Rhoda Penmark’s homicidal disposition

Rhoda Penmark’s homicidal disposition is the novel’s explanation for the gap between her composed, innocent appearance and her repeated, purposeful violence. Her conduct is shown not only in the killing of Claude Daigle, but also in her calm explanations afterward and her later decision to set a fire that traps Leroy Jessup. Christine Penmark eventually connects this pattern to Rhoda’s grandmother, Bessie Denker, and comes to regard the family resemblance as an inherited criminal nature. The book makes heredity a powerful interpretive frame, but presents it through the characters’ reasoning rather than as a scientifically established conclusion.

Identity and First Disclosure

Rhoda’s disposition first becomes unmistakable in Christine’s questioning about Claude’s death. After an unconvincing display of tears, Rhoda admits that she struck him with her shoe. She describes the conflict as beginning with the penmanship medal: Claude would not give it to her, so she followed him to the wharf and struck him when he refused. When he tried to escape, she continued, explaining that his cries made her fear someone would hear. Her account makes the violence purposeful and linked to a concrete objective, rather than an accident or an impulsive blow whose consequences she did not understand.

Rhoda’s explanation of what happened at the water’s edge extends that pattern. When Claude tried to hold on to the wharf, she struck his hands and head to make him let go, including because he had threatened to tell on her. She then treats his death as his own fault: in her account, he brought it on himself by refusing the medal and threatening to report her. The repeated reversal of responsibility is central to the characterization. Rhoda can describe what she did, but she does not accept the moral meaning Christine attaches to it.

Violence, Performance, and Remorse

Rhoda’s manner shifts according to what she wants from the person before her. She first tries tears, then offers a calm confession when the performance fails to persuade Christine. Afterward, she embraces her mother and promises not to do it again; soon after, she changes to affectionate praise. These gestures do not establish remorse. Christine observes Rhoda at breakfast the next morning, apparently rested and untroubled, and concludes that the child feels neither guilt nor regret. The contrast between visible distress and apparent composure makes performance part of the evidence: Rhoda can display emotion, but Christine doubts that the display corresponds to an inward recognition of harm.

The medal also gives the episode a revealing sequence of motives. Rhoda first wants the award; after Claude resists, she uses violence to obtain it. When he attempts to get away and threatens to expose her, the effort to silence him becomes part of the same chain of actions. Her own account keeps returning to what Claude supposedly did wrong, as though his refusal could transfer responsibility for her choices. The narrative thus presents her disposition through more than the fact of killing: it appears in the combination of calculated pursuit, practical self-interest, and refusal to acknowledge another person’s claim against her.

The Family Inheritance

Christine’s understanding changes when she discovers that Bessie Denker was her birth mother and Rhoda’s grandmother. The criminal cases Christine has been reading, and her own knowledge of Rhoda’s actions, begin to seem to her like parts of one family pattern. The account of Bessie’s early life includes the accidental poisoning of her younger brother when Bessie, aged seven, mistook arsenic for sugar and spread it on his bread and butter. Her younger sister later drowned in a well. Neighbors also recalled that Bessie’s grandfather was shot while alone with her when she was eleven; no one knew how it happened or who was responsible, and the account presents this early suspicion as unresolved rather than proven.

The family history does not offer a simple record of identical crimes passed unchanged from one generation to the next. Instead, Christine reads it as a recurrence: troubling childhood incidents in Bessie’s past, Bessie’s later criminal reputation, and Rhoda’s present violence. Once she sees Rhoda as Bessie’s granddaughter, Christine interprets what had seemed baffling as an inheritance that had remained dormant for a generation. That interpretation gives Christine an explanation, but also turns explanation into personal blame: she comes to believe that she transmitted the inheritance to her child.

Theories of Heredity and Environment

Christine’s questions arise from the tension between upbringing and inborn disposition. She considers whether criminal behavior results from faulty training or a bad environment, or whether it comes from something present from birth that environment can modify only slightly. Reginald Tasker, drawing on his years of reading and annotating criminal cases, argues that environment may affect the outward expression of such a disposition but does not account for its persistence. He describes these offenders as people lacking the conscience that, in his view, most people develop through instruction and example.

When Christine later asks whether such a lack could be inherited, Tasker compares it to traits he understands as resulting from an absence of something and passed between generations. His answer gives her no reassurance. The novel’s hereditary explanation is therefore conveyed as a character’s theory, shaped by the case files and by Christine’s desperate need to understand Rhoda; it is not presented as independent proof that criminality is biologically transmitted. The distinction matters because Christine’s conviction grows beyond explanation into guilt, even as the evidence available to her does not resolve the larger question of heredity and environment.

Escalation and Narrative Significance

Rhoda’s later treatment of Leroy Jessup reinforces the pattern established in her account of Claude’s death. After Leroy threatens her over the shoes connected with Claude’s killing, Rhoda takes matches from the kitchen, starts a fire in the basement, and closes the door behind her. When Leroy calls out from inside, she does not release him. Instead, she continues eating the ice-cream stick she had bought and answers in a way that shows she knows he understands the connection to the shoes. This episode makes the disposition harder to treat as a single confrontation over a prize: when her secrecy is threatened, Rhoda again acts deliberately and leaves another person without help.

Christine responds to the discovery of the family connection not by holding Rhoda responsible, but by taking the guilt upon herself. She believes that she passed Bessie Denker’s inheritance to her daughter, and her care becomes abnormally tender: she follows Rhoda, placates her, and tries to express through embraces a love that might transform the child into the affectionate person she longs for. Rhoda, by contrast, endures these gestures with distance and returns to her own activities. Their relationship is bound, in Christine’s understanding, by a shared history neither can undo.

Through this contrast, Rhoda’s disposition functions as both a pattern of conduct and a source of interpretive unease. Her acts are specific and consequential; the explanations offered for them are less certain. Christine and Tasker search for a hereditary cause, while Rhoda’s own justifications repeatedly shift blame to the people she has harmed. The novel lets those two levels stand together: Rhoda’s actions make the danger unmistakable, while the theory that explains them remains entangled with the fear and guilt of the people trying to understand her.