The debate over heredity and environment

The debate over heredity and environment is the explanatory conflict through which Christine Penmark tries to understand her daughter’s crimes and her own place in a family history of violence. The novel gives force to an inherited-disposition theory through Reginald Tasker’s criminological arguments and Christine’s discovery that Bessie Denker was her biological mother. Yet the explanation remains entangled with questions of conscience, childhood responsibility, social protection, and uncertain psychiatric judgment; it is presented through characters’ interpretations, not established as a settled scientific conclusion.

The promise and limits of upbringing

Before Christine knows her ancestry, she and her husband, Kenneth Penmark, regard Rhoda’s unusually mature character as a troubling riddle. They hope that Fern Grammar School, with its emphasis on discipline and old-fashioned virtues, will eliminate or at least modify the disturbing aspects of the child’s temperament. The school appears, at first, to offer a compelling case for environmental influence: Rhoda never misses a day or arrives late, earns perfect marks in deportment month after month, and receives equally perfect marks for self-reliance and conservation on the playground. Octavia Fern also describes her as conservative, thrifty, and exceptionally neat. These accomplishments show that Rhoda can conform to a demanding routine, but they do not establish that the routine has changed her underlying character.

The contrast sharpens when the school’s favorable account gives way to its decision that Rhoda should leave. The Fern sisters say they cannot understand or cope with her temperament and do not want her to remain because they consider her a bad influence on the other pupils. Their judgment makes the school’s limits part of the debate: discipline can measure conduct and maintain an orderly setting, but the sisters no longer believe their institution can help Rhoda or protect the wider group from her influence. Christine’s hope that a carefully chosen environment might correct what unsettles her is thus challenged by the school’s conclusion that its methods are insufficient.

Tasker’s theory of inborn disposition

As Christine reads criminal case files and tries to decide what has produced people like Rhoda, she considers faulty training, a bad environment, and an inborn condition. She asks Reginald Tasker, who has spent years reading, collecting, annotating, and studying criminal cases, for his judgment. Tasker tells her that environment seems to have little to do with the persistent appearance of this kind of criminal, although it might modify its outward expression. He proposes that such people resemble human beings before the development of civilization and moral codes: most people acquire conscience through precept and example, whereas some, in his account, do not develop the same moral understanding even when exposed to benign influences.

Tasker presents this difference as an absence rather than an acquired quality. When Christine later asks whether the disposition might pass between generations, he compares it to conditions understood as hereditary because something is lacking. His analogy gives Christine a framework for imagining transmission, but it does not amount to confirmation about her family. Tasker has not particularly considered the precise question before, and his response offers possibility rather than a diagnosis. His broader discussion likewise resists certainty: when Christine asks what psychiatrists think, he recalls opposing testimony in the Thaw case, where equally distinguished psychiatrists supported contradictory positions. Expert authority therefore gives her no single answer to settle the conflict.

Bessie Denker and Christine’s reinterpretation

The inherited explanation becomes personal when Christine reads the case of Bessie Denker and learns that Bessie was her birth mother. Bessie’s history includes the deaths of her younger siblings during her childhood: her brother died after she mistakenly put arsenic on his bread, believing it to be sugar, and her sister drowned after falling into a well. Later accounts also describe the unexplained shooting of Bessie’s grandfather while she was alone with him. The circumstances differ in certainty: the siblings’ deaths are described as accidents, while no one knew who shot the grandfather. Together, the episodes make the earlier family history appear ominously suggestive without making every event a proven crime.

After discovering her identity, Christine reassembles what had seemed to be separate facts about Rhoda. She thinks the resemblance between grandmother and granddaughter is not merely coincidence, and imagines an inheritance that lay dormant for a generation before appearing again in her child. In this interpretation, Christine sees herself as the link through which Bessie Denker’s criminal disposition reached Rhoda. Her sense of guilt shifts accordingly: rather than hold Rhoda responsible, she blames herself for passing on what she believes to be an inherited burden. This is Christine’s anguished explanation, not a verdict independently established by the evidence. Its emotional force comes from how it transforms the question of heredity from an abstract theory into a mother’s judgment of herself and her child.

Responsibility, uncertainty, and the plot’s theory

The theory does not resolve what Christine should do. Before learning the family secret, she considers whether Rhoda might be insane and belong in an institution where she could receive treatment and be prevented from harming others. She rejects the idea that Rhoda is insane, but remains unsure how any such decision would be arranged. Later, she weighs confessing to the authorities against the prospect that Rhoda would be taken away and that the family’s situation would become public. In a letter she does not intend to send to Kenneth, she frames their predicament as a duty both to their child and to society. The heredity question thus bears directly on action: if Rhoda’s conduct is inborn, Christine fears that ordinary upbringing or the hope that the child has learned a lesson may not be enough; if responsibility belongs to the parent who transmitted the disposition, punishment of the child seems equally fraught.

The theme also enters the novel’s self-conscious discussion of plot. Christine tells Tasker that her book concerns a child repeating her grandmother’s criminal pattern, and that the mother discovers the grandmother’s identity and gains an explanation for her daughter. Later, Natalie Glass recounts that a literary group debated possible endings for this story, including psychiatric treatment, reform school, and blind faith in the future. The group votes for a much darker proposed ending in which the mother keeps the secret, kills the child, and then dies by suicide. This is reported as the group’s recommendation for the book, not as confirmation of the novel’s actual ending. The debate’s significance lies in how little the heredity theory settles: it may explain the pattern as Christine understands it, but it cannot by itself decide who is accountable, what society owes potential victims, or whether treatment and protection remain possible.