Character Overview
Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who, in the course of the novel, murders a classmate and a groundskeeper who suspects her. It is also revealed that she murdered an elderly neighbor the year before. Despite coming from a loving home, she is a sociopath who is willing to kill to get what she wants. She is also a precociously talented con artist, adept at using a sweet, innocent façade to mask her true self from adults so they will give in to her. Her tricks do not work on other children, who sense who she truly is and avoid her.
March writes that Rhoda's evil is genetic; her maternal grandmother was a serial killer, who also began killing at a young age (Rhoda's mother, Christine, was adopted at a very young age and so doesn't remember her real parents).
Read more about this topic: Rhoda Penmark
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“The image cannot be dispossessed of a primordial freshness, which idea can never claim. An idea is derivative and tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state, and it has to be discovered there, not put there, obeying its own law and none of ours. We think we can lay hold of image and take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only the idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it.”
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