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
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)