Valdivia, Clarissa Valdivia 1

Prof. Batty

English 102

The Blessing that became a Demon

Children are always viewed as angels but have you ever thought that its just a mask to

cover up the real demon beneath it ?The look of innocence and purity can be the best mask for a

killer. The fact that many things in this world is unknown is the biggest fear we have knowing

we don't have the ability to control the unexpected In the book The Bad Seed by William March

is story about an eight year old little girl named Rhoda Penmark that is very mature and

intelligent for her age but has a secret bad side. She is use to getting whatever she wants till she

was finally left wanting something she can't have. She decided to kill and steal it back. The

question is how can an eight year old girl pull off such a heinous act without getting caught?

Would she be considered a Monster because of this ? When we think of monsters we think of big

ugly furry creatures under our bed and in the dark like in scary movies yet in our mind we can't

believe that a monster can have a face of an angel. This child in the book was a sociopath that

acted by anger and selfishness without any remorse lacking any human feeling towards her

victims. A monster is something that we believe is inhumane towards our society. Some kids

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inherit an extremely fearless temperament that can be detected soon after birth, says Paul Frick, a

psychologist at the University of New Orleans who studies children with severe behavioral

problems. They seek danger and show no conscience, lacking empathy and guilt. They respond

emotionally to negative events-such as punishment or the distress of others--and they use people

for their own gain. Imagine a child tormenting a peer despite repeated scolding, or coolly

severing the tail of a shrieking cat just to see what will happen. Rhodas ability to kill without

remorse or even being scared to not knowing what she really has done shows more fear than any

monster under a bed. Yet many can say that kids have no knowledge in what's happening so they

can't be help accountable for what they do which wouldn't make them a monster but that they

only made a mistake.

She had everything a little girl would want but that wasn't enough it would never be

enough she needed more. Many could say that kids can't be described as a sociopath because

they're still learning. CHildren act upon what they view online, at home or on tv but truth is they

can be smarter than us sometimes. Rhoda covered up her crimes so well that no one knew what

real monster she was. Children are a creation of their family and their genes helping them be the

people they grow up to be. We don't know their past their present let alone their future but we

can only predict what we want it to be because we believe we can control the child's life. Little

did we know that children are much smarter than we think in an article in Children make up what

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they want to believe because of things they see around their environment they create new ideas

and mentalities. Children are like sponges they suck up everything they can around them and

that's how they base off there life in. This brings up a bigger question and along with a bigger

issue. If children learn to be what they become arent the grown ups teaching them the real

monster? The creation of a monster isn't just mutations and everything you see in scary stories

but, also the things we create at home. In the story it was brought up that the nurture that was

given to Rhoda caused her to be what she was as a cold blooded murder. Her mother covered up

for her and did not view anything she did wrong which made her okay with continuing her

murdering. If Christine disciplined Rhoda differently there would have been less of selfless

attitudes towards the victims. She received everything she wanted but when she didn't she felt

some sort of way with anger and she had to release it. The story it said It seemed to her

suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor

of all - an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion,

behind the embrace of love itself. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the

surface; but always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational

dreadfulness. She finally saw something that helped her with the anger she saw that getting rid

if her obstacles is the only way. At that moment people didn't really know what was going on,

who was the murderer and let alone the problem that cause the whole issue.

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 In the Story it also s we read that Rhoda's father was hardly in the picture that the

majority of the time it was just the women of the house. Maybe the lack of attention from her

father also caused her to be this way. Sh could have seen how careless he was towards the the

same way she's careless towards the people she killed. The majority of females need at least one

male figure to help create a different mentality than just the feminine ways. Making a mindset

unreasonable to rational thinking can mess up the whole growth of a person to know differences

as in what's right and wrong.

Two people can be raised in the same environment but come out totally different. In the

book it seemed that Rhoda and her mom were raised in the same environment but they came out

totally different. Both were raised in a similar high class environment with loving and supporting

family.yet on one became a cold blooded murderer. Christine was adopted a young age so she

didn't really know her biological mother. They were both raised as only childs which couldve

caused a bigger impact to whether or not they are the way they are. In an article they described a

little girl just like Rhoda but she wasnt an only child She's sui generis, a freak of nature

masquerading as an angelic little girl of eight; surrounded by well-intentioned but foolish adults

who react to her outward, innocently beguiling behavior in mawkish, stereotypical ways that

must have given March, allegedly a hater of children (he was one of eleven siblings, and might

be said to have been an intimate observer of the genre child), a grim pleasure to record. The only

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difference with all this was the amount of children in the research that was done. In this case they

all were raised in a similar environment but only one came out as the demon child. The monsters

we create we can't fix them although people may believe that kids can't be sociopaths for

example a psychiatrist says a charming little animal that can never be trained to fit into the

conventional patterns of existence Her mother sees in her evidence of a dawning realization that

some factor of body or spirit separated her from those around her." They say that maybe the kids

can be trained to be better but truth is they cannot be.

The monsters and demons we imagine within our dreams can come to life. The things we

don't imagine are the things that should scare us the most like the fact that an innocent child

could kill and ruin people's lives. All that is just hidden because our eyes see only what they

choose to see and they don't want to understand that many kids could ruin lives. Rhoda was just

an innocent girl from what we saw but that didn't change the fact she could ruin lives. Worst idea

process since chucky was invented because we know that dolls can not come to life but we
 Work Cited

Gowin, Joshua. "Rethinking the Bad Seed." Psychology Today, vol. 42, no. 3, May/Jun2009,

p. 24. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pbh&AN=38710079&site=ehost-live.

Gurel, Perin. A Natural Little Girl: Reproduction and Naturalism in The Bad Seed as

Novel, Play, and Film. Adaptation, 10 Aug. 2005,

www.academia.edu/246260/A_Natural_Little_Girl_Reproduction_and_Naturalism_in_The_

Bad_Seed_as_Novel_Play_and_Film.

Hamblen, Abigail Ann. "The Bad Seed: A Modern Elsie Venner." Twentieth-Century Literary

Criticism, edited by Jennifer Baise, vol. 96, Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center,

library.lavc.edu:2077/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=lavc_main&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7

CH1420032539&asid=a6dce526a99642bb6de2057b1a0a69f4. Accessed 15 Nov. 2017.

Originally published in Western Humanities Review, vol. 17, no. 4, Autumn 1963, pp. 361-363.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Killer Kids." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Jennifer

Baise, vol. 96, Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center,

library.lavc.edu:2077/ps/i.do?p=GLS&sw=w&u=lavc_main&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CH

1420032545&asid=8c1099e5cf914e39eb5fc95ee2990f62. Accessed 15 Nov. 2017.

Originally published in The New York Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 17, 6 Nov. 1996, pp. 16-

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