SOURCE: “The Bad Seed: A Modern Elsie Venner,” in Western Humanities Review, Vol. XVII, No. 4, Autumn, 1963, pp. 361-3.

In the following excerpt, Hamblen compares March's The Bad Seed with a nineteenth-century telling of a similar story.

When William March's novel about a little-girl killer was published in 1954, it attracted widespread attention, probably because its theme—that of cold-blooded, congenital evil—has an almost morbid fascination for many readers. Rhoda is just eight years old, but by the time the book ends she has coolly killed three people and a puppy.

It is noticeable that no question of “guilt” or “sin” enters here. This child may be a criminal, but nowhere is there a suggestion that she is earmarked for a Calvinist hell or even that she is a candidate for repentance. March brushes past these ideas in order to refute them, dwelling instead on the mother's sense of...