The Browser has an excellent Five Books Interview with psychology professor Susan Gelman on the topic of essentialism, or the way we categorize people and things we encounter based on biases we believe to be facts. One of Gelman’s choices is William March’s novel, The Bad Seed, which allows her to address the idea of so-called inherited evil. An excerpt:

Question:

Let’s go on to The Bad Seed, a 1954 thriller about a little girl who turns out to be a serial killer.

Susan Gelman:

I love this book. I have to confess that in high school I had the lead in a play that we put on of The Bad Seed. I was the evil girl. So I’ve been thinking about this one for a long time. It’s really essentialism personified. What makes it essentialism is that this girl, who outwardly seems very sweet and innocent, in actuality is bad to the core. So there’s this appearance/reality distinction that is a big piece of essentialism. Also, the reason that she’s evil is that she was born that way – it was passed down from her grandmother. Her grandmother was a serial killer who got executed. The serial killer’s daughter was a very young child at the time. She was adopted and didn’t even remember any of this in more than the vaguest way. She was a perfectly fine person: The evil skipped a generation, and it was her own daughter who turned out to be this bad seed. The idea is that your moral character can be in-born. This little girl was raised in a wonderful environment, but that had no effect. That the evil is passed down from generation to generation is a very essentialist idea. It was actually controversial. If you read some reviews when the book came out, some of the reviewers really objected to that aspect.

Question:

What’s your view?

Susan Gelman:

As far as I understand it, there is no evidence that criminality is passed down through the genes. It’s a fiction, but it’s one that resonates with people. This is not supposed to be a work of science fiction. It works well for the plot of the book: The mother feels guilty for passing this along to her daughter. In some ways she feels her daughter is not at fault, because she doesn’t know any better. This is just the way she was born. What’s interesting to me is that that’s considered a plausible underlying theme that a reader can perfectly well accept. It’s a nice illustration of the common-sense aspect of essentialism.”