The theoretical framework addresses the distinction between an autobiography and a life narrative (the latter being a broader term which includes various types of self-referential narratives according to Sidonie Smith. Jimmy Santiago Baca's recent novel American Orphan, published in 2021, is analyzed both as a life narrative and the latest addition to the long tradition of the American classics. In 1956, Patty McConnack starred as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, a film that produced a lasting cultural referent for children whose asocial, violently structured lives gain national attention. However, if we go back further into the history of the honor film, we see that one of the first films in the United States to feature the evil child does not appeal to forces outside of the child's body (forces that possess the body of the child, a trope from the 1970s), but rather locates the evil of the child within the body as an inherited, natural force that neither the child nor society can escape. Horror films from the 1970s and the early 1980s (Poltergeist, Firestarter, Children of the Corn ) placed an emphasis on the possessed child, one whose powers or potential for evil stem from the demonic or supernatural. Omen (1976)? Horror films that feature evil children or young teenagers, as Wheeler Dixon has pointed out, hit a peak in the 1970s: It's Alive (1973), Carrie (1976), The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), Damien: The Omen II (1978), The Changeling(1979) (80-81). An attempt is made to offer a reading of March’s novel which would combine literary analysis and close reading with cultural and representation studies in order to bring this novel closer to the Serbian academic audience within the context of contemporary critical theory. The paper also addresses the issues of gender and race representation as they are reflected in the characters of Leroy Jessup and Christine Penmark. The trope of the evil child is used by March to explore the metaphysical nature of evil in line with an important tradition in American literature. March’s protagonist, Rhoda Penmark, a psychopathic child killer, is analyzed as an example of an anti-American anti-hero, unable to change her family legacy and closed to the idea of progress and personal improvement. The theoretical framework is based on Karen Renner’s (2011b: 177) idea that “’evil children’ in film and literature serve as figures through which the sources of human iniquity and cruelty can be symbolically explored” and Wandless’ (2011: 135–6) interpretation of the Levinas–Baudrillard dichotomy of the idea of the child. March’s narrative helped establish the evil child trope in literature and culture and has often been referenced in popular culture. The paper focuses on William March’s famous novel The Bad Seed and its importance for American literature and culture.
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