A Judgement In Stone Illiteracy Quotes

As human beings, our personalities determine our actions. In the novel, “A Judgment in Stone” by Ruth Rendell, Eunice Parchman and Joan Smith both possess two distinct personalities that fuel their hatred of the Coverdale family. Because of Eunice’s illiteracy and Joan’s insanity, they develop a mutual friendship that proves to be fatal for the Coverdale family.

Eunice Parchman’s illiteracy drives her to kill the Coverdale family and leads to the discovery of her crime. Eunice is accused by Rendell of killing the Coverdale family because she cannot read or write (1). Because of the war, Eunice never learned to read, and as a result, she has shut herself out of the world. Rendell states at the opening of the novel, “Literacy is one of the

Eunice’s spark for revenge against the Coverdale family comes when Melinda Coverdale discovers her inability to read. Eunice, in fear that news of her illiteracy will spread, resorts to blackmailing: “If you tell anyone I’m what you said, that word, I’ll tell your dad you’ve been going with that boy and you are going to have a baby” (134). After being fired for attempting to blackmail Melinda, Eunice, along with her friend Joan, decides to wreck the Coverdale house. In fear of the Coverdale family calling the police, “so in so” severs the phone lines, and thus disables the family’s ability to call for aid. Eunice continues her rampage by killing the Coverdales. Rendell proves her earlier description of Eunice’s imagination being dried up by illiteracy through Eunice’s thoughts of the family as she murders them: “In those moments the words they cried and their pleas passed over her almost unheard, and by some strange metamorphosis, produced in Eunice’s brain, they ceased to be people and became the printed word. They were those things in the bookcases, those patchy black blocks on white paper, eternally her enemies, hated and desired” (155). Because of her lack of emotion towards the murdered family, Eunice is able to

Valentine Day Massacre of the Coverdale family and in her induction into a coma. Joan, unlike Eunice, had a relatively comfortable childhood. Joan was afforded, by her parents, the best opportunities for education, but left it all in pursuit of a married man and prostitution (66-67). Throughout the novel, Joan uses fake clichés from the Bible and her past sins of prostitution and adultery to justifiably portray herself as being redeemed by God. Joan uses her religion, and by extension God himself, to express her feelings; Rendell detests to her behavior: “A devout woman must not be uncharitable, so she seldom indulged her dislike of people by straight malicious gossip. It was not she who found fault with them and hated them, but God; not she but God whom they had inflicted imaginary injuries…Joan Smith was merely his humble and energetic instrument” (62). Joan fabricates from the Bible upon learning that Mr. Coverdale does not want her in his house anymore: “Woe to him whom the Lord despiseth!” (102). Unlike Eunice, Joan, when killing the Coverdale family, loses what little sanity she retains to religious insincerity. Joan crackles, “I am the instrument of the One Above” (185), while murdering the Coverdales. Unlike Eunice, who wants to escape unnoticed, Joan desires to proclaim her “victory over the enemies of God” to everyone. Joan’s insanity and