The Trial of Lizzie Borden(90)

Most interpretations tell us more about the preoccupations of its chroniclers than any essential truth about the mystery. Just as Lizzie Borden’s contemporaries saw their own worst fears refracted through the prism of her trial, later commentators have seized upon whatever aspect of the mystery speaks most eloquently to their time. For example, an early-1950s solution imagined Lizzie Borden as a nightmarish “feminist” heroine, concluding: “If today woman has come out of the kitchen, she is only following Lizzie, who came out of it with a bloody ax and helped start the rights-for-women bandwagon.” Equally telling is the widely held speculation, which gained currency in the early 1990s, that Lizzie Borden committed the murders after enduring years of sexual abuse by her father. The bedrooms that opened onto each other, the dead mother, the powerless stepmother, the special understanding between father and daughter symbolized by the “thin gold band”—all crystalized into a suddenly obvious solution, a solution that seemed to explain not only the identity of the killer but also the very brutality of the crimes. In such examples, the Borden case serves as a cultural Rorschach test, in which Lizzie Borden’s guilt is assumed and her imagined acts are wrenched out of their time and place. In this way, every generation reinvents the case.

While most “whodunits” largely ignore the specific Fall River context, Victoria Lincoln’s A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight makes the case that it could only have happened there. Lincoln, a novelist and Fall River native, provides a richly textured insider’s account of the setting. She argues that Lizzie committed the murders but did so, echoing the prosecutor Hosea Knowlton, in an altered state. In her telling, Lizzie was planning to poison her stepmother and killed both stepmother and father during an ambulatory epileptic seizure. Criminologists of Lizzie Borden’s day would have applauded the diagnosis. For them, epilepsy, an extreme form of periodicity, went hand in hand with crime. What Lincoln captures better than any other chronicler, however, is the Fall River elite’s complicity, its closing of ranks against outsiders and the collective unspoken vow of silence on the part of those who had firsthand knowledge of the murders. For Fall River native Lincoln, Lizzie Borden was “the skeleton in our cupboard, the black sheep in our family, a disgrace, but a private disgrace.”

This local reticence has been abandoned in favor of a desire to cash in on the legend. The long-serving former curator of the Fall River Historical Society, Florence Brigham, a diminutive lady of impeccable Fall River pedigree, was given to lament that tourists trooped through the restored mansion (which houses the society), ignoring displays highlighting Fall River’s belle epoque in search of some Borden relic. Her successors, Michael Martins and Dennis Binette, have put this unseemly interest in Fall River’s most notorious citizen in the service of preserving and promoting the city’s rich history. Their nearly thousand-page prosopography, Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River, traces the arc of Fall River over the course of Lizzie Borden’s life. The murders and trial feature in only 35 of the 998 pages, yet their epic effort restores Lizzie Borden to her own world.

Less circumspect is the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum, operated out of the family’s house on Second Street, opposite the looming posterior of Fall River’s five-story Justice Center, home to the criminal division of the Bristol County Superior Court. The present owners, Donald Woods and Lee-ann Wilber, have cultivated the occult aspects of the legend, employing a house psychic and encouraging paranormal investigations. But it still caters to those drawn by the siren call of the underlying mystery. On the anniversary of the murders, the bed-and-breakfast offers a special tour, repeated on the hour, featuring actors in period costume portraying key figures in the case. One year, guests were greeted as reporters by an agitated Bridget and encouraged to ask questions of the family members; another year, patrons were deputized to assist the police in their investigations, viewing the bodies along with their police tour guide. Dead Andrew had a cameo, his hand dropping with a comic thud from under a bloodstained sheet. Woods and Wilber purchased Maplecroft in 2018, consolidating their status as guardians of Lizzie Borden’s residential real estate. There, they plan to showcase the second part of Lizzie Borden’s story. Woods remarked, “She really was a complex character. She’s not just an alleged ax murderer.”

This desire to see Lizzie Borden as a whole person rather than “a Halloween tchotchke,” as Sarah Miller puts it in her elegant 2016 young adult study of the Borden murders, informs recent imaginings of the story. In See What I Have Done, novelist Sarah Schmidt unspools the madness of her protagonist in the context of the Borden household’s claustrophobic interiority. But the Lizzie of the post-#MeToo moment may well be Chlo? Sevigny’s portrayal in the 2018 film Lizzie. A longtime passion project, informed by visits to the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast Museum, Lizzie was originally envisioned by Sevigny and screenwriter Bryce Kass as a “rousing, smash-the-patriarchy piece.” Sevigny was reportedly disappointed with the final version, which “features more than a few shots of Lizzie’s backside” but is “a little more vague” about Lizzie’s desire for freedom as a motivation for the murders. The film, like Schmidt’s novel, is a speculative solution grounded in extensive research. Absent (so far) from the Borden canon is an extended documentary series in the vein of The Staircase or Making a Murderer, carefully crafted and paced narratives that upend official accounts of notorious crimes.