* * *
Lizzie Borden stood trial for the murder of her father and stepmother in 1893, a trial that the New York Times labeled persecution (4). Lizzie was found not guilty. Generations of amateur (and professional) criminologists have disagreed with the verdict while others have as vociferously defended Lizzie's reputation. The theories of the latter too often center on mysterious strangers, illegitimate children and the half-mad concoctions of Gothic novels. Barring the existence of X-File aliens, it is likely that Lizzie killed her parents.
Her motives vary (and have become a second source of debate): money, revenge for abuse, need to hide a forbidden affair. The target may have been Lizzie's father, the stepmother a mere corollary, especially if the motive was revenge or money. On the other hand, the target may have been the stepmother (she received the majority of "whacks") with Lizzie's father as corollary. It is a matter of notice that Lizzie moved up on "The Hill" in Fall River—to a house that matched her class and income--as soon as her guardians were dead. She remained there, even after her older sister moved to Providence, Rhode Island.
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| 92 Second Street |
But it is the location of the murders that garners attention, not the later residence. 92 Second Street has become in recent years a tourist attraction. It is currently a Bed & Breakfast, replete with a museum and gift shop selling mugs, hatchet earrings and T-shirts. At the Bed & Breakfast, you can--like Pamela Sheldon and David Howe of Middlebury, Connecticut--get married (Parker A7). You can stay in one of the eight rooms named for participants in the story: Lizzie, Emma (sister), Andrew (father), Abby (step-mother), John Morse (the visiting uncle), Bridget (the maid), Jennings (Lizzie's lawyer) and Knowlton (prosecutor at the trial). The Bed & Breakfast attracts visitors from Ohio, Texas and even Germany (Parker A7).
Do they come for Lizzie Borden the American Axe Murderess or for Lizzie Borden the New England Axe Murderess?
Both, it would seem. In order to understand how Lizzie Borden became an American tourist attraction, it is necessarily to look at the elements that make her initially a New England one.
Lizzie Borden as New England murderess hangs on the reaction of Fall River inhabitants to their infamous daughter, the domestic setting of the murders, and the characterization of Lizzie Borden at the time of the trial and since. The last factor overlaps with Lizzie as American murderess and the fascination humans have with murder and mystery.
The Lizzie Borden case was a cause célèbre in 1893. The New York Times followed it assiduously. Modern commentators have compared it to the O.J. Simpson trial in terms of its notoriety and defendant. Many people, then and now, believe that Lizzie Borden's acquittal was due to so-called "political correctness"—she was a woman from the upper-class and therefore, untouchable.
Like with all cause célèbres, the Lizzie Borden case came and went. The storm of publicity subsided. Lizzie Borden moved up on The Hill, and Fall River went on to suffer through the New England-wide collapse of the mills. In time, perhaps, the world would have forgotten the case: Lizzie would have become an obscure footnote in a book on female killers.
But Fall River couldn't forget. Fall River inhabitants would not leave Lizzie, guilty or innocent, to her personal demons. They needed, I imagine, to exorcise the brutal event that overtook them for nearly nine months. The Fall River Globe continued to print anniversary articles for thirteen years (Avery 57) and their reporter, Edwin Porter, published a book, Fall River Tragedy the same year as the trial. The Fall River Globe and Edwin Porter were notoriously uncommitted to Lizzie's innocence [there were two newspapers in Fall River, one pro-Lizzie, one anti-, information I learned recently from Joseph Conforti's 2016 book].
In fact, to an extent, Edwin Porter and The Fall River Globe represented Fall River's working class, who were, according to Victoria Lincoln, more likely to believe Lizzie had escaped a just punishment than the wealthier class on The Hill. It could be argued that Porter's book was more a product of class resentment than of justified suspicion.
But oddly enough, one of the most famous books about Lizzie Borden issued not from the working class of Fall River but from Lizzie's own class. Victoria Lincoln grew up near Lizzie Borden's post-1893 home of Maplecroft. She remembers Lizzie mostly as that eccentric old person down the block. The Hill, while believing Lizzie guilty, preferred to present a reticent front. In her book, A Private Disgrace, Lincoln writes, "Somewhere in my marrow, I am shocked to discover that I am the sort of person who would talk to outsiders about Lizzie" (23). She did wait to break her silence until after Lizzie's death!
Illuminatingly, Victoria as a child heard the infamous rhyme: "Lizzie Borden took an axe/Gave her mother forty whacks/And when she found what she had done/She gave her father forty-one." The only possible conclusion is that the rhyme began in Fall River amongst children on the playground before it passed into the general lore box of America [a great example of how folklore comes into being, sui generis].
The Fall River need to explain Lizzie Borden still operates today. Arnold Brown who grew up in Fall River published Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter which argues that Lizzie didn't do the murder, she covered up the murder by her supposed illegitimate half-brother. (The theory is highly problematic.) Robert Flynn, another Fall Riverite, who moved to Portland, Maine, collected newspaper articles of Lizzie Borden and tracked down one of the few extant copies of Porter's Fall River Tragedy. With collaborator David Kent, he produced the Lizzie Borden Source Book.
Move-ins are as susceptible to Lizzie's charm. Jules Ryckebusch moved to Fall River in 1966. In 1992, he organized a three day conference about Lizzie Borden at the Bristol Community College. The conference attracted 500 people from locations as disparate as Plymouth, MI; Oxford, England; Nebraska and Virginia (D3).
Even the original Bed & Breakfast owners had a claim to the area. (No shoo-ins here.) Martha McGinn inherited the property from her grandparents (not Bordens). She furnished the house with period pieces (not the originals—there is no blood-soaked couch on view). The Bed & Breakfast has changed hands since 1996 [I believe it has changed hands several times since then].
The Bed & Breakfast is as important to the Lizzie Borden "tour" as her grave or even the Fall River Historical Society. "The House," Agnes de Mille called it. A narrow Greek Revival building, it was cramped and claustrophobic even by Victorian standards. It plays a role in the Lizzie Borden story and contributes substantially to Lizzie Borden as American tour attraction and Lizzie Borden as New England icon.
Greek Revival houses, built between 1830 and 1850, owe their existence to an upsurge in romantic architecture during the early nineteenth century. Greek Revival houses appear in areas which incurred high population growth in the early 1800s, including Massachusetts. The style was considered progressive for a time, being called "National Style" (McAlester 182).
Greek Revival gave way to Gothic Revival, however, and by 1892 (the year of the murder), a Greek Revival house would be considered out-of-date. The Borden house, moreover, had no gas and running (cold) water in only two rooms. Much is written, with reason, of Andrew Borden's parsimony that kept the family in this old-fashioned structure rather than in a more modern house on The Hill. Andrew could have afforded a nicer house. He had invested in property and anticipated buying a house for his wife's sister. He even sent Lizzie to Europe. After his murder, Lizzie and her sister inherited enough money to support themselves in independent lifestyles. When Lizzie moved up on The Hill, she not only entertained (mostly New York theatre folk) but left $30,000 to the Animal Rescue League in her will.
It seems that Andrew Borden was simply one of those people who believes, "If it isn't killing us, why move?" Except it may have killed him. Lizzie's resentment at such stinginess, especially when she saw her inheritance being spent on others while she sweated and stewed in an inconvenient, unappealing house, must have been considerable.
A cramped Romantic-style house provides the quintessential New England setting. Agnes de Mille uses it in her ballet The Fall River Legend. The ballet is replete with New England stereotypes (perhaps the better word here would be motifs): a minister fiancé for Lizzie, a Salem-like gallows, the angular, brooding house which transforms into a church. In the ballet, the gloomy house, with its Stick style front porch, dominates an arrangement of rocking chairs. If Nathaniel Hawthorne had written about Lizzie, Mrs. Caroline Emmerton would have restored 92 Second Street, rather than "The House of the Seven Gables" (Conforti 252). Which would be a pity for the murder mystery tourists. Why clutter up popular murder with high culture?
It is the domesticity of the murders—"that House"—which attracts visitors. Viewers and readers of murder mysteries are attracted to the forensics, the heroism of the detective, the capture of the bad guy. But more importantly, we are attracted to the exposure of hidden lives. We are voyeurs, peering through windows, sneaking in back doors, sending spy cameras down the chimney. The Borden murders tantalize us with a view into an otherwise stiflingly dull Victorian household.
It is hard to imagine, for instance, that an axe murderess "out West" would strike the same cord. It is the so-called repressed, silent nature of Lizzie's world—a silence Victoria Lincoln can attest to—that makes us press for more. "The good murder," wrote Edmund Pearson, "the really desirable performance, beloved by the collector, is committed not by an habitual criminal, but by someone of blameless life" (7).
Hence Lizzie: Sunday School teacher, spinster, "proper Victorian lady" (Beem 86).
Proper Victorian ladies may swoon, but they do not give way to hysterics. And here Lizzie took things too far. To say she was expressionless and unemotional during the trial would be an understatement. "From start to finish she has manifested no feeling of weakness," said The New York Times (A8) while the Boston Daily Globe rather wonderingly wrote, "She sits like a graven image by the hour" (Flynn 214). "No apparent insanity," the New York Times (Flynn 163) thankfully decided. And what a relief it was to all when Lizzie did faint. (The reaction of spectators to Lizzie is similar to writers on the Scarsdale murder who were repulsed by Jean Harris' blank demeanor in Court.) [Other writers make compelling arguments that Lizzie played to the jury, giving them a "stiff upper lip" when necessary; providing them with a womanly swoon when required.]
In truth, Lizzie was more forthright and self-controlled than was considered entirely "nice." Even those who defended her with high-flown sentiments about her ladylike demeanor seemed to be calling on a stereotype rather than a true knowledge of Lizzie's personality. A woman reporter at the time of the inquest wrote of Lizzie's bedroom, "As dainty and charming a place as any girl need ask for . . . How could Lizzie Borden have come in the dainty place and removed the traces of such fearful work without marring all the delicate purity of everything with which she had contact?" (Flynn 145), a remarkable statement that is echoed ironically in Jean Filetti's article "From Lizzie Borden to Lorena Bobbitt: Violent Women and Gendered Justice." Arguing that Lizzie Borden was absolved by the defense of weak womanhood, Filetti writes, "The most compelling defense . . . was the brutality of the crime . . . The female was not capable of such a horrendous act of violence; a woman was inherently different from a man" (475).
Some spectators, more attuned to Lizzie's personality, felt she began to fake "feminine" behaviors in order to gain support. It is entirely possible. A shrewd woman, Lizzie was not the type to confess her crime, either at the time of its performance or at a later date. Crime experts can debate until kingdom come whether or not Lizzie did the crimes, but any suspect who burns a dress in a stove fire in front of witnesses three days after a murder [which may have covered the perpetrator in blood] has a truly staggering allotment of hutzpah. Lizzie's measures of self-protection after the murder are the acts of a woman determined to control the events to her liking. It is her coolness, I believe, that either enthralls or enrages people. What was the woman thinking? And why won't she tell us?
Over the years, Lizzie's characterization as Victorian maiden versus hardhearted suspect has solidified. In the current articles I read about the Borden murders, Lizzie was referred to as a "Sunday School teacher" at least four times (and as a "spinster" twice). It's as if Emily Dickinson got tired of seclusion and started throttling people. The impression is of a New England lady gone berserk. And if it happened to her, it could happen to anyone.
It could happen in your living room. A perusal of television shows indicates our fascination with crime and, more importantly, the detection of crime: Cold Case; Without a Trace; CSI: Las Vegas; CSI: New York; CSI: Miami; the innumerable variations of Law & Order. The majority of the cases take us into ordinary homes, everyday settings where people very much like us embroil themselves in trouble. As Pearson says, "The victim of the good murder is not a complete stranger, nor a passing acquaintance, but preferably someone near and it may even be dear to the murderer" (Pearson 7).
Lizzie certainly satisfies this demand. As Seattle Times writer, Anne Stuart put it, "In the nineteenth century, a double murder was highly unusual, one charging the victims' daughter rarer still and one involving a socially prominent family practically unprecedented" (A4). With the murders, Lizzie became, almost overnight, a New England sensation. Forty-two reporters attended the trial, the majority from Boston. One reporter farmed out pieces to seven newspapers, including the Portland Argus and the Springfield News. In 1994, the grandson of the trial's prosecutor, Hosea Morrill Knowlton, left his grandfather's papers to the Fall River Historical Society; among the papers were letters written to Knowlton during the trial from "attorneys, society matrons and learned thinkers, farmers, housewives and meat packers"—people from all over New England (Lorant A7).
Do they come for Lizzie Borden the American Axe Murderess or for Lizzie Borden the New England Axe Murderess?
Both, it would seem. In order to understand how Lizzie Borden became an American tourist attraction, it is necessarily to look at the elements that make her initially a New England one.
Lizzie Borden as New England murderess hangs on the reaction of Fall River inhabitants to their infamous daughter, the domestic setting of the murders, and the characterization of Lizzie Borden at the time of the trial and since. The last factor overlaps with Lizzie as American murderess and the fascination humans have with murder and mystery.
The Lizzie Borden case was a cause célèbre in 1893. The New York Times followed it assiduously. Modern commentators have compared it to the O.J. Simpson trial in terms of its notoriety and defendant. Many people, then and now, believe that Lizzie Borden's acquittal was due to so-called "political correctness"—she was a woman from the upper-class and therefore, untouchable.
Like with all cause célèbres, the Lizzie Borden case came and went. The storm of publicity subsided. Lizzie Borden moved up on The Hill, and Fall River went on to suffer through the New England-wide collapse of the mills. In time, perhaps, the world would have forgotten the case: Lizzie would have become an obscure footnote in a book on female killers.
In fact, to an extent, Edwin Porter and The Fall River Globe represented Fall River's working class, who were, according to Victoria Lincoln, more likely to believe Lizzie had escaped a just punishment than the wealthier class on The Hill. It could be argued that Porter's book was more a product of class resentment than of justified suspicion.
But oddly enough, one of the most famous books about Lizzie Borden issued not from the working class of Fall River but from Lizzie's own class. Victoria Lincoln grew up near Lizzie Borden's post-1893 home of Maplecroft. She remembers Lizzie mostly as that eccentric old person down the block. The Hill, while believing Lizzie guilty, preferred to present a reticent front. In her book, A Private Disgrace, Lincoln writes, "Somewhere in my marrow, I am shocked to discover that I am the sort of person who would talk to outsiders about Lizzie" (23). She did wait to break her silence until after Lizzie's death!
Illuminatingly, Victoria as a child heard the infamous rhyme: "Lizzie Borden took an axe/Gave her mother forty whacks/And when she found what she had done/She gave her father forty-one." The only possible conclusion is that the rhyme began in Fall River amongst children on the playground before it passed into the general lore box of America [a great example of how folklore comes into being, sui generis].
The Fall River need to explain Lizzie Borden still operates today. Arnold Brown who grew up in Fall River published Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter which argues that Lizzie didn't do the murder, she covered up the murder by her supposed illegitimate half-brother. (The theory is highly problematic.) Robert Flynn, another Fall Riverite, who moved to Portland, Maine, collected newspaper articles of Lizzie Borden and tracked down one of the few extant copies of Porter's Fall River Tragedy. With collaborator David Kent, he produced the Lizzie Borden Source Book.
Move-ins are as susceptible to Lizzie's charm. Jules Ryckebusch moved to Fall River in 1966. In 1992, he organized a three day conference about Lizzie Borden at the Bristol Community College. The conference attracted 500 people from locations as disparate as Plymouth, MI; Oxford, England; Nebraska and Virginia (D3).
Even the original Bed & Breakfast owners had a claim to the area. (No shoo-ins here.) Martha McGinn inherited the property from her grandparents (not Bordens). She furnished the house with period pieces (not the originals—there is no blood-soaked couch on view). The Bed & Breakfast has changed hands since 1996 [I believe it has changed hands several times since then].
The Bed & Breakfast is as important to the Lizzie Borden "tour" as her grave or even the Fall River Historical Society. "The House," Agnes de Mille called it. A narrow Greek Revival building, it was cramped and claustrophobic even by Victorian standards. It plays a role in the Lizzie Borden story and contributes substantially to Lizzie Borden as American tour attraction and Lizzie Borden as New England icon.
Greek Revival houses, built between 1830 and 1850, owe their existence to an upsurge in romantic architecture during the early nineteenth century. Greek Revival houses appear in areas which incurred high population growth in the early 1800s, including Massachusetts. The style was considered progressive for a time, being called "National Style" (McAlester 182).
Greek Revival gave way to Gothic Revival, however, and by 1892 (the year of the murder), a Greek Revival house would be considered out-of-date. The Borden house, moreover, had no gas and running (cold) water in only two rooms. Much is written, with reason, of Andrew Borden's parsimony that kept the family in this old-fashioned structure rather than in a more modern house on The Hill. Andrew could have afforded a nicer house. He had invested in property and anticipated buying a house for his wife's sister. He even sent Lizzie to Europe. After his murder, Lizzie and her sister inherited enough money to support themselves in independent lifestyles. When Lizzie moved up on The Hill, she not only entertained (mostly New York theatre folk) but left $30,000 to the Animal Rescue League in her will.
It seems that Andrew Borden was simply one of those people who believes, "If it isn't killing us, why move?" Except it may have killed him. Lizzie's resentment at such stinginess, especially when she saw her inheritance being spent on others while she sweated and stewed in an inconvenient, unappealing house, must have been considerable.
A cramped Romantic-style house provides the quintessential New England setting. Agnes de Mille uses it in her ballet The Fall River Legend. The ballet is replete with New England stereotypes (perhaps the better word here would be motifs): a minister fiancé for Lizzie, a Salem-like gallows, the angular, brooding house which transforms into a church. In the ballet, the gloomy house, with its Stick style front porch, dominates an arrangement of rocking chairs. If Nathaniel Hawthorne had written about Lizzie, Mrs. Caroline Emmerton would have restored 92 Second Street, rather than "The House of the Seven Gables" (Conforti 252). Which would be a pity for the murder mystery tourists. Why clutter up popular murder with high culture?It is the domesticity of the murders—"that House"—which attracts visitors. Viewers and readers of murder mysteries are attracted to the forensics, the heroism of the detective, the capture of the bad guy. But more importantly, we are attracted to the exposure of hidden lives. We are voyeurs, peering through windows, sneaking in back doors, sending spy cameras down the chimney. The Borden murders tantalize us with a view into an otherwise stiflingly dull Victorian household.
It is hard to imagine, for instance, that an axe murderess "out West" would strike the same cord. It is the so-called repressed, silent nature of Lizzie's world—a silence Victoria Lincoln can attest to—that makes us press for more. "The good murder," wrote Edmund Pearson, "the really desirable performance, beloved by the collector, is committed not by an habitual criminal, but by someone of blameless life" (7).
Hence Lizzie: Sunday School teacher, spinster, "proper Victorian lady" (Beem 86).
Proper Victorian ladies may swoon, but they do not give way to hysterics. And here Lizzie took things too far. To say she was expressionless and unemotional during the trial would be an understatement. "From start to finish she has manifested no feeling of weakness," said The New York Times (A8) while the Boston Daily Globe rather wonderingly wrote, "She sits like a graven image by the hour" (Flynn 214). "No apparent insanity," the New York Times (Flynn 163) thankfully decided. And what a relief it was to all when Lizzie did faint. (The reaction of spectators to Lizzie is similar to writers on the Scarsdale murder who were repulsed by Jean Harris' blank demeanor in Court.) [Other writers make compelling arguments that Lizzie played to the jury, giving them a "stiff upper lip" when necessary; providing them with a womanly swoon when required.]
In truth, Lizzie was more forthright and self-controlled than was considered entirely "nice." Even those who defended her with high-flown sentiments about her ladylike demeanor seemed to be calling on a stereotype rather than a true knowledge of Lizzie's personality. A woman reporter at the time of the inquest wrote of Lizzie's bedroom, "As dainty and charming a place as any girl need ask for . . . How could Lizzie Borden have come in the dainty place and removed the traces of such fearful work without marring all the delicate purity of everything with which she had contact?" (Flynn 145), a remarkable statement that is echoed ironically in Jean Filetti's article "From Lizzie Borden to Lorena Bobbitt: Violent Women and Gendered Justice." Arguing that Lizzie Borden was absolved by the defense of weak womanhood, Filetti writes, "The most compelling defense . . . was the brutality of the crime . . . The female was not capable of such a horrendous act of violence; a woman was inherently different from a man" (475).
Some spectators, more attuned to Lizzie's personality, felt she began to fake "feminine" behaviors in order to gain support. It is entirely possible. A shrewd woman, Lizzie was not the type to confess her crime, either at the time of its performance or at a later date. Crime experts can debate until kingdom come whether or not Lizzie did the crimes, but any suspect who burns a dress in a stove fire in front of witnesses three days after a murder [which may have covered the perpetrator in blood] has a truly staggering allotment of hutzpah. Lizzie's measures of self-protection after the murder are the acts of a woman determined to control the events to her liking. It is her coolness, I believe, that either enthralls or enrages people. What was the woman thinking? And why won't she tell us?
Over the years, Lizzie's characterization as Victorian maiden versus hardhearted suspect has solidified. In the current articles I read about the Borden murders, Lizzie was referred to as a "Sunday School teacher" at least four times (and as a "spinster" twice). It's as if Emily Dickinson got tired of seclusion and started throttling people. The impression is of a New England lady gone berserk. And if it happened to her, it could happen to anyone.
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| Edmund Pearson, dissector of true crime |
Lizzie certainly satisfies this demand. As Seattle Times writer, Anne Stuart put it, "In the nineteenth century, a double murder was highly unusual, one charging the victims' daughter rarer still and one involving a socially prominent family practically unprecedented" (A4). With the murders, Lizzie became, almost overnight, a New England sensation. Forty-two reporters attended the trial, the majority from Boston. One reporter farmed out pieces to seven newspapers, including the Portland Argus and the Springfield News. In 1994, the grandson of the trial's prosecutor, Hosea Morrill Knowlton, left his grandfather's papers to the Fall River Historical Society; among the papers were letters written to Knowlton during the trial from "attorneys, society matrons and learned thinkers, farmers, housewives and meat packers"—people from all over New England (Lorant A7).
Lizzie as a New England axe murderess comes down to the essentials of her story: a New England town that cannot stop talking, a New England house that overshadows the Bordens' lives and trial, and a New England lady who willingly takes on the part.
"Solidly authentic Massachusetts background" (xx), Miriam Allen Deford states in her intro to Edmund Pearson's Masterpieces of Murder. (Pearson attended the trial and wrote extensively about Lizzie.) "She was Fall River," Victoria Lincoln explains as if that explanation is enough (300), and Agnes de Mille deduces, "Lizzie, we knew, was in love with death and this sense of death in life is a deep New England trait" (159). "Simultaneously an American Lady MacBeth and dull New England spinster," (5) Gabriela Schalow Adler writes in her thesis "But She Doesn't Look Like a Fiend."
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| Agnes De Mille |
Still worrying about death, Agnes de Mille writes:
Murder is dear to the American heart; in murder there is a element of the blood sacrifice. Death on the highway will not answer, nor any demise by misadventure; it must be death deliberately planned and compassed. Our state provides no catharsis of ritual killing, but since we Americans are an independent and do-it-yourself type of people, we do our own; we murder like anything, and those who do not actually practice the big effects make the tremendous audiences. We are all drawn. We are hypnotized. We are murder besotted. (244)
When Agnes de Mille took the American Ballet Company to the Soviet Union in 1966, the story of Lizzie Borden, Fall River Legend (renamed The Legend of the Autumn River) was the only modern ballet to cross the Soviet/American cultural barrier to win widespread approval. The "atavistic" (as Agnes de Mille calls it) Soviet response was to the human drama, but it is a quintessentially American human drama due to the New England background, the undermining of that background and to the American love of mysteries.
Lizzie is New England and thus she is American. Whether the two are synonymous is an argument for regionalists everywhere, but in Lizzie's case, they have certainly become so. Florence King summed it up best when she said, "If you want to understand Anglo-Saxon Americans, study the Lizzie Borden case" (24). And what is considered more Anglo-Saxon than a New England town?
As Robert Paynter points out in his article "Afro-Americans in the Massachusetts Historical Landscape," the examination of minority groups in New England have been long bypassed. The increase in immigration in the late 1800s caused political and social uneasiness to intellectuals like John Fiske and Francis Amasa Walker who feared the annihilation throughout all of America of "Yankee" behaviors and virtues. Walker extolled the decently dressed child, tidy houses, the "village church, the public schoolhouse" (76), images that were, and often still are associated with New Englanders, specifically Anglo-Saxon New Englanders.
And oddly enough, it is in the undermining of these images that Lizzie Borden gains power as a myth. The classic New England images are used to illuminate the oddity of her story.
Marcia Carlisle makes such use in her article, "What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?" She describes a help group for victims of father-daughter incest, adding "the majority were white, educated, and unmarried" (9). Without debating Carlisle's data, her point is clear. This, she is saying, is noteworthy: incest happens (even) in "respectable, middle-class families" (5).
The juxtaposition of respectable Yankee lifestyles against "reality" is necessary to Carlisle's argument that incest is often a hidden secret. But the ideal must exist in order to be shown as false or misleading. If the "virtues of the American people" can be traced to their New England "ancestry" (Solomon 80), their vices can be traced to the same place.
I have referred to images of New England/American virtues as "classic"--another word might be "orthodox" or "accepted." In his book In Place/Out of Place, Tim Cresswell argues that orthodoxy exists in contrast to "transgression," an act that goes beyond the community's assumed boundaries. The community reacts with orthodoxy, the "right way" or social norm. In the tension between orthodoxy and transgression, social customs and assumptions are established and challenged. It is within this murky borderland that murder tourism finds its impetus.
After all, isn't it simply comeuppance that Lizzie should murder her rich, Yankee parents? That the "right way" should be overturned, its belly exposed? Weren't we all secretly gleeful when Martha Stewart went to jail? Her fall from the (in her case, self-produced) ideal reinforced both the ideal (she failed it) and its threats. Lizzie Borden also fell and in her fall, both the orthodoxy she failed and the "reality" she exposed battle for attention. And they get it.
From Lizzie Borden to O.J. Simpson, from the Lindbergh kidnapping to JonBenet Ramsey, the domestic, personal crime excites us. Although American mystery fiction was long synonymous with Bogart-ready Dashiell Hammett novels, it is no coincidence that Americans supply a large number of Agatha Christie fans. I would argue that the two are sides of the same coin: the grimy underworld and the so-called domestic "cozy." Miss Marple herself would say the same: the "cozy" has grime and to spare: you just have to look hard enough.
Look and look again. The coupled strands of voyeurism and crime dovetail neatly within the tourist trade. Agnes de Mille aside, it is less the gore and more the mystery that fascinates. With a startling degree of prescience, The New York Times wrote, even before the Borden trial ended, "[The Borden case] has all the fascination of a mystery about which there may be a thousand theories and upon which opinions may differ as variously as the idiosyncrasies of those who form them" (4). The possibility of submitting Andrew and Abby Borden's corpses to modern forensic study excited surprisingly few Borden fans. A Borden descendant wrote the concerned criminologist, "Personally, I prefer the case not be solved. It would take some of the uniqueness and mystique out of our family history to do so" ("Leave Lizzie" C3). Bernie Sullivan, editor at the Fall River Herald News, stated, "We don't want anybody to solve the mystery. Then all the fun will be gone" (Beem 119). And the original Bed & Breakfast owner, Martha McGinn, told reporters, "We're not promoting the murders. It's the mystery" ("Inn Cold Blood" 65).
What really happened? we ask. What really happened? But don't tell us.
We don't want merely the facts. We want to experience the truth in its entirety—gore and all, if the gore is unavoidable. Hence not just murder mystery tours attract us but sites such as Plymouth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village. We watch reality TV, from Frontier House to the pig-killing and bug-eating Survivor. It isn't enough for Americans to stand at polite attention before a historical marker. We want to know it first hand. We want to be inside. We want to sleep in Lizzie's bed. We want to eat her breakfast and if it happens to be an old-style New England breakfast all the better ("the most famous breakfast in America" (King 26)). We are individuals, seeking our own personal experience.
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| The victim and murderer nobody remembers. |
And yet Herbert Hayden's name has certainly not lasted to become synonymous with arsenic poisoning, seduction, or stabbing. Mary Stannard, more unfortunately, has not been preserved through history as a victim of class exploitation. This New England murder mystery (Hayden was acquitted) did not pass into either New England legend or American folklore.
And the distinctions are important. First, a woman was the victim, not the murderer. Second, the woman involved was a servant, not a "lady." And third, the methods were, however outrageous, not quite as outrageous as the Borden whacks. With the acquittal of Hayden, the texture of society could return to normal. But Fall River could never recover from the blows dealt, probably by Lizzie. She moved the boundaries permanently, and she didn't even pay for it. When that happens, legends arise, icons form.
Lizzie is both a New England icon and an American one. The qualities that make her New England find root in the American psyche that desires mystery and, if possible, mystery that undermines our assumptions. We want to be surprised. We want to be challenged.
Regional identity plays a role in the production of such surprises and challenges. A double-sided coin, it supplies the accepted, the norm, as well as less tolerable images: sometimes profane, often grotesque. Flip the coin and the two sides appear to blend. Regional identity becomes a constant shifting between orthodoxy and the unorthodox as both, in turn, define and reaffirm the other.
In essence, we need regional identity—with all its assumptions—in order to enjoy the richness that arises from opposing possibilities. We do not need to choose. Once we create an identity, we perceive what lies outside it, what defines it. We see the Lizzies and are enthralled.
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