Lizzie Borden as Gothic Heroine in THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN (1975)
Times is hard, folks. This blog is dedicated to the horrifying -- and what's more horrifying these days than the dreaded job search? Yes, your hostess is on an epic quest to find a full-time job to support her writing habit. In the process of finding a job in the legal field, I have become a fearsome combination of paralegal, carnival barker and travelling salesman. Still, as impressive as "Horror Movie Critic" and "Internet Smart-Ass" look on a resume, the overcrowded job market has rendered this search difficult. There are a few things keeping your hostess optimistic, however. One, is the astronomical crime rate here in Dead River, nicknamed "The Hidden Diamond of Dixie" (or "The Diamond in a Pig's Ass" as some of our detractors like to refer to it). All those stabbings are not only weeding out job candidates and freeing up positions, but they're generating a need for legal professionals! Otis Calhoun is finally back on the streets, on parole for shooting his daughter after she refused to bring him another beer, so there should be no shortage of criminal defense work. Hell, if I have to interview with one more pompous pant-suited pitbull armed with an army of HR zombies and a real hate-on for internet smart-asses sneering, "So why do you think you're qualified for this job?"
It's enough to make a girl want to bake a fresh batch of cyanide cupcakes.
And speaking of women on a spree, there's nothing that warms my twisted heart more than a high-strung woman hacking her way through her dysfunctional family with an ax, so today we're going to talk about Lizzie Borden. Or the legend of Lizzie, rather. Legends abound in Dead River too: we've got swamp witches, voodoo queens, a plethora of ghosts and this area was even a hotspot for Bigfoot sightings until we discovered it was just a shirtless Otis Calhoun before he bought his Hair-Off Mitten. But anyway, whatever the truth it's the legend that lives on in our imagination. Many forget that Lizzie Borden was acquitted of the infamous double-murder of her father and stepmother. However, in nearly every fictional portrayal, Lizzie is the culprit. As natural storytellers, we are constantly reframing our experience to fit a conventional narrative so perhaps we can make sense of it and bring order to the chaos of life. Lizzie Borden seems eternally cast in the role of The Gothic Heroine. The basic facts of her life just seem to be a checklist of Gothic tropes: Lizzie lives - or is trapped, rather - in an Old Dark House, practically a prisoner of a Wicked Father and Spiteful Stepmother until she is finally driven to madness and violence due to social constraints placed upon her by her gender. The most famous of these fictional dramatizations is probably the made-for-television THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN (1975), featuring an outstanding performance by ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY as Lizzie.
As the film opens, something is clearly wrong at the Borden house as the Bordens' Irish maid, Bridget (Fionnula Flanagan, THE OTHERS), runs to fetch a doctor. As the Bordens' neighbor, Mrs. Churchill approaches to find out what the commotion is all about, she sees Lizzie standing frozen at the screen door with the strangest look on her face. "Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come in," she says calmly. "Someone has killed Father."
The film uses District Attorney Hosea Knowlton's (ED FLANDERS of THE NINTH CONFIGURATION and SALEM'S LOT) investigation and prosecution of Lizzie as a framework to gradually reveal the tormented history of the dysfunctional Borden family through a series of flashbacks (fragmented editing reflecting Lizzie's fragmented state of mind). Family patriarch Andrew (a chilling FRITZ WEAVER, CREEPSHOW), once a mortician and now prominent businessman, follows the Wicked Father trope of Gothic fiction. He is a cold, controlling authoritarian to his daughters and so miserly he forces the family to continue to eat spoiled mutton broth. He's the kind of father who hacks his daughters pet pigeons to death with a hatchet just so the neighborhood boys can't get at them. "Papa, they were mine!" Lizzie sobs. Andrew curtly informs her that everything on the property is his and he will do with it what he sees fit.
Lizzie is Andrew's prisoner, not his daughter.
Stepmother Abby (HELEN CRAIG) is likewise domineering and spiteful. She never has a kind word for either stepdaughter, always sneering, snapping or disapproving. In exchange, Lizzie refers to her as "Mrs. Borden" instead of "Mother" or "that old sow."
As if that emotional minefield isn't enough, despite Andrew's wealth, the family occupies a claustrophobic, decaying house with no indoor plumbing. It is the Old Dark House of the Gothic, a prison for its inhabitants where madness festers. Lizzie's only source of stability is patient, long-suffering older sister Emma (wonderfully played by KATHERINE HELMOND of TV's SOAP) who has taken on the role of mediator and surrogate mother.
Many remark at Lizzie's lack of emotion. During the trial, Knowlton refers to her as "sphinx of coldness" and the women of Fall River observe with disgust that Lizzie does not shed a single tear at her parents' funeral. But Lizzie's defense attorney knows best, remarking, "The eyes that do not cry are the saddest eyes of all." Lizzie, like most products of abusive homes, has detached from her emotions to protect herself. But all of those ugly emotions will boil up to the surface at some point.
Despite her environment, Lizzie refuses to remain a victim. While Emma accommodates, Lizzie is a fighter and hellraiser, frequently erupting at both her father and stepmother. She struggles to meet her unmet needs with kleptomania and compulsive spending. As Mark Rutland in MARNIE (1964) would remind us, "When a child - of any age - can't get love, it takes what it can get."
Lizzie refuses to accept her dreary existence as fate and dreams of escape, a life filled with travel, glamorous dresses and a fashionable house on the hill. But most importantly, Lizzie wants the one thing that Victorian New England denies a young woman: her freedom.
"Flyyyy," she cries to the pigeons that are able to escape her hatchet-wielding father. Despite her family's wealth, Lizzie's options are extremely restricted. She cannot escape her family and her "ugly, old house" through education and career as those options are not open to her. She doesn't dream of love or marriage as an acceptable escape: after all, she'd still under a man's control.
Her only hope is of inheriting which is promptly destroyed when Abby badgers Andrew into changing his will so that she will be the sole benefactor, successfully disinheriting his two daughters.
It's a betrayal of the cruelest order.
Not only does Andrew deny both daughters affection, replacing love with iron-fisted control, but he would discard both of them and leave them penniless without a second thought.
Fictionalized Lizzies are used as a metaphor for the cage of traditional womanhood. In Elizabeth Engstrom's LIZZIE BORDEN, in addition to being trapped by her family's dysfunction, Lizzie is a lesbian and fears rejection from the church-going people in her community. The other women in this novel have been denied opportunities and emotional expression as well: Abby, rather than the unsympathetic harridan that is portrayed in THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN, is an unhappy woman in a loveless marriage, long ago stripped of her voice and unable to communicate her feelings to others; Emma lives a divided life, a proper New England spinster who travels one town over to indulge in self-destructive sprees of binge-drinking and rough sex; and The Widow Crawford, who befriends Lizzie in church, is forced to prostitute herself to keep her two sons in school. Engstrom's novel incorporates supernatural elements (another trademark of the Gothic) as well and Lizzie's repressed sexuality and rage creates a wrathful spectral second Lizzie that ultimately becomes responsible for the murders. In Sharon Pollack's play BLOOD RELATIONS, Lizzie is driven over the edge not only be her and Emma's disinheritance by their father, but her father's desire to marry her off to a wealthy widower with children (therefore making her another Abby). She proclaims to Emma that she never wants to marry or have children and declares this makes her "an aberration."
To D.A. Knowlton's horror, his wife expresses sympathy for Lizzie, explaining, "You have no idea how heavy these skirts can be at times."
As in Gothic fiction, sexual repression is intertwined with perversity and sex is linked with death. As
a child, Lizzie witnesses her father caressing a corpse on his embalming table, before guiltily shutting his eyes and jerking away. He even implores a terrified young Lizzie to touch one of the corpses to assure her that death is not something to be afraid of, remarking sensually how "smooth" and "cold" the dead flesh is to the touch.
As an adult, Lizzie coolly inspects the the corpse of her father before kissing it on the lips. The Freudian freakshow culminates in Lizzie committing the forty whacks in the nude. Sure, Lizzie's a pragmatic creature and no bloodstained dress means there's no physical evidence linking her to the crime. But in preparing for the double-murder, Lizzie slowly and sensually undresses and, for those viewers who have trouble with subtlety, strokes the phallic handle of the ax.
The murders are the first time we get to see Lizzie really let go. Having discarded the heavy skirts that constrain her, Lizzie literally let's her hair down as she mercilessly hatchets her perceived captors to pieces. Both Andrew and Abby's murders are intercut with flashes of earlier arguments, fragments of memories, symbolizing the final venting of savage rage Lizzie has kept festering for years. For Andrew's murder, the camera films Lizzie's blows in slow-motion, blood splattering her face and body as her eyes close and mouth goes slack in a kind of grotesque sexual release. It's not only the Gothic fusion of sex and death -- Lizzie has achieved her sexual liberation by murdering her abusive parents. She is now an independent woman who may do as she pleases.
At the end of the film, acquitted, Lizzie exits the courthouse. As she smiles up at the pigeons flying off the courthouse roof, we know murder was her only means of escape.Had she not resorted to parricide, Lizzie may well have become Madeline Usher.
Ironically, the patriarchy that constructed the walls of her prison sets her free; it seems so impossible that a respectable, upper-middle-class woman would do such a horrifying thing. With their inheritance, Lizzie and Emma ("We're free! At last we're really free!" Lizzie exults) may live autonomously in the house "on the hill" much like Merricat and Constance Blackwood in WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE. But like those two sisters, the shadow of death still looms over them.
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