A WASP looks at Lizzie Borden

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Florence King

IF YOU want to understand Anglo-Saxon Americans, study the Lizzie Borden case. No ethnologist could ask for a better control group; except for Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens' maid, the zany tragedy of August 4, 1892, had an all-Wasp cast.

Lizzie was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on July 19, 1860, and immediately given the Wasp family's favorite substitute for open affection: a nickname. Thirty-two years later at her inquest she stated her full legal name: Lizzie Andrew Borden. "You were so christened?" asked the district attorney. "I was so christened," she replied.

Lizzie's mother died in 1862. Left with two daughters to raise, her father, Andrew Borden, soon married a chubby spinster of 38 named Abby Durfee Gray. Three-year-old Lizzie obediently called the new wife Mother, but 12-year-old Emma called her Abby.

Andrew Borden was a prosperous but miserly undertaker whose sole interest in life was money. His operations expanded to include banking, cotton mills, and real estate, but no matter how rich he became he never stopped peddling eggs from his farms to his downtown business associates; wicker basket in hand, he would set out for corporate board meetings in anticipation of yet a few more pennies. Although he was worth $500,000 in pre-IRS, gold-standard dollars, he was so tightfisted that he refused to install running water in his home. There was a latrine in the cellar and a pump in the kitchen; the bedrooms were fitted out with water pitchers, wash bowls, chamber pots, and slop pails.

Marriage with this paragon of Yankee thrift evidently drove Abby to seek compensatory emotional satisfaction in eating. Only five feet tall, she ballooned up to more than two hundred pounds and seldom left the house except to visit her half-sister, Mrs. Whitehead.

Emma Borden, Lizzie's older sister, was 42 at the time of the murders. Mouse-like in all respects, she was one of those spinsters who scurry. Other than doing the marketing, she rarely went anywhere except around the corner to visit her friend, another spinster named Alice Russell.

Compared to the rest of her family, Lizzie comes through as a prom queen. Never known to go out with men, at least she went out. A member of Central Congregational, she taught Sunday school, served as secretary-treasurer of the Christian Endeavor Society, and was a card-carrying member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

What did she look like? Like everyone else in that inbred Wasp town. New York Sun reporter Julian Ralph wrote during the trial:

By the way, the strangers who are here begin to notice that Lizzie Borden's face is of a type quite common in New Bedford. They meet Lizzie Borden every day and everywhere about town. Some are fairer, some are younger, some are coarser, but all have the same general cast of features--heavy in the lower face, high in the cheekbones, wide at the eyes, and with heavy lips and a deep line on each side of the mouth.

Plump by our standards, she had what her self-confident era called a good figure. She also had blue eyes, and like all blue-eyed women she had a lot of blue dresses--handy for changing .clothes without appearing to have done so. The case is a vortex of dark blue dresses, light blue dresses, blue summer dresses, blue winter dresses, clean blue dresses, paint-stained blue dresses, blood-stained blue dresses, and an all-male jury struggling to tell one from the other.

Five years before the murders, the Bordens had a family fight when Andrew put one of his rental houses in Abby's name. Lizzie and Emma were furious, so they said politely: "What you do for her, you must do for us." That's the Wasp version of a conniption and Andrew knew it, so he took refuge in our cure-all fair play, buying his daughters houses of identical valuation ($1,500) to the one he had given his wife.

Now they were even-steven and everything was settled--except it wasn't. Having failed to clear the air, everyone started smoldering and brooding. Emma and Lizzie stopped eating with the elder Bordens, requiring the maid to set and serve each meal twice. They never reached that pinnacle of Wasp rage called Not Speaking--"We always spoke," Emma emphasized at the trial--but she and Lizzie eliminated "Abby" and "Mother" from their respective vocabularies and started calling their stepmother "Mrs. Borden." What a cathartic release that must have been.

Lizzie ticked away for four years until 1891, when she committed a family robbery. Entering the master bedroom through a door in her own room (it was a "shotgun" house with no hallways), she stole her stepmother's jewelry and her father's loose cash.

Andrew and Abby knew that Lizzie was the culprit, and Lizzie knew that they knew, but rather than "have words," Andrew called in the police and let them go through an investigation to catch the person the whole family carefully referred to as "the unknown thief."

The robbery launched a field day of Silent Gestures. Everybody quietly bought lots of locks. To supplement the key locks, there were bolts, hooks, chains, and padlocks. Abby's Silent Gesture consisted of locking and bolting her side of the door that led into Lizzie's room. Lizzie responded with her Silent Gesture, putting a hook on her side of the door and shoving a huge clawlooted secretary in front of it.