[In the following essay, Berni reads Carter's short story “The Fall River Axe Murders” as a commentary on traditional literary and historical representations of the past.]

Immortalized in the grisly economy of a children's rhyme, Lizzie Borden's legend continues to fascinate. Since the axe murders occurred in 1892, Borden's story has been dramatized on stage and screen, in novels, short stories, and poems. She has achieved the status of cult figure and feminist heroine, her name adopted by radical film-makers and rock bands alike. Feminist film-maker Linda Borden, for example, of Working Girls fame, has long adopted Lizzie's first name, and the all-female rock band “Lizzie Borden and the Axes” made the rounds in Boston in the 1980s. Some unknown admirer even left geraniums and silk violets on her tomb upon the 100th anniversary of the crimes, while the tombs of the victims remained bare. On this same centennial, five hundred people attended the first ever Lizzie Borden Conference, hosted by Bristol Community College, in Borden's native Massachusetts.¹

The story of this officially unsolved crime has also been explored in dozens of nonfiction books and articles, each purporting to deliver up the definitive truth. Working from the same set of historical documents (newspaper accounts, official trial transcripts), Borden historians nonetheless arrive at vastly different conclusions about every aspect of the case. What the mountain of Bordenalia reveals above all is that there is nothing so pliable as a “fact.” Each new book that claims to have found the truth (new ones appeared in 1991 and 1992) explains away the ambiguities of the case and creates a seamless narrative. In both fictional and nonfictional accounts, Borden's story becomes a stage upon which particular ideologically motivated dramas are played out. In particular, class and gender are determinate lenses through which commentators (past and present) see and construct the story of Borden's alleged crime. The Borden case allows for the investigation of a fascinating set of class, ethnic, and gender relations in a turn-of-the-century New England mill town. Nonetheless, the sensationalism of the story, and the relative historical insignificance of its major actors, ensures that for academic historians, the case remains little more than a historical footnote. It is in the popular arena that this irresolvable tale thrives, providing a unique opportunity to explore the strategies and politics of popular history writing.

Enter British writer Angela Carter. Her 1986 short story “The Fall River Axe Murders” offers a fundamental challenge to the kind of seamless narrative that has characterized both fictional and historical writing.² Her story is not so much a re-telling of the Borden murders as a commentary on past re-tellings. Carter refuses to create a sealed-off fictional world; instead, she repeatedly reminds us of her role as producer of the past. She lampoons the need for single, uncomplicated historical causality as she demonstrates the ways that class and gender influence historical production. In short, through a host of narrative strategies often labeled “postmodern,” Carter challenges history and fiction writing that disguises ideology through representational fidelity to the real.

My use of qualifying quotation marks around the term postmodern acknowledges the highly vexed status of the term within both popular and academic arenas. The alleged excesses of “pomo” academicians are a regular target of journalists on both the left and the right—a situation tinged with irony given that understandings of the term differ widely within academia. In his essay “SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus,” Robert Rawdon Wilson distinguishes postmodernism as a period term, concerned with the socio-economic analysis of late capitalism (and articulated by people like Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard), from postmodernism as an aesthetic term, “a highly flexible analytic-descriptive term capable of isolating contentions, devices and techniques across the range of all the cultural products” (and explicated by critics such as Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian McHale).³ For her part, Hutcheon, too, separates these registers with the terms postmodernity and postmodernism, arguing for the importance of such a distinction in order to avoid “conflating the two in some sort of transparent causality.”⁴ My use of the term postmodern owes much to Hutcheon's formulation of postmodernism as a cultural term characterized by “complicitous critique,” that is, marked by “… reflexivity and historicity, that at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces of the twentieth-century western world” (11). While a socio-economic critique of postmodernism as, in Fredric Jameson's familiar phrase, “the cultural logic of late capitalism” offers invaluable insights, I also believe that, with regard to cultural production, Jameson's brush is too broad. With Hutcheon, I would argue that many postmodern works demonstrate not (as Jameson contends) the emptying of historical content, but an active and necessary engagement with historical content. Jameson's observation of postmodernism's disappearance into surfaces maintains a style/content dichotomy that postmodern art would break down.⁵ In some cases this breakdown can mean superficial absorption in style/surface that erases ideology and precludes social critique (as in, say, some of David Lynch's films). For those works that qualify as “complicitous critique,” however, the style/content breakdown is precisely in service of laying bare the ideological production of knowledge.

I am not alone in considering this ideological unveiling to be a central, and crucially political, project of Carter's fiction. In the previously cited essay, Wilson reads one of the reconceived fairy tales in Carter's 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber as exemplifying his twin axes of postmodernism, offering both an artfully reflexive formality and a cogent political critique. Similarly, Magali Cornier Michael argues that Carter's 1984 novel Nights at the Circus combines postmodern narrative technique with feminist social critique, maintaining, “a firm connection to the historical material situation as a means of securing her novel's feminist political edge and ensuring that her novel remains accessible to most readers.”⁶ Elaine Jordan also argues for Carter's usefulness for feminism, while celebrating the political efficacy of postmodernist narrative's very lack of fixity. Jordan speaks of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved as “fantastic fiction which re-writes history; not perversely or as an impossible utopia … but as knowledge and possibility”; this, I would argue, is also Carter's accomplishment in “The Fall River Axe Murders.”⁷

On Thursday, August 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew Borden (70) and his second wife Abby Durfee Borden (65) were brutally murdered in their home. Between approximately 9:00 and 10:30 a.m., Abby was killed in the upstairs guest room; she received nineteen hatchet blows to the head and shoulders. At approximately 11:00 a.m., Andrew Borden was similarly bludgeoned about the head while lying or sitting on the sofa in the downstairs sitting room. The only people known to be in and about the house at the time of the murders were daughter Lizzie, 32 (her mother died when she was two years old; Andrew remarried about two years later), and the family's Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, 26. Elder daughter Emma, 42, was away visiting friends in Fairhaven. Houseguest John Vinnicum Morse, brother of Andrew's first wife, left the Borden home before the murders and returned after the crimes had been committed. His alibi is generally considered airtight (seen as somewhat too unimpeachable by some) and his character and behavior generally considered strange, if not suspicious. These are the principal characters in the drama, along with a host of secondary players: reporters, police officers, attorneys, doctors, judges, neighbors. After an inquest, preliminary hearing, and grand jury hearing, Lizzie was indicted for the murders. Her trial took place in New Bedford in June of 1893. While the jury of twelve white, middle-class men found her not guilty, she is nonetheless remembered to this day as an axe-wielding murderess. The finger has variously been pointed at sister Emma, at Uncle John, at the maid Bridget, at an alleged illegitimate son of Andrew, and at strangers unknown, but Lizzie remains the favorite suspect.

Book-length treatments of the Borden case vie for respect, prestige, and the book-buying dollar through various claims to historical authority. The book jacket of Edward Radin's 1961 book, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, is typical: “after nearly three years of research, Mr. Radin presents a fascinating picture of the real Lizzie Borden … a picture which casts new light on the murders. … In short, he solves the case seventy years after the fact.”⁸ Radin reports that he studied the one existing copy of the two-volume official trial minutes and “found the answer”: “Lizzie Borden was innocent” (10). In his 1974 book Goodbye Lizzie Borden, Robert Sullivan reports that he, too, has examined the “official verbatim transcript” of all testimony, and states that his purpose is to “present the facts and the testimony of the witnesses with as much accuracy and objectivity as it is possible to do.”⁹ Sullivan argues that Lizzie is guilty beyond any doubt. Nonetheless, much energy continues to be expended in researching this crime. In a 1991 book called Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter, Arnold R. Brown announces that “this account is the objective, definitive answer” to the Borden mystery.¹⁰ He again claims that an exhaustive study of the historical record (along with information provided by two never-before-heard-from witnesses) has allowed him to provide “the true, factual report of an historic event” (13). Brown's theory is that the murders were committed by Andrew Borden's illegitimate son, and that Lizzie helped orchestrate a cover-up in order to ensure that Andrew's will (allegedly leaving the bulk of his estate to Abby) never be brought to light. The most recent book-length study, David Kent's 1992 Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden, is decidedly short on “new evidence,” but nonetheless claims a right to enter into the Borden fray by virtue of its objectivity.¹¹ In his foreword to Kent's book, Robert A. Flynn notes that Kent “somehow assimilated the myths, distortions, innuendoes, biases, and prejudices of the Lizzie Borden case, digested it all, and emerged from his intense research with … the essence of historical truth” (x). Kent himself ends his preface by saying that he will simply present the facts of the case, with “no attempt to persuade” the reader of Lizzie's “guilt or innocence” (xvi). In spite of this declaration, however, Kent's book clearly constructs a case for Lizzie's innocence.

All of these books distinguish the information that they present from that conveyed by “the legend” of Lizzie Borden. “Legends, as a rule,” notes Radin, “are composed of few facts, much exaggeration and many freewheeling flights of fancy and fiction” (10). The authors suggest that corruption is inevitably involved when information is kept alive through oral transmission. While thus privileging written history, each book nonetheless claims to see the biases of previously printed accounts and to deliver up, at last, the only unbiased presentation of the Borden case. Not surprisingly, reading these treatments against one another reveals precisely the biases and blindnesses that exist within these allegedly neutral accounts. Each book does what it claims the others do: each presents only that information favorable to its conclusion, suppressing all information that might create doubt as to its findings. In particular, the Borden case aptly illustrates the degree to which the shaping of history, the conferring of official sanction, depends upon issues of class and gender.

In 1892, Fall River, Massachusetts, was a city of sharp class divisions. Thanks to the powerful underground river that gave the city its name, Fall River was a leader in textile manufacturing, a thriving mill town of about 80,000 with a bustling port. The ruling classes were of the long-settled Yankee variety and lived in the fashionable part of town known as “The Hill.” Those who lived below The Hill and worked in the mills were often newly arrived immigrants, in particular Portuguese, Slavic, French Canadian, and Irish (Radin, 11-12). Andrew Borden made his fortune through real estate and banking. When the opportunity arose, he bought up several blocks of downtown property, tore down the existing structures, and built the massive Andrew J. Borden building, renting it out to various businesses. Instead of establishing his family on The Hill, where his fortune and influence certainly earned him a place, Andrew chose instead to live close to his banks and businesses downtown. In searching for a motive for the crimes, many point to Lizzie's alleged resentment that her father's solitary and idiosyncratic ways closed her out of the social circles where she would have preferred to travel. After she was acquitted of the crimes, she and sister Emma did in fact purchase a mansion on The Hill. By that time, however, her infamy worked just as effectively as her father's eccentricity to bar the doors to Fall River high society.

Lizzie was not at first avoided as a figure of infamy. During the ordeal of her arrest and trial, she was supported by a number of well-connected friends and clergy. Influential newspaper editors opined in her favor, those inside the courtroom cheered as she was pronounced not guilty, and telegrams of congratulations poured in from far and wide. Not long after the trial, however, the tide began to turn against her. The police announced that they had closed the case, suggesting their belief that the guilty party had gone free. People began to wonder who else could possibly have committed these horrific crimes, and unanswered questions from the trial kept suspicions against Lizzie alive. Newspaper editorials critical of the way the trial had been run began to appear (Sullivan, 205). The “legend” that paints Lizzie Borden as an unfeeling killer who got away with murder began to be forged.

Radin suggests that the enduring tale of Lizzie Borden's guilt was in large part a product of class hostility, a kind of revenge exacted by the laboring population against the privileged daughter of one of their oppressors (11). Certainly class played a role in the case from the beginning. The two most established newspapers in Fall River, the Herald and the News, largely served the interests of the moneyed inhabitants on The Hill; these papers are variously seen by Borden chroniclers as reasonably responsible and accurate in their treatment of the Borden case (Radin, Kent) or as hopelessly biased in Lizzie's favor (Brown, Sullivan). The upstart paper in town, the Fall River Globe, was established as a voice for the working classes. Its determination to sell papers at all costs meant that its journalistic methods were sensationalistic, fast, and free. This paper adopted an anti-Lizzie line almost immediately. For Sullivan, the Globe is clear-eyed on the case, if a bit too ready to print every rumor swirling about town. For most other commentators, the Globe's accounts are to be treated with caution. Sullivan also believes that the big out-of-town papers such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe were prejudiced in Lizzie's favor. Kent, on the other hand, argues that the out-of-town papers were more objective than those closer to the scene; he finds that the Times reported on the case with “accuracy and impartiality” (167).

Class bias is also evident in assumptions about suspects. In their initial questioning, police asked Lizzie if “a Portuguese” working for her father might have committed the crimes. The Herald's first story on the case reported that police investigated the suspected Alfred Johnson (a Swede; “Portuguese” was a term that covered all immigrants) and learned that he was a longtime and trusted employee who had been “‘confined to his bed by illness’” at the time of the murders (reprinted in Kent, 6). According to this same story, on the afternoon of the killings, police also arrested “‘a sturdy Portuguese named Antonio Auriel’” who later provided a sufficient alibi and was released (quoted in Kent, 7). Brown reports that, when the search for a blameworthy “Portuguese” proved unsuccessful, attention turned briefly to Bridget Sullivan, who made the mistake of being Irish and of being at home when the murders took place (45, 153). Radin, on the other hand, reports bias of another sort, saying that Bridget was never really taken seriously as a suspect because she was “just the maid” (212). Lizzie's lawyer, Andrew Jennings, reveals the era's beliefs about supposed criminal classes. At one point in the legal proceedings, he argues before Judge Josiah C. Blaisdell that Bridget Sullivan, not Lizzie Borden, should “naturally” have been questioned more closely in connection with the murders: “‘In the natural order of human nature, who would be the party liable to be cross-questioned, her clothing to be examined, to be subjected to suspicion? Which of these two people?’” (quoted in Radin, 230). Brown does not explain why suspicions against Bridget were dropped; he does tell us though that she became a police favorite, employed in the household of the new Bedford jailkeeper after the tragedy (251).

Past and present descriptions of Bridget suggest that her favorable treatment may have been linked to her age and gender. Convinced of Bridget's innocence, Sullivan describes a photograph of Bridget this way: “her pretty face [wears] a pleasant, shy, and trusting expression” (23). By contrast, Sullivan paints an unflattering portrait of Lizzie. “No great beauty,” she is “abrupt” in manner, socially ambitious, and hampered by “an unfortunate inability to engender warm friendships” (20). Unlike Lizzie, whose legendary public composure was held against her, Bridget was appropriately distraught throughout the ordeal. Radin writes that police and reporters found her “agitated … confused and incoherent after the murders” (75). Brown says she was a “scared-to-death lass” at the preliminary hearing (251). Even the sympathetic Sullivan describes her as “excitable and apprehensive” throughout the legal proceedings (23).

The contrast between Bridget's appropriately feminine displays of emotion and Lizzie's much suspected reserve may, however, be a product of Borden myth-making. Historians more friendly to Lizzie defend her capacity for emotion. Kent, for example, points to numerous newspaper accounts that describe Lizzie displaying her feelings, such as the New York Times account of her behavior at her parents' funeral (41). Kent and Radin also make much of the attentions administered to Lizzie by doctors, friends, and neighbors on the day of the murders. These attendants report pressing Lizzie's hands, fanning her, applying cold cloths. For Sullivan, however, these attentions were administered “despite the fact that [Lizzie's] composure seemed absolute” (32). Newspapers are the main source for information on the behavior of the principals before and during the trials, and each writer's beliefs on this score seem clearly to be a product of which newspapers he chose to believe. Similarly, those friendly to Lizzie make much of her charitable work with a number of church and community organizations, while those less sympathetic describe this activity as minimal (Sullivan, 69). It is interesting to note, however, that the emotional Bridget and the composed Lizzie seem to have traded places by the time of the final trial nearly a year after the murders. According to Kent (who at least makes clear that he favors the accounts presented in the New York Times; other writers provide little documentation for many of their conclusions), Bridget was a model of confidence and composure on the stand, while Lizzie wept on two occasions and fainted or nearly fainted on three others over the course of the 17-day trial (103).

As this information suggests, Lizzie was frequently judged against a standard of appropriate feminine behavior. Moreover, perceptions of her guilt or innocence often hinged upon whether her behavior was seen as in keeping with that expected of a gentlewoman. Lizzie reveals that she is very much aware of the class standard against which she is being judged and of her failure to measure up. In the only interview she ever granted, Lizzie expresses dismay at the characterizations of her as cold and unfeeling: “‘There is one thing which hurts me very much. They say I don't show any grief. Certainly I don't in public. I never did reveal my feelings and I cannot change my nature now. They say I don't cry. They should see me when I am alone, or sometimes with my friends. It hurts me to think people say so about me’” (quoted in Kent, 69). She proclaims her innocence and promises to bear up under the ordeal, invoking the dignity-in-times-of-emotional-crisis expected of the upper classes. Julian Ralph, reporting for the New York Sun, repeatedly calls Lizzie a lady: “‘She was modest, calm and quiet, and it was plain to see that she had complete mastery of herself, and could make her sensations and emotions invisible to an impertinent public’” (quoted in Radin, 107). Had there been no question as to her innocence, I have little doubt that more commentators would have taken this more charitable line and lauded Lizzie's bravery and self-control. Instead, legend thrived on whatever could be shown to make her monstrous: an unemotional woman fit the bill.

Determining whether or not Lizzie Borden was indeed a monster was the express goal of the reporter who secured the interview with Lizzie. Writing for the New York Recorder, McGuirk reports that she approached the interview in hopes of discovering what had become of the gentle and charitable woman she had known:

I was anxious to see if this girl, with whom I was associated several years ago in the work of the Fall River Fruit and Flower Mission, had changed her character and become a monster. … The woman was Lizzie Borden, who had been accused of the murder of her father, and personally has been made to appear in the eyes of the public as a monster, lacking in respect for the law, and stolid in her demeanor to such an extent that she never showed emotion at any stage of the tragedy, inquest, or trial, and, as far as the government would allow they knew, had never shown any womanly or human emotion of any sort since the public first crossed the threshold of the Borden house.

(reprinted in Kent, 69)

McGuirk concludes that Lizzie is “‘unchanged, except that she showed traces of the great trial she has just been through’” (quoted in Kent, 69). Her piece clearly aims at dispelling the “Lizzie-as-monster” construction; however, only those historians interested in a similar project report on Lizzie's only public interview.

McGuirk's exclusive interview with the suspected axe-murderer did little to influence the opinions of those set against her. The piece was immediately ridiculed by the Globe:

The flap-doodle, gush, idiotic drivel, misrepresentations, and in some instances, anarchic nonsense, which is being promulgated by women newspaper correspondents, WCTU conventions, and other female agencies in connection with the Borden murder just now, may originate in good intentions but do not strengthen Lizzie Borden's case much in the opinion of the public. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts will, for the present, adhere to the forms of law in conducting cases, regardless of the clamor or criticism of any petticoat propaganda.

(quoted in Kent, 70 and Radin, 97)

Support for Lizzie from the WCTU, from women's suffrage activists, and from other women's organizations tended to be dismissed by the Globe and others in similarly gender-determined terms. After her acquittal, the Providence Journal discredited Lizzie's supporters as “‘a lot of women’” (quoted in Sullivan, 206). Even Lizzie supporter Radin dismisses those that he calls Lizzie's “sob sisters,” journalists who cover only “human-interest sidelights” (106). Clearly women of any sort were seen as unable to adopt an objective position on the issue. It is a fitting irony then that the jury of twelve white men (largely rural tradesmen and farmers) is frequently criticized for its inability to see the case free of bias. Lizzie's acquittal for the crimes is commonly understood to be the result of her gender and class position: the authorities of the day could not bring themselves to hang a gentlewoman.¹² Those in power in Borden's own time needed to believe in her innocence in order to uphold conceptions of virtuous Victorian womanhood. At every point in the legal process, Lizzie's position as an upper-class woman influenced the handling of the case. For the legal authorities of the day (and it would seem for many present-day historians) Lizzie could be either a gentlewoman or a monster. She could not possibly be both. They had only to determine which she was for all the answers to fall into place. This gentlewoman/monster dichotomy rests upon a notion of sexual division as absolute; this division would be tested during the Superior Court Trial, where the class and gender cards come most fully into play.

While Andrew Jennings and his assistant Melvin O. Adams had represented Lizzie at all previous legal proceedings, they decided to bring in George Dexter Robinson to handle the Superior Court trial. A former governor of Massachusetts with connections to two of the three judges presiding at the trial, Robinson added profile and a decided skill with rhetoric (if not with the finer points of law; his abilities in both areas are criticized by Sullivan) to the Borden team. Like much of the press sympathetic to Lizzie, Robinson employed a gender-determined rhetoric of weakness in presenting his client. He called Lizzie a “little girl” (Kent, 103) and the proverbial sparrow watched over by God (Brown, 265). When the court had to decide whether to allow Lizzie's inquest testimony as evidence in this hearing, Prosecutor Moody argued the law, but Robinson's rhetoric of a “defenseless woman” bullied by the police for days carried the day: the jury agreed not to allow the inquest testimony (Kent, 130; Sullivan, 196). Robinson's strategy at the trial was to align himself with the jurors as husband and father and to construct Lizzie Borden as the loving daughter that all of them had or wished to have. In his closing speech for the defense, Robinson first paints the portrait of the monster:

And so we are challenged at once, at the outset, to find somebody that is equal to that enormity, whose heart is blackened with depravity, whose whole life is a tissue of crime, whose past is a prophecy of that present. A maniac or a fiend, we say. Not a man in his senses and with his heart right, but one of those abnormal productions that Deity creates or suffers—a lunatic or a devil.

(quoted in Kent, 170)

Clearly this category excludes Lizzie Andrew Borden, church-goer, Sunday School teacher, member of numerous charitable organizations, rich man's daughter. Police may have seen Lizzie in a monstrous light, Robinson argues, but only because they are conditioned by their occupation to see monsters everywhere. That she was in the house at the time of the crimes did not incriminate her, for that is just where any dutiful daughter should be: “‘I don't know where I would want my daughter to be, than to say that she was at home, attending to the ordinary vocations of life, as a dutiful member of the household’” (quoted in Kent, 172). He concludes by confronting them squarely with the dichotomy and challenging them to say that this gentlewoman is a monster: “‘To find her guilty you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it? As she sat here these long weary days and moved in and out before you, have you seen anything that shows the lack of human feeling and womanly bearing?’” (quoted in Kent, 179).

Given the well-dressed, attentive, occasionally fainting or weeping figure of Lizzie Borden that sat before the jury in the courtroom, District Attorney Knowlton's task of convincing the jury that they gazed upon a monster was perhaps the more difficult. Nonetheless, he tried, first invoking the figure of the gentlewoman, and then reporting that in Lizzie's case something had gone horribly wrong:

It is no ordinary criminal that we are trying today. It is one of the rank of lady, the equal of your wife and mine, of your friends and mine, of whom such things had never been suspected or dreamed before. … It is hard, it is hard, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen, to conceive that woman can be guilty of crime but I am obliged to say, what strikes the justice of every man to whom I am talking, that while we revere the sex, while we show our courtesies to them, they are no worse than we. If they lack in strength and coarseness and vigor, they make up for it in cunning, in dispatch, in celerity, in ferocity.¹³

Knowlton appears here to ask the jurors to reject the dichotomy, to allow that gentlewomen could actually also be monsters, and Ann Schofield notes that the jury of “twelve middle-aged, middle-class New England gentlemen” proved “unable to accept the notion that women might be like men” (99). In reality, however, Knowlton ultimately maintains the dichotomy by arguing (out of a long-standing misogynistic tradition), that all women are monsters. The ferocious cunning of women, he argues, enabled Lizzie to dispose of the murder weapon and any bloody garments after Andrew's murder. Knowlton admits that the question of how this was accomplished is a difficult one: “‘I cannot answer it. You cannot answer it. You are neither murderers nor women. You have neither the craft of the assassin nor the cunning and deftness of the sex’” (quoted in Kent, 187; emphasis mine). With these words Knowlton cements the equation: woman = monster. With Lizzie's acquittal, however, the cultural construction of woman as monster (as, in Knowlton's words, “the sex,” therefore capable of the kind of passionate outburst demonstrated in the Borden murders) loses out to the construction of woman as virtuous (and passionless), in need of male guidance and protection, a much less frightening conception. An editorial in the next day's New York Times adds to the picture of a virtuous, defenseless Lizzie persecuted by inept and desperate authorities: “‘The acquittal of the most unfortunate and cruelly persecuted woman was, by its promptness, in effect, a condemnation of the police authorities of Fall River and of the legal officers who secured the indictment and have conducted the trial’” (quoted in Kent, 199).

For their part, Radin and Kent assist in the depictions of Lizzie as a paragon of virtuous womanhood, as they celebrate her community involvements, and detail every reported display of womanly emotion. Both report in detail her charitable activities (carried out mostly anonymously) after the trial. Here as elsewhere, my examination of the treatment of this case suggests that twentieth-century writers merely repeat the prejudices of their nineteenth-century counterparts. This repetition may be the more dangerous given their declarations of objectivity. As a rule, these popular histories of the Borden case are scantily documented and deceptive in their presentation of evidence. The writers make no attempt to acknowledge that they are offering an interpretation of the past, or to explore the ways in which their own views of the case might have been shaped by their own social positioning. Each claims instead to occupy an all-seeing, transcendent subject-position, a subject position that has historically been the province of moneyed white males, and that has authorized innumerable studies of and laws for those Others whose vision and position are deemed partial, incomplete, embodied, limited (women, Portuguese, the Irish). If the notion of a transcendent subject position has begun to be questioned in the academy, that questioning seems to have had little impact on popular practice; however, the disarming of the transcendent subject position is a preeminent goal of postmodern narrative practice. Carter's story about Lizzie Borden may not provide the definitive account of what happened on that August day in 1892, but it teaches us how to read history and hints at what a postmodern historiography might look like.

The mystery of the Borden murders may be frustrating for seekers after certainty, but it has also proven immensely generative. Schofield discusses many of the fictional treatments of the Borden case and reports that, at last count, it had inspired “two operas, a ballet, numerous novels, eight plays, a film, a television show, two short stories, four poems, various popular songs, and, of course, the children's rhyme” (91). Schofield argues that invariably these fictional treatments of Lizzie Borden's life take one of two forms: “The tragic romance and the feminist quest” (91).¹⁴ In both models, Lizzie's character and fate are equally determined by her gender. Most writers find the historically accepted (though still controversial) financial motive for the crimes unsatisfactory and so add romance plots of every conceivable variety. In these romances, Lizzie Borden is invariably and stereotypically the feminine half of the romantic pair. She is also, however, woman as monster: “sexual passionate, angry and dangerous” (Schofield, 94). In the feminist quest, Lizzie's violent act is redefined: the murders themselves are not monstrous, but rather are the product of a monstrous social circumstance, an avenue toward liberation from the oppression of the Victorian home. Schofield finds Carter's “Fall River Axe Murders” emblematic of the feminist quest model (95). Carter's story certainly does point up the horrors of domestic space, as it details the dull and confining life of its celebrated spinster heroine. Carter tells us that Mr. Borden “owns” all of the women in his house, “either by marriage, birth, or contract,” and she constructs Lizzie's crime as one motivated, in part, by her desire for liberation from the confines of her patriarchal home. While I agree with Schofield that Carter is concerned to delineate carefully the historical era in which the Borden family lived, I would argue that Carter's narrative is equally interested in commenting on the way this story has been told in the past. In the process she suggests the imposture of claims to historical authenticity/truth/objectivity, which is not to say that she documents the demise of historical knowledge. Rather, Carter demonstrates a respect for the complexities of history that conventional historiography would do well to attend to.

As I have indicated, Hutcheon argues that postmodern fiction undertakes a paradoxical project: “It reinstalls historical context as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge.”¹⁵ Carter's fiction exemplifies this paradox. Her attention to historical detail and her richly rendered descriptions of material reality comprise a kind of hyper-realism, as for instance in the Borden family's final meal: “There is nothing quite like cold mutton. The sinewy, grey, lean meat amidst the veined lumps of congealed fat, varicosed with clotted blood; it must be the sheep's Pyrrhic vengeance on the carnivore!” (21). At the same time, Carter's story is deeply suspicious of narrative, particularly as a vehicle of historical knowledge, and she employs a number of strategies in order to resist the consolations of realistic fiction.

From the start, she subverts the teleological demands of conventional narrative. For instance, she never narrates the central event in this story: the murders themselves. Instead, her story offers several false starts and keeps doubling back on itself and beginning again. In fact, the tale concludes at precisely the place where it begins, on the morning of the fateful day. In this refusal to provide the denouement, her story resists the tidy structuring of conventional narrative. Carter also resists teleology by revealing the impossibility of arriving at a single, authentic historical truth. Instead, she illustrates the vastly overdetermined status of this particular historical incident. With hilarious hyperbole, she enumerates the multiple causes of the killings on August 4th: the suffocating heat, the binding Victorian clothing, the cramped and comfortless house, Lizzie's menstrual cycle, food poisoning, Lizzie's response to her stepmother's uncontrolled gluttony, an Indian curse upon the land, Lizzie's “fits,” Lizzie's Oedipal jealousy of her stepmother, and last but not least, Lizzie's rage at her father when he kills her pigeons.

In addition, Carter refuses the transcendent subject position by refusing to present a hermetically sealed fictional world. Through regular moments of interruption in her narrative, she reminds us that we are reading a construction of events. By means of these contextual breaks, the authorial voice allows realities from contemporary life to enter and comment on the process of fiction making. In the following passage, for example, the author both criticizes a social order that provided few meaningful activities to the daughters of the wealthy and comments on the lack of information about women's activities in existing historical records:

The girls stayed at home in their rooms, napping on their beds or repairing ripped hems, or sewing loose buttons more securely, or writing letters, or contemplating acts of charity among the deserving poor, or staring vacantly into space.

I can't imagine what else they might do.

What the girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me.

(13)

Carter's interruptions in the narrative flow also remind us that history is written according to particular agendas, as in this example:

In a mean house on Second Street in the smoky city of Fall River, five living creatures are sleeping in the still, warm early morning. They comprise two old men and three women. The first old man owns all the women by either marriage, birth, or contract.

The other old man is some kind of kin of Borden's. He doesn't belong here; he is a chance bystander, he is irrelevant.

Write him out of the script.

Even though his presence in the doomed house is historically unimpeachable, the colouring of this domestic apocalypse must be crude and the design profoundly simplified for the maximum emblematic effect.

Write John Vinnicum Morse out of the script.

One old man and three of his women sleep in the house on Second Street. The women comprise his second wife, his youngest daughter, and his servant girl.

(10-11)

Those who believe that Morse was in some way involved in the murders would be disappointed in Carter's imperious treatment of him. Her point, however, is clear: bit players are easily written off of the stage of history, a fact amply illustrated in the many histories of the Borden case. These accounts sacrifice the messiness of unanswered questions, the puzzles posed by bit players; they sacrifice complexity to serve a singular theory: “the design profoundly simplified for maximum emblematic effect.” Carter employs broadly stereotypical portraits of old Borden (the gaunt miser) and his wife (the portly glutton) to suggest the ease with which we cling to such simple caricatures, rather than see the full complications involved in understanding historical realities. We saw that past and present historical accounts of the case offer similarly simplified character sketches, generally in a transparent attempt to skew the case in one direction or another. Multiple references to fairy tales complete Carter's critique of the flattening and oversimplifying tendencies of historical narrative. In particular, she suggests that Lizzie constructs her reality in accordance with the crude emotional realities of fairy-tales. Lizzie creates a self-history in which she is the poor orphan girl whose life has been devastated by the loss of her real mother, who has been replaced by a comically evil stepmother. After a tour of Europe, Lizzie returns to the place of her torment: “Home again, the narrow house, the rooms all locked like those in Bluebeard's Castle, and the fat, white stepmother whom nobody loves sitting in the middle of the spider web; she has not budged a single inch while Lizzie was away, but she has grown fatter” (28).

More pointedly, Carter reveals the systems of belief within which historical realities are shaped: Christianity (Andrew and Abby Borden represent two of the seven deadly sins, avarice and gluttony), psychoanalysis (Lizzie resents the place that her stepmother has assumed in her father's affections), Marxism (Andrew's hobby is “grinding the faces of the poor” who work in Fall River's “dark, satanic mills” 18, 9), and finally fairy- and folktale (Andrew and Abby are Jack Spratt and his wife; the Borden home is called Bluebeard's castle; Abby is depicted as the wicked stepmother). These references to existing systems of knowledge suggest that ideology influences the production of historical truths. In particular, Carter reveals that class, gender, and racial position influence how we see, make sense of, and narrate the world. The class position of the Borden family leads them to blame a mysterious burglary on the various ethnic others of Fall River: “They blamed it on the Portuguese, mostly, but sometimes on the Canucks” (16). Similarly, Lizzie projects her murderous desires on “a dark man, Portuguese, Italian” whom she claims to have seen lurking about the house (25).

Just as the many Borden chroniclers present the facts in accordance with their own preconceptions, so too, Carter's story tells us, do we all construct reality, a point she makes in the final contextual break in the story:

Surviving photographs of Lizzie Borden show a face it is difficult to look at as if you know nothing about her; coming events cast their shadow across her face, or else you see the shadows these events have cast—something terrible, something ominous in this face with its jutting, rectangular jaw and those mad eyes of the New England Saints, eyes that belong to a person who does not listen … fanatics's eyes, you might say, if you knew nothing about her. If you were sorting through a box of old photographs in a junk shop and came across this particular sepia, faded face above the choker collars of the eighteen-nineties, you might murmur when you saw her: “Oh, what big eyes you have!” as Red Riding Hood said to the wolf, but then you might not even pause to pick her out and look at her more closely for hers is not, in itself, a striking face.

But as soon as the face has a name, once you recognise her, when you know who she is and what it was she did, the face becomes as if of one possessed, and now it haunts you, you look at it again and again, it secretes mystery.

This woman with her jaw of a concentration camp attendant; and such eyes …

(29)

This passage demonstrates how we make sense of artifacts and produce history by drawing upon a catalogue of received knowledge: historical accounts, fairy tales, legends, sensationalistic journalism, and fiction. The passage tells us that there is no understanding of new information without prior ideological conditioning/positioning. The self-reflexivity of Carter's fiction asks that history, at the very least, acknowledge its own biases, admit to and interrogate the systems of belief upon which it rests.

Two of the most recent investigations into the Borden case (Brown's and Kent's) maintain the tradition of the claim to objectivity. At the same time, however, these books suggest an interesting shift in the status of fiction as vehicle of authoritative historical truth. The jacket of Kent's book tells us that he has written “a true crime mystery that reads like fiction.” With this invitation to readers, the editors perhaps hoped to guard against the presumption that historical accounts are inherently dull. In keeping with this promised rhetorical mode, Kent narrates the story of the bloody August morning and its aftermath, re-creating dialogue between principal characters. This practice, however, is dropped fairly early on in his book. Brown's 1991 work carries the use of fictional techniques even further, employing a fictional mode as a means of cementing its authority. Several early chapters of Brown's book read like a novel, as he enters into the minds of the central characters in order to paint the world as they see and experience it. The technique suggests that Brown knows the material well enough to write as if he had been there himself: he engages in the kind of seamless world-building that fictional realism is known for. Thus in the realm of popular bookselling at least, the line between fiction and history seems a slippery one indeed. Postmodern fiction has been criticized for rendering this line even more obscure: for suggesting that all historical accounts are only masquerading fictions. There is a vital difference, however, between the practices of the contemporary historians whose works I have explored and the practices of postmodern fiction. In the former, fictional techniques are in the service of greater historical authenticity: they serve to more fully obscure that the writer works from a particular set of beliefs, within a certain historical moment, and for a particular audience. Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, aims at unveiling precisely these realities of context, position, and ideology—not in some value-free, radically relational world, but in the service of a complex and honest understanding of human history and one's place in it. Carter's sly and humorous tale thus comprises a sort of anti-narrative, one that insists that historical knowledge, like all systems of knowledge, must give up its global pretensions and acknowledge its ideological investments, must give up the claims to value neutrality that allow it to ground its pronouncements in an allegedly natural and eternal order.

Notes

1. For information on the Bristol conference, see Carolyn J. Mooney, “100 Years Later, Lizzie Borden Captivates Academics,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 12 August 1992, A5; Lewis MacDonald, “One Hundred Years of Lizzie Borden,” Contemporary Review 261 (1992): 323-26.

2. Angela Carter, “The Fall River Axe Murders,” Saints and Strangers (New York: Penguin, 1986), 9-31. Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

3. Robert Rawdon Wilson, “SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990), 113.

4. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 26.

5. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92.

6. Magali Cornier Michael, “Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus: An Engaged Feminism via Subversive Postmodern Strategies,” Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 493.

7. Elaine Jordan, “Down the Road, or History Rehearsed,” in Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), 173. For Jordan's defense of Carter's work as feminist, see “The Dangers of Angela Carter,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), 119-31.

8. Edward D. Radin, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961). Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

9. Robert Sullivan, Goodbye Lizzie Borden (Brattleboro, Vermont: Stephen Greene Press, 1974), 3. Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

10. Arnold R. Brown, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter (Nashville: Rutledge Hill, 1991), 11. Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

11. David Kent, Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Yankee, 1992). Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

12. Sullivan makes this case most strongly, noting that no female criminal defendant had been executed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts since the Revolutionary War (191). Kent and Radin argue that Lizzie's class and gender didn't save her, but that the prosecution's weak case did. Brown believes that Lizzie's money allowed her to work with town officials to ensure the outcome of the trial.

13. Quoted in Ann Schofield, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe: History, Feminism, and American Culture,” American Studies 34 (1993): 98-99. Subsequent references to this text will be included parenthetically.

14. On the “romance” side, Schofield lists Agnes de Mille's 1948 ballet “Fall River Legend,” Jack Beeson's 1967 Lizzie Borden: An Opera in Three Acts, Evan Hunter's 1984 Lizzie Borden: A Novel, and Elizabeth Engstrom's 1990 novel Lizzie Borden. Those works demonstrating the “feminist quest” include Sharon Pollack's 1981 play Blood Relations and Carter's “Fall River Axe Murders.”

15. Linda Hutcheon, “The Postmodern Problematizing of History,” English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 367.