SOURCE: Langlois, Janet L. “Andrew Borden's Little Girl: Fairy-Tale Fragments in Angela Carter's ‘The Fall River Axe Murders’ and ‘Lizzie's Tiger.’ Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 192-212.

[In the following essay, Langlois discusses narrative similarities in Carter's stories about Lizzie Borden.]

INTRODUCTION

Angela Carter's works are new to me.¹ Although I had seen the 1984 film, The Company of Wolves, I had not read her “Little Red Riding Hood” rewrite on which it was based until recently. Although I have used Robert Coover's and Ann Sexton's revisions of literary Märchen in my courses on “Folklore and Literature,” I had never assigned students any of Carter's tales until recently. I wonder now at my own resistance. Letting go and reading her short story collections has catapulted me, somewhat late, into Angela Carter fandom. I am particularly intrigued with her apparent move away from literary fairy tales, represented in her classic 1979 The Bloody Chamber, toward other narrative forms in her later collections, notably her 1985 Black Venus (published in 1986 in the United States as Saints and Strangers) and her 1993 American Ghosts & Old World Wonders.² “These stories, written late in Angela's life, are about legends and myths and marvels, about Wild Western girls and pagan practices,” notes Susannah Clapp in the introduction to this last story collection (ix). Carter sensed this “move away” herself when she told Anna Katsavos in a 1988 interview, “I've noticed a very definite shift in my works, a most definite shift” (15).³

In one sense, reasons for this shift are not difficult to see. Critics have remarked that, in her earlier work, Carter's goal as a writer lay in contextualizing the literary Märchen she drew upon, often to expose their underlying patriarchal foundations. Mary Kaiser sums up what she calls Carter's “deuniversalizing of fairy tale plots” in The Bloody Chamber: “Situating her tales within carefully defined cultural moments, Carter employs a wide-ranging intertextuality to link each tale to the zeitgeist of its moment and to call attention to the literary fairy tale as a product, not of a collective unconscious but of specific cultural, political and economic positions” (35). Cristina Bacchilega extends Kaiser's apt perception by regarding Carter's intertextual rereadings/rewritings of fairy tales as implicit criticism of monologic readings that disregard multiple folk and literary versions and their various social contexts. For Bacchilega, Carter's complex postmodern rewriting is “fairy-tale archaeology” that recuperates (in a good sense) these absent generic/gendered voices (50-70).

Although Bacchilega sees Carter's work in The Bloody Chamber as focusing more on narrative genealogy than on historical accuracy per se (61), I am not surprised that Carter turned eventually to rewriting American and European historical accounts and legends as these are narrative forms already contextualized by definition. When Salman Rushdie writes in his introduction to the 1995 collected short stories, Burning Your Boats, that the later stories “eschew fantasy worlds; Carter's revisionist imagination has turned towards the real, her interest towards portraiture rather than narrative” (xiii), he notes Carter's trajectory out of Märchen and into legend. He reinscribes Jacob Grimm's often-quoted 1844 statement that “The fairy-tale flies, the legend walks, knocks at your door; the one can draw freely out of the fullness of poetry, the other has almost the authority of history” (qtd. in Dégh 72).

In another sense, however, reasons for Carter's ostensible shift from “the fullness of poetry” to “almost the authority of history” must be perplexing to critics who value the writer for just those qualities she apparently left behind in her later works.⁴ In response to interviewer Anna Katsavos's question, “What sort of games do you most enjoy playing with the reader?” Carter answered in part that “I'm doing it less, actually, because I have less time. … I find myself thinking much more simply because I'm spending so much time with a small child” (Katsavos 15). Notwithstanding the very real parenting issues facing her, I sense that Carter's pragmatic response might be amplified in theoretical ways. My project here, then, is to explore some of her later, “simpler” stories that resonate with and around History.

Rushdie comments that some of the best stories in these later books are portraits, “portraits of Baudelaire's black mistress Jeanne Duval, of Edgar Allan Poe and of Lizzie Borden” (xiii). Perhaps because both Carter and I have been drawn to American women who “took an axe …” and carved their way into a certain historical consciousness (Langlois), I focus here on the portrait of Lizzie Borden, who may or may not have murdered her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Although, for some years before her own death in 1992, Carter was considering writing a novel about Lizzie Borden, for whatever reason, whether for practical constraints on her time or for reasons of philosophical/critical position, the short stories, “The Fall River Axe Murders” and “Lizzie's Tiger,” rather than that (unwritten) novel, are the texts before us.⁵ Earlier versions of both stories appeared in 1981,⁶ but “The Fall River Axe Murders” was technically the first to be published, for it appeared as the last story in Black Venus in 1985 (reprinted in the 1995 Burning Your Boats) and as the first story, somewhat altered, in Saints and Strangers in 1986 (SS hereafter). Published in American Ghosts & Old World Wonders in 1993, “Lizzie's Tiger” was also reprinted in 1995.

“THE FALL RIVER AXE MURDERS”: THE HOUSE ON SECOND STREET

Both versions of “The Fall River Axe Murders” present such a realistic picture of the day of the murders, 4 August 1892, that readers might accuse Carter of paraphrasing somewhat too closely the casebook studies that document the famous event.⁷ Historical accuracy per se appears uppermost. Historical sources confirm, for instance, that it was a scorching day in the New England mill town. Carter's British version begins: “Hot, hot, hot … very early in the morning, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers under the attack of white, furious sun already high in the still air” (300). Her American version amplifies: “Hot, hot, hot. Even though it is early in the morning, well before the factory whistle issues its peremptory summons from the dark, satanic mills to which the city owes its present pre-eminence in the cotton trade, the white, furious sun already shimmers and quivers high in the still air” (SS 9).

Writer Rikki Ducornet, who has written one of the few critical pieces on this short story, highlights this particular image as informing the rest of the story to follow: “At the story's center, the sun's vortex gyres” (37). The summer heat wave marks the contrast between this story and the crystalline winter scenes sharply etching Carter's Märchen such as “The Bloody Chamber,” “The Company of Wolves,” “The Snow Child” and “The Werewolf” (Bacchilega 36-38, 59). It anchors the story in social realism, in the quotidian stink of bodies: of workers' bodies sweltering in the heat of New England mills, of mill owners' bodies (and those of their wives, daughters and servants) sweltering in Victorian cultural codes. Yet, in the passage quoted from the American version, Carter's allusion to Blake's prophetic vision of the Industrial Revolution hints at her “reformist imagination” at work, positioning Lizzie Borden, a mill owner's daughter, at the nexus of social, political and historical forces but in league with the devil.

Both versions of the story layer stifling historic detail upon detail.⁸ Carter focuses on the Borden house, for example, “narrow as a coffin” (301; SS 10) and as airless on that too-hot morning when family members will wake sickened by food tainted by the heat: Lizzie, a thirty-two-year-old spinster still living in her miserly father's house (her older sister Emma, also a spinster, is gone visiting); her father, Andrew Jackson Borden, the entrepreneur and patriarch; her hated stemother, Abby Durfee Borden; John Vinnicum Morse, her deceased mother's brother on a visit; and Bridget Sullivan, their Irish housemaid and cook. (Dis)located on Second Street in the “flats” down among the middle-class Irish residents near the town's business center rather than up on the “Hill” where Fall River's Yankee elite lived and the Bordens' social standing would have allowed them to reside (Robertson 363-68), the house stands as mute testimony to the family's dysfunction. Carter notes accurately: “One peculiarity of this house is the number of doors the rooms contain and, a further peculiarity, how all these doors are always locked. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages” (304; SS 13). Details pile up and are caught in the early morning before the murders occur. The story is as still and oppressive as the day, the house and the characters themselves. The story is plotless because it stops before it can build to narrative. It is literally a “Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide,” the first title under which “Fall River Axe Murders” was published in 1981. It exemplifies, in an ironic way, Jacob Grimm's comment that legendary material is more “fettered” than Märchen “but more home-like” (qtd. in Dégh 72).

The Borden house, “cramped, comfortless, small and mean” (302; SS 10), appears the very antithesis of the castle in “The Bloody Chamber”: “The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its spiked gate …” (117). Carter echoes this contrast when the narrator accurately notes that Lizzie had a chance to leave the narrow house in “the sweating months of June, July and August” when “few of their social class stay in Fall River” because she “was invited away, too, to a summer house by the sea to join a merry band of girls.” But Lizzie, enmeshed, refuses the offer: “… but, as if on purpose to mortify her flesh, as if important business kept her in the exhausted town, as if a wicked fairy spelled her in Second Street, she did not go” (302; SS 10; my emphasis). Yet the incremental repetitions of “as if” pull the domestic space of Victorian house and the Märchen world closer together for Lizzie, the omniscient narrator and the reader alike in what must be a typical Carter tease.

Carter reiterates the triply-closed system of the Borden house, Lizzie's prospects, and the story frame when the narrator refers to a European tour Lizzie had taken two years earlier in 1890 with other “girls” who would not marry: “It was a sour trip, in some ways, sour; and it was a round trip, it ended at the sour place from where it had set out. Home, again: the narrow house, the rooms all locked like those in Bluebeard's castle. …” (314; SS 28; my emphasis). This allusion also opens up intertextual references to the Märchen world in the parallel space of simile; it aligns the Bordens and those unhappy families “never more than one step away from disaster” that Carter saw depicted “in the traditional tale, no matter whence its provenance.” It specifically links the Bordens' case to those fairy tales that offer “evidence that even widely different types of family structure still create unforgivable crimes between human beings too close together” (Carter, The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book xviii-xix). And it indicates that “The Fall River Axe Murders,” as so many traditional tales before it, ends “at the sour place from where it had set out,” a situation Ducornet recognizes in the short story's multiple levels of circularity and enclosure (37-39).

That these embedded fragments of the fairy tale Carter ostensibly left behind indicate her fusion of the fantastic and the everyday must come as no surprise to Carter aficionados who have long acknowledged her propensity towards magic realism (Kendrick). Yet how she plays out the idea that Jacob Grimm had already noted a century and a half ago that Märchen and legend could “by turns … play into one another” (qtd. in Dégh 72) is a process worth attending to more closely. Agreeing with Walter Kendrick's assessment that she “suspends time, lets murderer and victims sleep, while she ponders, digresses, speculates … broods over the legendary house at 92 Second Street, Fall River,” I argue that “The Fall River Axe Murders,” “a bizarre amalgam of tale and essay, delicacy and grossness,” becomes a meditation on the liminal spaces between these genres (66).

Carter speculates on different ways one might “Märchen-ize” Lizzie Borden's story, in mirror imagings of Bacchilega's and Kaiser's readings of her historicizing literary Märchen in The Bloody Chamber. She does this through focusing on portraiture, as Rushdie noted. “The Fall River Axe Murders” contains many verbal portraits of Lizzie, some complementing, others contradicting each other. The pivotal first portrait presented, like that of the stifling Second-Street house discussed above, builds on historical detail; it concentrates on what Lizzie will wear that hot, fateful day; it depicts her through action strangely static because set in the future tense:

On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock—but, under that, went a long, starched cotton petticoat; another short, starched cotton petticoat; long drawers; woollen stockings; a chemise; and a whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly. She also strapped a heavy linen napkin between her legs because she was menstruating.

(300-01; my emphasis)⁹

From this point, however, Carter presents two divergent lines of possible representation. The one she considers first is the grass-roots, folk or popular depiction of the legendary Lizzie that segues from the description above: “In all these clothes, out of sorts and nauseous as she was, in this dementing heat, her belly in a vice, she will heat up a flat-iron on a stove and press handkerchiefs with the heated iron until it is time for her to go down to the cellar woodpile to collect the hatchet with which our imagination—‘Lizzie Borden with an axe’—always equips her, just as we always visualize St Catherine rolling along her wheel, the emblem of her passion” (301; SS 10; my emphasis). The ubiquitous children's folk rhyme, the epigram which heads both versions of the short story and whose first line Carter quotes above, is simple and illustrative.¹⁰ It positions Lizzie as murderer and, through the polishing effect of repeated transmission, it hones down the voluminous Borden case documentation to the “emotional core” of elemental family conflict—a daughter's “whacking” her parents to death.¹¹ Carter's apparent writerly digression, while cataloging family members in the house on 4 August, only highlights the emblematic qualities of this time-polished (re)visioning:

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.

(302; SS 10)

Ducornet reads Carter's story, in fact, as an emblem book for Anger, summer heat transmuted into Passion; she writes that “Lizzie is emblematic and exemplary; she is reduced to sign—the ax she carries within her grinding madly,” in a pun literalizing the folk metaphor worthy of Carter herself (37).

Here, Lizzie's story takes on the patina of Märchen, an emblematized form itself for many folktale scholars.¹² I think that Carter, who would have appreciated the current fate of “the doomed house”—opened as The Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in August 1996, a piece of cultural tourism still scripting the legend (“Inn Cold Blood”; Witchel)—may have been thinking of a once-favorite quote from Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville: “There are times when reality becomes too complex for Oral Communication. But Legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world” (qtd. in Katsavos 12). Godard echoes Jacob Grimm's observation that “As the fairy tale stands related to the legend, so does legend to history …” (qtd. in Dégh 72).

Carter clearly supports these “legends of people,” to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Bruce Kapferer, for she accepts the basic premise that Lizzie did it, as did the working classes of Fall River who “viewed the case as yet another example of the rich literally getting away with murder” (Robertson 362). She does not accept what Kapferer calls “myths of state,” in this case the official verdict of acquittal of a good, Christian woman of high social standing in the June 1893 trial, a “myth” or verdict supported by jury, judges, journalists and others, including suffragettes of the day (who, however, with other elites, ostracized Lizzie once the trial was over) (Robertson 362). She eschews the underlying mythic narrative operating at the trial for both prosecution and defense with somewhat different inflections: the fate of Lizzie as a “damsel in distress,” a heroine of romance who could not have committed such brutal crimes, or, at least, not easily (Jones 221-22; Robertson 391-416).¹³ She also disregards other voices, contemporary and current, that develop alternative theories of who might have killed the Bordens if Lizzie did not.¹⁴ In this respect, she reverses the process of recuperating multiple voices in literary Märchen but, in doing so, gives credence to a folk voice.

Then, Carter turns from the emblematic legend of “Lizzie Borden with an axe,” “with which our imagination always equips her,” to the second line of representation with which our imaginations have not dealt so easily: why she killed (Schofield 92-93). The narrator, in discussing why all the doors, inside and out, were locked in the Bordens' house, accurately reviews a burglary that predated the double murders by several years and that has been seen by many as a prelude to them. The burglar took Mrs. Borden's jewels, then urinated and defecated on the Bordens' bed. Andrew Borden, “a man raped,” nonetheless, stopped the initial police inquiry and locked the doors, a clear sign to current scholars, but not to contemporary observers, that he thought it an inside job; most agree that he knew or suspected that it was Lizzie herself who was also a kleptomaniac and may have had “hysteric spells” close to her menstrual periods like her mother had before her (304-06; SS 16-17). At the time of the burglary, Mr. and Mrs. Borden were away from the house; Emma and Lizzie were at home. The narrator muses:

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.

(304; SS 13; my emphasis)

Yet the rest of the “The Fall River Axe Murders” resonates with imagining just what Lizzie Borden did on her own to bring her to parricide. Carter broods over this “blank page” and constructs portraits of Lizzie that are not unsympathetic and which address feminist debates both about her own writings and about the Lizzie Borden case (Altevers, Bacchilega, Duncker, Jones, Kaiser, Robertson, Schofield). Feminist critics have read Carter's treatment of locked-up women in different ways. Her focus on the Bordens' locked house and on the restrictive clothing Lizzie will wear seems to confirm Patricia Duncker's broader critique of Carter's stories in The Bloody Chamber that she ultimately reinforces gender stereotypes, despite her innovative prose techniques, by choosing “to inhabit a tiny room of her own in the house of fiction. For women, that space has always been paralysingly, cripplingly small” (12). But for Mary Kaiser, Carter's representations are culturally and historically sound because they accurately present women's conditions in the time periods portrayed in her stories. And for Ann Schofield, “The Fall River Axe Murders” is one of a small body of twentieth-century fiction dealing with the Lizzie Borden story as a feminist quest, one that “portrays Lizzie Borden as an individual oppressed by historical circumstances and struggling to break free of social restraints,” one that simultaneously breaks free of gender stereotypes itself (95-96).

Regardless of the positions taken, the critics above might agree that Carter plays with the dialectic between constraint and freedom for women in some complicated ways as the story draws to its close. Part of this play involves an intricate overlay of the Märchen world with that encased in 92 Second Street, Fall River, in a much more specific and focused way than earlier. The short story spirals back to its beginning with an extended description of Lizzie sleeping in her locked room, the room she loves, “a pleasant room of not ungenerous dimensions, seeing the house is so very small,” on that hot morning before she rises and dresses in the first portrait discussed above. In its privacy, she is wearing “a rich girl's pretty nightdress, although she lives in a mean house, because she is a rich girl too”: “The hem of her nightdress is rucked up above her knees because she is a restless sleeper. Her light, dry, reddish hair, crackling with static, slipping loose from the night-time plait, crisps and stutters over the square pillow at which she clutches as she sprawls on her stomach, having rested her cheek on the starched pillowcase for coolness' sake at some earlier hour” (309; SS 23).¹⁵

“Sleep,” the narrator tells readers, “opens within her a disorderly house” (310; SS 24). Her “nightdress rucked up above her knees” and her hair “slipping loose from the night-time plait” suggest a lessening of restrictions/constrictions in the dream world of sleep. Yet “her room is harsh with the metallic smell of menstrual blood” (309; SS 24). Carter seems to superimpose the image of the vampiress's blood-flecked nightgown in “The Lady of the House of Love” from The Bloody Chamber over this bedroom scene, and so disrupts Lizzie's harmless sartorial attempts to offset her father's conflicted Victorian codes and shifts her towards butchery (195-209). Rushdie notes this double (con)fusion of menstrual and murder victims' blood, and of historical personage and dramatis personae of fairy tale when he writes, “Beneath the hyper-realism, however, there is an echo of The Bloody Chamber; for Lizzie's is a bloody deed, and she is, in addition, menstruating. Her own life-blood flows, while the angel of death waits on a nearby tree” (xiii-xiv).

Intertextual references to The Bloody Chamber move so dangerously close to the story's surface now that its still waters writhe with the bloody storm that is to come. Carter takes two extensions of the portrait of Lizzie sleeping, her actual photograph and her image in a looking glass, and breaks their surfaces with fairy-tale shards. In the first instance, the narrator asks readers to imagine finding a surviving daguerreotype of Lizzie Borden: “If you were sorting through a box of old photographs in a junk shop and came across the particular, sepia, faded face above the chocked collars of the 1890s, 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” (315; SS 29; my emphasis).¹⁶

In the second instance, narrator and readers watch Lizzie watching herself in her bedroom mirror:

There is a mirror on the dresser in which she sometimes looks at those times when time snaps in two and then she sees herself with blind, clairvoyant eyes, as though she were another person.

“Lizzie is not herself, today.”

At those times, those irremediable times, she could have raised her muzzle to some aching moon and howled.

At other times, she watches herself doing her hair and trying her clothes on. …

She is a girl of Sargasso calm.

(315; SS 30; my emphasis)

In both instances, Carter sets up a dual image—Lizzie as the wolf in fairy tale, Lizzie as an ordinary person—that opens up the “disordered house within her” despite locked room and choked collar. The overt reference to “Little Red Riding Hood” conditionally connects Lizzie's story, not to the literary fairy tales of Perrault and Grimm, but to Carter's three dark rewrites in The Bloody Chamber: “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice,” whose richness, complexity and subversion Bacchilega reveals in her analyses (50-70). Lizzie is in the company of wolves. She, perhaps, has most in common with the female characters in “The Werewolf” who seem to be “sheep” (grandmother and granddaughter in their respective, appropriate feminine roles in a harsh economy) but are hidden “wolves” (the grandmother a were-witch, the granddaughter her possible killer who prospers in a most masculine way) (Bacchilega 59-62). Ducornet writes that Lizzie “is in fact a werewolf ruled by the moon” whose “anger has made her supernatural” and who literally “cuts loose” from her “coffin house” by hacking its occupants to death (39). Cara Robertson, in assessing cultural representations of Lizzie at her trial, notes that the economic imperative—to fall heir to her father's fortune kept from her while he was alive—is an obvious motive not, however, recognized by either defense or prosecution, who could not fully accept that “the angel in the house” might also be “the madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert and Gubar). Carter's reference to Jean Rhys's rewriting of Jane Eyre from a viewpoint sympathetic to the madwoman (“a girl of Sargasso calm”) suggests just this association, however.¹⁷

It is this sympathy for the “wolf” in Lizzie, not its condoning but its understanding, that ties “The Fall River Axe Murders” to “The Company of Wolves.” Bacchilega argues that the latter rewrite draws on the folk traditions that werewolves were melancholy creatures to be pitied as well as feared (62). “The Fall River Axe Murders” focuses near its conclusion on an incident presented as the immediate cause for Lizzie's flailing out against her parents: her father butchers and her stepmother eats in a pie the pet pigeons that were her only consolation. “At home all was blood and feathers.” Although “she doesn't weep, this one, it isn't her nature, she is still waters, …” she picks up the axe her father used and remembers (316; SS 30-31). Feminist critics, Joan N. Radner and Suzanne Lanser, draw on a remarkably similar story, Judith Glaspell's 1917 “A Jury of Their Peers,” in developing their analysis of women's folk coding as strategies within patriarchal discourse. In Glaspell's story, farmers' wives decode signs of a neighbor woman's disordered kitchen, including a dead canary in its cage with neck wrung, as evidence that she is the one who has killed her abusive husband. Their husbands, acting as sheriff and deputy, do not see these signs; the women remain silent, complicitous, empathetic in allowing the farmwife her probable freedom (1-3). So, perhaps, for Lizzie.

Lizzie, who is “the wild card” in the Borden house (314; SS 29), is also something like Carter's “wild child,” Wolf-Alice. Both are menstruating and both confront their own reflections in the patriarchal mirror (Bacchilega 64-66). However, while the fairy-tale heroines'/wolves' initiations ultimately open them up to sensual and nurturing encounters in the cold winter of Carter's Märchen rewrites, no such maturation process touches Lizzie Borden, constrained in her father's house. “The Fall River Axe Murders” resolutely focuses on family dynamic and submerges sexual connection. Little Red sleeps between the paws of the tender wolf before her own transformation in “The Company of Wolves”; Wolf-Alice licks the vampiric Count into humanity; Lizzie Borden stares into the mirror where “time goes by and nothing happens” (315; SS 30). Sometimes she might howl, alone, at “the aching moon” yet her icy demeanor, noted by journalists at her trial, remains despite summer heat.¹⁸

Carter's hyper-realism and her dark ironic literary Märchen here converge on Victorian conventions of the feminine. Carter takes what Cara Robertson sees as complementary ideologies sometimes called forth and sometimes suppressed in Lizzie Borden's trial—the born criminal “who has remained animalized” (378), the female hysteric whose “duality” threatened Victorian divisions between virtuous and decadent women (386) and the periodic insanity due to menstruation making violent crime possible (387-91)—as valid explanations for Lizzie's actions. Carter, in fact, carries the prosecution's unsuccessful arguments further than the state was willing to go in assessing motivation. She suggests that Lizzie's gender-bending blood-lust might grant her freedom; her dual image might confound the mirror; her axe might break open a door on Second Street, but that “a free woman in an unfree society is a monster” (The Sadeian Woman 27).

When Robertson writes of the trial, “In a sense, the Miss Lizzie of the defense plays Jekyll to Lizzie Andrew Borden's Hyde as conceived by the prosecution” (411-15), the “Märchen-izing” of Lizzie Borden's story comes full circle.¹⁹ Not only Carter's not-so-simple versions of “The Fall River Axe Murders” but also the Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Lizzie Borden partake of “fiction” in the broadest sense. Carter's story points to the Märchen world, on the one hand, but also toward the social and narrative constructions of the historical record in the Borden case, on the other (Robertson 356; Schofield 98-101). She gives readers a concrete example of Jacob Grimm's comment partially quoted earlier that “As the fairy-tale stands related to the legend, so does legend to history, and (we may add) so does history to real life” (qtd. in Dégh 72; my emphasis).

“LIZZIE'S TIGER”: THE COTTAGE ON FERRY STREET AND THE CIRCUS TENTS

Ann Schofield makes a telling comment about “The Fall River Axe Murders” when she writes that, when it concludes “with violence summoned, Lizzie's future is left to the reader” (95). Carter does focus relentlessly on the past, probing its crevices and permutations for answers, perhaps, to the enigma of Lizzie's character and motivations. Carter's second story, “Lizzie's Tiger,” constructs a day long before the murders when Lizzie, then a four-year-old child, escapes her restrictive home, at the time a cottage on Ferry Street, to go to the circus.²⁰ It more clearly exemplifies Alison Lurie's comment that Carter “weaves intricate fantasies around historical characters” (11) as no historical documentation supports the liminal moment when Lizzie confronts a caged tiger after her own mother, Sara Gray Borden, has died and before her father marries her stepmother, Abby Durfee Borden. Although Schofield notes that “The Fall River Axe Murders” escapes the “Freudian family romance” which drives many twentieth-century reworkings of the Borden story (91-96), this second story picks up familial threads in the first which, if not distinctly oedipal, point to significant emotional experiences for its protagonists: Lizzie's mourning the loss of her mother (310; SS 23-24), her father's conflicted adulation of his youngest daughter despite his miserliness, and Lizzie's youthful recognition of her power to manipulate her father for small change (314; SS 19).

Social realism and literary Märchen interpenetrate in this second story, too, but in more subtle and pervasive ways. As the story begins, the description of the Borden cottage illustrates this muted intertexuality. Carter writes: “The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, leaned at a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurching this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and windows stuffed with old newspapers, and the snagged picket fence …” (322; my emphasis). The Borden home is located both in the worst slum area of Fall River, down near the Taunton river where the shacks of newly-arrived Portuguese and French-Canadian mill workers stand close to the mills (Robertson 366), and in the dark forest of “Hansel and Gretel.” Like the house on Second Street which Ducornet called “the gingerbread house,” punning again on Victorian architecture and the Grimms' witch's enticing dwelling (38), it embodies all the anxieties about changing family relationships, blended-family tensions and hinted-at incestuous desires with which contemporary folk tale scholars and writers have imbued the Grimms' tale.²¹ The narrator, strangely positioned somewhere between omniscient and family storyteller, only comments about Lizzie and Emma, “Such was the anxious architecture of the two girls' early childhood” (322).

Like the siblings in the fairy tale, Lizzie escapes the edible/devouring house, but only for a brief moment. She and her sister Emma, thirteen at the time and too young for all the household duties, see a circus poster “showing the head of a tiger” tacked on their fence one midsummer day (322). The poster, more symbolic than realistic because its image is stylized and fragmented, creates another place that foreshadows the alternative world of the circus (Bouissac 176-90). It draws Lizzie, stubborn as her father, out of her bed after supper and out the back door on a fairy-tale quest. As she moves alone through the cityscape to the forbidden circus, the Victorian middle-class conventions her father imposes on her, despite their impecunious living situation, fade for her. The child becomes a small, female version of the nineteenth-century aesthete flâneur, walking through the city, watching, observing and interacting in ways and in places proscribed by her father's aspirations, the gender role assigned her, and the bourgeois repression of carnival (Stallybrass and White).

Carter honors the nineteenth-century conception of the city and its spaces as she tracks Lizzie's progress down through geographic space and social class, illuminating a semiotically-charged urban landscape. “A gaggle of ragged Irish children from Corkey Row” take her to the field on the edge of town where the circus tents have been set up, and one of the boys swings her up on his shoulders since she is too small to keep up with them, foreshadowing the contact she will have with man, boy and tiger later in the evening but not again (323). Once in the big top, “a red and white striped tent of scarcely imaginable proportions, into which you could have popped the entire house on Ferry, …” she finds herself among those immigrant millworkers—Lancashire, Portuguese and French-Canadian—her father both lives in the proximity of and disdains. Within its expansive canvas walls, class, ethnic, and gender oppositions melt in carnival. “All unnoticeably small as she was, she was taken up by the crowd and tossed about among insensitive shoes and petticoats, too close to the ground to see much else for long. …” In “the frenetic bustle of the midway,” Lizzie experiences sensuous delights of smell, taste and touch which counteract and subvert her gaze (323-25). She comes under the spell of what Rushdie calls “Carter's other country”: “the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer” (xi). Carter and Lizzie revel in Bakhtin's carnivalesque “lower bodily orders.”

Following a piglet more sensuous than the snow white bird that guides Hansel and Gretel, Lizzie runs out of the big tent and beyond the circus grounds to “an abrupt margin of pitch black and silence” where the sensual landscape becomes further eroticized for her. Before she sees a couple coupling in the grass and a dwarf somersaulting across her path, she experiences the tiger trainer's lust first hand as he “took firm hold of her right hand and brought it tenderly up between his squatting thighs.” The narrator notes that although she does not mind this act of sexual abuse, Lizzie does mind when the trainer asks her for a kiss: “She did mind that and shook an obdurate head; she did not like her father's hard, dry, imperative kisses, and endured them only for the sake of power” (325-26). Juxtaposition of the tiger trainer's and Andrew Borden's kisses projects the Ferry Street cottage onto the dark spaces around the circus grounds with that breath of incest that intrigues and troubles Carter and other scholars in the Borden case (Robertson 406-09; Schofield 92-93).

A smaller tent behind the large striped tent draws Lizzie. She follows the tiger trainer to the back of this smaller tent whose pulsing “bright mauve, ammoniac reek” marks the tiger's range.²² When the narrator comments that the trainer fumbles at this tent's flap as he had fumbled earlier at his trousers, readers must guess that the tiger “burning bright” within is Blakean experience writ large. Carter makes this phallic (and paternal) connection obvious and overblown, seemingly parodying Freudians' projective readings of folktales: “The tiger walked up and down, up and down; it walked up and down like Satan walking about the world and it burned. It burned so brightly, she was scorched. Its tail, thick as her father's forearm, twitched back and forth at the tip” (328). A French-Canadian boy, there to see the tiger with his large family, has picked Lizzie up in his arms so that she, too, can see the beast despite his mother's ironic warning that Lizzie, mudstained and tousled, might harbor lice herself. When Lizzie is drawn towards the beast and the beast is drawn to the child in a way that frightens the boy holding her and that catches the attention of the raucous crowd, Carter writes, “Time somersaulted. Space diminished to the field of attractive force between the child and the tiger. All that existed in the whole world now were Lizzie and the tiger” (328).

Lizzie's encounter with the tiger thrusts readers, too, even further into alterity; they are thrown into the Märchen world of “Beauty and the Beast,” particularly into that of “The Tiger's Bride,” which I find the most openly sensual of Carter's rewritings of the ancient animal husband's tale (154-69). Both stories share protagonists: a miserly father in one, a profligate father in the other; daughters caught in commodity brokerage; and the tigers, raw sexual energy paradoxically harnessed in a cage in one and in a civilized suit and mask in the other. Both stories share the same language, especially in the attraction between girl and beast. In “The Tiger's Bride,” the girl ultimately chooses the Beast her father initially forced upon her. Naked, filled with fear redolent of “Hansel and Gretel,” she comes to the Beast: “Nursery fears made flesh and sinew; earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment. The beast and his carnivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction” (168). The tiger crawls towards her; “the reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house” and prove her “as if” offer valid. “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs” (169).

Bacchilega's reading of “The Tiger's Bride” as subversion of a patriarchal order, itself subverted by Beauty's moment of hesitation, is particularly apt when applied to “Lizzie's Tiger” (95-102). If “The Tiger's Bride” “liberates women only partially within a genre which … is often used to constrain gender” (101-02), then how much less liberating is Lizzie's story (first published in Cosmopolitan)? The child, constrained by the Canadian boy, by the trace of incest prohibition (if parody can be in deadly earnest), by “all the skins of a life in the world,” cannot transform completely into the Beast's feline mate although her love drew it, too, purring, on its belly towards her over gnawed bloody bones, “the serpentine length of its ceaselessly twitching tail” behind it (328-29). The narrator's “as if” musings are horribly ironic in this case, in the light of the axe murders to come: “It was … as if this little child of all the children in the world, might lead it towards a peaceable kingdom where it need not eat meat. But only ‘as if’” (328).²³

Crack! The spell broke.
The world bounded into the ring.

(329)

The tiger trainer's whip as he jumps into the cage signals his confrontation with the tiger and his mastery over it, in what Paul Bouissac sees as the basic semiotic text of the circus act (90-107). Yet, as psychoanalytical readings of fairy tales prepare us (Carter seems to take them straight as the story draws to its finale), both characters can be seen within circus ritual, meant to confuse the human and the animal, as aspects of the same familial/familiar person writ large (Bouissac 108-22). “Then he placed one booted foot on the tiger's skull and cleared his throat for speech. He was a hero. He was a tiger himself, but even more so, because he was a man” (329). For a moment, tiger/man re-establishes the fearful rule of the patriarchal father. When the French-Canadian boy tries to kiss Lizzie on the forehead before he sets her down, her shouts break her cover and the crowd recognizes her because she is “the most famous daughter” in the whole town: “‘Well, if it ain't Andrew Borden's little girl! What are they Canucks doing with little Lizzie Borden?’” (331). Lizzie Borden is caught in a way the heroine of “The Tiger's Bride” is not; she is still “daddy's girl” (Bacchilega 73).

The story ends with the freedom of circus and carnival dissipating, with the child Lizzie doomed to return to the succession of Victorian gingerbread houses which will ultimately bestialize her. For she will take back to the Ferry Street Cottage and to the house on Second Street “the sudden access of enlightenment” she gained as the tiger trainer spoke of his control of his cats: “I have established a hierarchy of FEAR … because I know that all the time they want to kill me, that is their project, that is their intention …” (330-31). “Her pale-blue Calvinist eyes” will take on the qualities of the “flat, mineral eyes of the tiger” (328). As she hugs the family cat, Miss Ginger Cuddles, as she climbs “kitten-like” (322) into her father's lap to ask for money, she will remember that “‘The tiger is the cat's revenge’” (330). Like the nineteenth-century women labelled as hysterics by Freud and his predecessors, she will internalize the frenzy of carnival until, repressed, it will return 4 August 1892 in an individual, bloody act of resentment (Stallybrass and White).²⁴

In “Lizzie's Tiger,” Carter takes up what Bouissac has called “the link between children and the circus” in the Western tradition (122) and makes further links to the Märchen world of “Hansel and Gretel” and “Beauty and the Beast,” possibly two of the most-discussed fairy tales in the western canon of children's literature. The intricate linkage holds possible sexual abuse and father-daughter incest just below the surface of Lizzie's story, however. And Carter seems to ask readers to consider the implications of such family dysfunction and sexual tension whether in childhood fantasy or experience, a question haunting readings of her works, literary Märchen, psychoanalytic and social work literature still.

CONCLUSION: MAPLECROFT ON THE HILL

Although Carter's stories about Lizzie Borden are quite different from each other, my analysis has focused on what seem to be Carter's similar narrative strategies in both; she spins out intertextual Märchen threads in both stories to lead protagonist and readers momentarily and paradoxically out of closed cultural, historical and literary frames into the more open spaces of “once upon a time” or “as if,” and then she shuts the door. We, as readers, are caught in a dialectic “archi‘text’ure” that encloses in “The Fall River Axe Murders” and that runs at oblique angles in “Lizzie's Tiger.”²⁵

I can only imagine a third story about Lizzie Borden that Carter might have written had she lived. It would have been about Lizzie's life after her acquittal. She and her sister Emma bought a thirteen-room mansion that stood on “the Hill” on French Street in the upper-class section of Fall River with part of the quarter of a million dollars inherited from their father's estate. Lizzie, who changed her name to Lizbeth, named the house “Maplecroft” and lived there until her death in 1927, despite the probably appropriate social ostracism she endured. What Joyce Williams calls “the only extant expression of what Lizzie wanted,” the house has many windows that looked out “in marked contrast” to the hovel on Ferry Street and to the narrow house on Second Street. At Maplecroft, Lizzie actually had two bedrooms—one for winter and one for summer—and the front (winter) bedroom extended the width of the house with eight windows (Emma took a small interior bedroom that might have been slated as a maid's room) (Williams 233-39).

I imagine that Carter would pull readers once again into contemplating this new short story about Lizzie and “The Lady of the House of Love” as intricate palimpsests. In the latter story, “the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house” with “her own suite of drawing room and bedroom” (195) as Lizzie might have in her spacious rooms. Yet the Countess opens up “the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom” and “light and air streamed in” as signs of her self-annihilating love for the innocent British soldier (207). Lizzie's open windows, allowing sun-lit reflections on the chandeliers and crystal within, seem to give evidence of her conflicted feelings about her parental homes (Williams 233) and of her own self-construction (Jones 232-33).

No such story will be written, yet Maplecroft itself stands as an emblem of Carter's postscript to The Sadeian Woman: “History tells us that every oppressed class gained true liberation from its masters through its own efforts. It is necessary that women learn that lesson …” (151). That Lizzie Borden had to learn that lesson through the probable murder of her father and stepmother suggests that she has become “one of the dark ladies [with] unappeasable appetites to whom Angela Carter is so partial” (Rushdie xi).

Notes

1. I thank writer Anne Finger and our student Mary Kathryn Keith who indirectly introduced me to “The Fall River Axe Murders” and colleagues Andrea di Tommaso, Ross Pudaloff and Anca Vlasopolos for their allusive help. I also thank Cristina Bacchilega, Kathleen Manley and Danielle M. Roemer for their introducing me to “Lizzie's Tiger” and for their bibliographical information, critical comments and support.

2. All collections (except Saints and Strangers) have been republished together in 1995 as Carter's Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. All page references will be to this edition unless otherwise noted.

3. In all fairness, I may be taking Carter's statement somewhat out of context. The shift to which she refers may be read as a move from the more “speculative fiction” of her earlier novels to that of “a kind of down-to-earthness” in the short stories in The Bloody Chamber. It may also be read as a move from a certain complex verbal game-playing in the Märchen to the more “simple” narrative structures of her later collections (Katsavos 14-15). The first reading contradicts the argument being presented here; the second complements it.

4. Judging by the far greater number of critical pieces on The Bloody Chamber and by Rushdie's statement that this collection is Carter's masterwork (xi), I conjecture that such critics' responses may correspond to the general devaluing of legendary forms in comparison to Märchen in much folk narrative scholarship.

5. Clapp writes, “The stories are quite different; both are characteristic. Taken together, they show what a fine, fierce book we might have had” (xi). Rushdie echoes her sentiments: “One hankers for more; for the Lizzie Borden novel that we cannot have” (xi).

6. An earlier version of “The Fall River Axe Murders” appeared as “Mise-en-Scène for a Parricide” in the London Review of Books in September 1981; a version of “Lizzie's Tiger” was first published in Cosmopolitan in September 1981, and broadcast on Radio Three in Britain (Carter, Burning Your Boats 461).

7. Although a number of case studies were published in 1992, the centennial year of the Borden murders (Kent, Rappaport, Ryckebush), studies by Pearson; Spiering; Sullivan; and Williams et al. would have been available to Carter earlier.

8. Hereafter, the first page number will refer to the version published in Carter's Burning Your Boats, the second to the version published in Carter's Saints and Strangers (SS). Significant differences in quotations will be noted in the text or in endnotes.

9. The version in Saints and Strangers is similar but more didactic. It reads in part, “On this burning morning when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on rising, don a simple cotton frock that, if worn by itself, might be right for the weather …” (9).

10. The full text reads:

    Lizzie Borden with an axe
    Gave her father forty whacks
    When she saw what she had done
    She gave her mother forty one.

    (300; SS 7)

    I learned it with a slightly different first line: “Lizzie Borden took an axe.” Although most evidence suggests that Abby Borden was killed first with nineteen blows to the head and then Andrew Borden with ten, the rhyme reverses the sequence and exaggerates the number. At present, I have not located further information on the provenance of the rhyme.

11. Allusions to the rhyme abound in scholarly and popular book and article titles. Ann Schofield's “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe: History, Feminism and American Culture” and David Gates's “A New Whack at the Borden Case” are examples.

12. The concept of Märchen as emblem is represented by Lüthi, but other European scholars of folk narrative have recognized possible shifts in local legends to a more polished fairy-tale form, what Swedish folklorist Carl von Sydow characterized as a migratory legend. Lüthi notes that the violence, destruction and mutilation of legend is transmuted and stylized in fairy tale, and so it is a relief for listeners and readers to turn from the former to the latter; fairy tale empties legend of reality and fills it in altered stylized form (83-94). Cara Robertson uses the term in a slightly different way when she writes, “For Fall River and most of America, the murders became emblematic of the perils of foreign immigration, social disorder, or feminine transgression” (352).

13. Interestingly enough, Ann Schofield characterizes a number of twentieth-century fictions about the guilty Lizzie Borden falling into the same romance stereotype (91-93).

14. Bristol Community College in Fall River hosted a centenary conference 3-5 August 1992 in which participants discussed theories concerning the case, including those which variously put Bridget Sullivan, John Vinnicum Morse, Emma Borden, a Portuguese immigrant and others in the murderer's seat. See Ryckebush. Karen S. H. Roggenkamp asks questions that Carter does not: “I'm also interested in how Borden's modern reputation came to be formulated. It would seem to me that most people, if they know of Borden, think she did in fact kill her father and stepmother. … My own work has concentrated on the journalistic casting of the Borden trial, and if we can trust those at all, the VAST majority of people CLEARLY believed in Lizzie's innocence—the journalists most certainly did. … So how did a heroine of 1893 become a dark folk figure in a rhyme?” As noted in the text, Robertson documents coverage in Fall River's Irish popular newspaper, The Daily Globe, for its anti-Borden sentiment.

15. In the British, but not the American version, the narrator ironically interpolates “Look at the sleeping beauty!” before this passage (309).

16. Such photographs exist as part of the collection of the Fall River Historical Society. While writing this, I am looking at a reproduction of a portrait photo circa 1890 (Robertson 354).

17. I am, of course, referring to Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Deutch, 1966). Carter's portrait of Lizzie Borden comes close to that of Jeanne Duval in her Black Venus in which she highlights the Afro-Caribbean woman's enclosure in Baudelaire's apartment in Paris with the windows painted over (231-44).

18. See my analysis of “Lizzie's Tiger” for a discussion of possible incestuous relations between Andrew Borden and his daughters.

19. William R. Espy writes that “A Jekyll and Hyde is a person who is alternately completely good and completely evil. In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the gentle and proper Dr. Jekyll discovers a potion by means of which he can change himself into the monstrous Mr. Hyde and back again. He is ultimately trapped in the Hyde personality” (140).

20. This is one point where Carter's historical accuracy fails. Lizzie, born in 1860, would have been four years old in 1864 in the middle of the Civil War. Carter positions the time period some ten years earlier: “In another ten years' time, the War between the States would provide rich picking for the coffinmakers, but, back then, back in the Fifties, well—” (321). The Bordens did live on Ferry St., however, until they moved to Second Street in 1871 when Lizzie was eleven years old.

21. Bruno Bettelheim reads “Hansel and Gretel” as a warning against a child's regression to the oral stage of development and a fixation on the mother as he/she works towards maturity (159-66) while social historian Robert Darnton sees it, with other tales, accurately reflecting starvation issues and multiple marriages in early modern Europe (9-72). Anne Sexton in Transformations (101) and Robert Coover in Pricksongs & Descants (see 75) each develop probable incest themes projected into the arena of food and eating metaphors in their rewrites. To my knowledge, Carter has not rewritten this tale in any of her literary Märchen collections.

22. The position of the tiger's tent, accurate for the layout of typical traveling circuses, also marks a deepening of illicit pleasure as it has something in common with the “back rooms” of bars, bookstores, video stores, etc.

23. With one of Edward Hick's paintings of “The Peaceable Kingdom” before me, I cannot believe that Carter was not playing on the double entendre of the verb “to lie down with” in Ezekiel: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them” (11.6). Lizzie leading, rather than the Christ Child, is Satanic reversal indeed.

24. It may be significant that one of the contested etymologies for “carnival” is “farewell to the flesh.”

25. I lift the term “archi‘text’ure,” most appropriate for the fusion of cultural space theory and textual production, from the title of a conference on feminist texts to be held at Emory University in the spring of 1998.

Works Cited

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