Psychoanalysis on Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

She gave her Father forty- one

One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time, right up there next to the Jack the Ripper murders, is the Borden double homicide. On August 4th, 1892, a hot, muggy day in Fall River, a prominent member of the community, Andrew Jackson Borden, and his wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, were killed in their home. The lead suspect in these grisly murders was Mr. Borden's youngest daughter by his first wife. Lizzie Borden was portrayed as a cool, calculating woman who killed her father and stepmother for financial gain and because she harbored a well-hidden hatred for the woman chosen to replace a mother she never knew.

For over one hundred years, people have speculated as to her guilt or innocence. There have been arguments on both sides of the fence, some citing the fact that Lizzie--which was her christened name, not Elizabeth--never cried or showed any emotion over the death of her father, whom she supposedly looked up to, and her stepmother. Others have pointed the finger at Bridget Sullivan, the live-in maid, John Vinnicum Morse, the uncle of Lizzie, and even Emma, Lizzie's quiet, unassuming older sister. Lizzie herself pointed to an unknown assailant who may have broken into the house, hidden in the closet, run upstairs to kill Mrs. Borden, hidden again in the closet, and run out again to kill Mr. Borden as he lay on the couch. However, this seems highly unlikely as there are no bloody footprints to signify an unknown assailant, no indication that anyone had been in the front hall closet, and no possible way that assailant could get past Bridget, who was cleaning the windows on the ground floor that morning. The only possible suspects are Bridget and Lizzie, and it was the latter who had the greatest motive for wanting to see

her father and stepmother dead. Today, there are several psychological theories that show the reason why Lizzie would commit such a heinous crime and will be explained in detail later in this essay. The ultimate purpose of this information is to demonstrate how Lizzie, and Lizzie alone, killed her parents in a final act of defiance against parents who caused her mental harm throughout her young life.

On the morning of August 4th, 1892, Mr. Borden left the house at 9:30 to go about his daily routine. He was director of one bank, sat on the board of three others and was supervising the construction of the Andrew J. Borden Building, a monument to himself and the wealth he had gained throughout his life. He would return to the house at approximately 10:45 that morning. Meanwhile, his wife, Abby Borden, was going about her dusting. These facts are uncontested and have been reported and confirmed by various witnesses. It is the remainder of the testimony that is in debate. According to Bridget, she was not asked to wash windows until at least 9:30 where Lizzie contests she saw Bridget filling a bucket with water and leaving by the side door at 9:05 (Radin, 1961: 220). At sometime between 9 o'clock that morning and 10:30, Mrs. Borden was killed via 18 whacks with a hatchet to the head in the guest bedroom on the second story (Kent, 1992).

At around 10:45, Mr. Borden returned. Lizzie, who saw her elder father enter the house, helped him to the sofa where he lay down, his legs dangling over the edge of the too-short sofa. At some time between 10:50, when Lizzie left him, and 11:12, when Lizzie found him, he was killed, also with a hatchet to the head (Radin, 1961: 221). Contrary to the popular rhyme, there were only 10 gouges to the head of Mr. Borden (Kent, 1992: xiii).

Born on July 19, 1860, Lizzie Andrew Borden was the third child born to Andrew Jackson Borden and his wife Sarah Anthony Morse Borden (Hoffman, 2000: 38). They had two other daughters, Emma Lenora and Alice Esther, the latter having died at the age of two (Hoffman, 2000: 28). Just before Lizzie turned three, Sarah died, leaving twelve-year-old Emma in charge of raising her younger sister (Hoffman, 2000: 38). Lizzie enjoyed a relatively unremarkable youth in Fall River. "After all, in the 1890s in staid, Victorian New England, what little excitement there was was more likely to take place around the waterfront's roughhouse bars, not in the reserved parlors of the upper class" (Kent, 1992: 15). Her father did finance a "Grand Tour of Europe in 1890" (Hoffman, 2000: 38) for her thirtieth birthday (Radin, 1961: 33). She was a prominent member of charity organizations including the Women's Christian Temperance Union (Radin, 1961: 45). While there was very little tenderness or affection in Lizzie's home life, one instance shows her love of her father, despite his miserly ways. In her junior year, she gave her father a gold ring as a token of her love for him (Hoffman, 2000: 38). Mr. Borden was still wearing that ring upon the occasion of his death (Radin, 1961: 33).

There have been dozens of book written on the subject of Lizzie Borden and her inexplicable killing of her father and stepmother. In Pearson's book, "Trial of Lizzie Borden", the author denounces the defense throughout the novel in its attempt to show Lizzie's innocence. Pearson praises the prosecution and even dedicated his book to Hosea Knowlton, the prosecutor in the Lizzie Borden trial. It was Pearson's opinion that Lizzie was guilty and he went to any lengths to demonstrate this to his readers. He ridiculed the people of Fall River in their sentimentality when Lizzie was formally arrested for the murders of her father and stepmother. "Such waves of emotion, inspired by prejudice or ignorance, more usually follow a conviction on the capital charge" (Pearson, 1937: 40). He referred to the church party who supported Lizzie as "clerical busybodies" and "hirsute pastors" (Pearson, 1937: 40) in his attempt to discredit any supporters of Miss Borden. It is easy to degrade someone after death, as Pearson had done in his own completely prejudiced account of the trial and the subsequent acquittal of Miss Borden. Pearson based his information mainly on the Fall River Globe, a paper that today would be equivalent to the National Enquirer. He edited testimony by omitting it throughout his trial book. He argued that it was greed that caused Lizzie Borden to kill her father and stepmother. It was quite possible that that was the case, despite Pearson's tilting of the evidence in his book (Kent, 1992: xiv).

Mr. Borden was a tight-fisted gentleman. His father was a fish peddler and "... [he] seems to have set out deliberately