Lizzie Borden and Victorian Madness

Whether or not you’re familiar with all the historical details, chances are, you’ve encountered this ditty:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks,
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

Behind this nursery rhyme is an intriguing story, one that sheds light on the meaning of madness in Victorian America.

Lizzie Borden was a 32-year-old matron living in upper-middle-class comfort in Fall River, Massachusetts. One August day in 1892, her stepmother and father were brutally murdered in the home she shared with them. When no other suspects could be found, accusation fell on her. She was in the house at the time of the murders, which took place over the course of two hours. Nothing was stolen, and no other person was seen entering or leaving the home.

The trial that followed was sensational, with a “Dream Team” of high-priced lawyers defending Borden using every trick in the book. Borden won her case but ultimately lost in the court of public opinion. Most people would conclude that she did indeed kill her parents.

From the start, Americans wondered why, if Borden had indeed committed the horrible hatchet murders (the nursery rhyme “ax” is a bit off here, and the number of “whacks” was also much lower), then why?

Among the speculations was the issue of insanity. From the start, her defense told the jury that such a horrible crime could only be accomplished by “an insane person or a fiend.” And Lizzie, they said, was not insane.

Many thought otherwise. Wrote the Boston Advertiser at the time, “It is an open secret in police circles that the government officers believe that Miss Borden was insane at the time of the murders.”

The idea that a person who “presented” as sane could temporarily become homicidal was one theory. Rooted in a popular psychiatric concept of “monomania,” this theory claimed that an otherwise sane-acting person could develop a crazed fixation on one singular thing, becoming so consumed that they could act violently on it. Was Borden psychotically fixated on doing harm to her parents?

Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, with his murderous fixation on the white whale, was understood as betraying monomaniac behavior.

Others brought up the “female” disease of “hysteria.” Literally meaning “wandering womb,” the diagnosis of hysteria was commonly deployed against unruly women in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ever more elaborate theories about the “primitive” and “uncivilized” nature of women emerged. Especially dangerous was the idea of menstruation-caused madness. As one noted criminologist of the time put it, “Menstruation may bring women to the most terrible crimes…in many cases even to murder.”

During the trial, the issue of menstruation briefly came up. But the prosecution chose to not go there. Victorian propriety seemed to shield this middle-class woman from the charge of period-induced insanity.

The prosecution still settled on a gender-based attack. Lizzie, as a woman, was said to be uniquely capable of evil. As a prosecutor claimed in his remarks to the jury, what women “lack in strength and coarseness and vigor, they make up for…in cunning, in dispatch, in celerity, in ferocity. If their loves are stronger and more enduring than those of men…their hates are more undying, more unyielding, more persistent.”

The defense leaned on gender, too. But they did so in an opposite way. How, they asked, could a prim and proper (read: white) woman commit these crimes, especially if not afflicted with madness? An attorney asked the jury, “Gentlemen, as you look upon her you will pass your judgment that she is not insane. To find her guilty you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it?...[H]ave you seen anything that shows the lack of human feeling and womanly bearing?”

The jury sided with the defense. Lizzie was free to buy a nice house in the rich section of town, where she lived out her days.