If Looks Could Kill

by Mary Elizabeth Naugle

First published in October/November, 2004, Volume 1, Issue 5, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

Even if looks could kill we would still be arguing about the Borden case. It seems that everyone sooner or later returns to Lizzie’s likeness with the famous question, “Is this the face of a fiend?” But the problem is that everyone sees something different. Whether we go by descriptions by friends or reporters of the time or by the responses to her photograph by modern case enthusiasts, her face is never the same. She seems to have had many faces then, and even now her photos don’t hold still. Each viewer sees someone different, as if the portraits have become inkblots in a forensic Rorschach test. 

Not only beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is guilt.

Putting aside the pressing questions of guilt and beauty, simple facts are in dispute. No one was quite sure of the color of Lizzie’s eyes and hair, but everyone had an opinion and those judgments differed widely. Her hair and eyes becomes a virtual color wheel. Here is a tally based on the newspaper accounts gathered from The Lizzie Borden Society Forum archives, The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook and Leonard Rebello’s Lizzie Borden: Past and Present:

Hair

Light—1
Red or Reddish—4
Nut-brown—3
Light Brown—1
Medium Brown—3
Dark Brown—1
Black—2

Eyes

Gray—2
Greenish or Blueish Gray—2
Blue—1
Brown—1
Dark—1 [1]   

Nut-brown is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “of the colour of a ripe hazel-nut.” In case you don’t have a ripe hazelnut handy, the definition concludes with “reddish brown.” The various browns and reds are understandable: sunlight might bring out red highlights; a hat (which she invariably wore), or a window shade, might block the sun and darken the effect to a dark or medium brown. The extremes of light and black are harder to explain; likewise the Boston Daily Globe’s courtroom description of “nut-brown” one day and “glossy black” the next (Sourcebook 206, 214). Did Lizzie resort to the bottle? Surely not. Ladies don’t color their hair. Either people’s impressions are faulty or Lizzie was part chameleon.

The varied reports of her features are not confined to color alone. Her forehead is described as both high and low; her lips as both full, “thick,” and “thin, almost bloodless.” Again, these characteristics should remain constant. Foreheads can’t be raised and lowered like flags; collagen injections were unheard of in the 1890s. Somehow, her observers saw what they wanted to see—down to the slightest detail.

On some things reporters could agree. Most found the general impression of her face to be plain to downright homely. However, they nearly unanimously refer to her “glossy” and “abundant” hair as her best feature and the upper half of her face as attractive, singling out her “lustrous eyes,” “sensitive” tilted nose, and “pretty,” “delicate” ears for praise. The lower half of her face is generally considered her downfall: her cheekbones too “prominent,” her cheeks drooping jowls, her jaw brutally deemed the “largest . . . I ever saw on a woman” by sketch artist Louis Grant (Rebello 236). Of her form and movement, they seemed to agree that she had the carriage of a lady and a generally agreeable figure, though they do note considerable weight gain between the crime and the trial (just as reporters do now with Martha Stewart). This aspect is immortalized by the Boston Herald, which reports that Bridget Sullivan “is fond of saying that she scarcely knew Lizzie Borden when she saw her in court the first day, she has grown so fat. Evidently, as the district attorney would say, prison fare is better than the routine of mutton, cold soup, cookies and green peas she used to get in her cheerless hole in Fall River” (Sourcebook 248). 

So much for the question of beauty. What interests us most is the question of guilt. First, those who find the face or form of a fiend.

Probably the most emphatic of these descriptions comes from the Rockland Independent, which sees a “dull heavy mouth” whose “expression was not so much firmness and dogged determination as it was eternal hatred to all who stood in her way.” It concludes that “she has simply a face, which, analyzed closely. . . is utterly devoid of human color” and eyes whose “expression is something terrifying. They are eyes that (?tend) and devour, and force unwary on to their destruction [sic]” (Rebello 236).

Lizzie’s uncle Hiram Harrington describes her to the Fall River Herald as “haughty and domineering with the stubborn will of her father and bound to contest her rights.” He further remarks that she is “of a repellent disposition” and “sulky.” The mayor of Fall River commented on Lizzie in the Evening Standard that her “manner is cold, at times absolutely frigid” (Rebello 230-231). A similar impression is conveyed by Julius Chambers of Collier’s: “She has a cold, gray eye, thin, almost bloodless lips and is wanting in personal attraction of any kind” (Rebello 231). 

Finally, a recurring refrain in the negative press is the reference to a disturbingly masculine nature. This may be taken as a hint at lesbianism or as an attempt to reveal a nature sufficiently masculine to commit a crime no man wanted to believe a woman capable of. So the New York Daily Tribune finds that despite “small and delicate” ears and “sensitive” nose,

That which makes Lizzie Borden’s coarse face [sic] and all that leaves it possible for her to have committed this crime are the lower features—the mouth, the cheeks, and the chin. Her face is wide and full. It seems to possess little mobility, and it indicates the possession of a sort of masculine strength that one does not like to observe in the face of a woman. But looked at anywhere else, she is seen to advantage. . . . Nobody would pick out Lizzie Borden for the fiend incarnate she must be if the indictment at issue is credible (Rebello 234).

The New York Herald concurs: “She is a masculine looking woman with a strong, resolute, unsympathetic face.” It finds that even “Her voice has a peculiar guttural harshness” (Rebello 229).

This view persisted to the end, when the nurses at Truesdale Hospital told a reporter “she was a woman of decided opinions and will, more masculine in appearance and ways than feminine” (Sourcebook 334). One can’t help wondering if her perceived masculinity lay merely in her outspokenness, an attribute still deemed masculine in the 1920s. But then, today, we have a less exalted view of the female sex: we don’t need to believe a woman is unwomanly to commit a messy murder.

Nevertheless some, by contrast, found her distinctly feminine. A quote from an unknown newspaper reports the startled remark of a female newcomer to the courtroom: 

“Why, she is a lady.” That was an interesting exclamation. The prisoner is far from good looking, so heavy is the lower half of the face. Yet there is about her that indefinable quality which we call ladyhood. She is said to be generally thought of throughout the country as a brawny, big, muscular, hard-faced, coarse-looking girl. She is, in fact, . . . of the average build, and in demeanor is quiet, modest, and well bred—from a country rather than a city point of view (Sourcebook  269).

Indeed, Lizzie must not have been completely devoid of female charms, for she gradually won over many of her reporters. Joe Howard, of the Boston Daily Globe, began with a decidedly bad impression of the defendant. Although he compliments her clothing and coiffure, he observes, “her wide-apart eyes had an unpleasant stare. Her cheeks, which are over full, hang down below the line of . . . an obstinate and stubborn chin” (Sourcebook  203). Yet Howard became one of her most enthusiastic champions, who would write with unabashed sentimentality of 

the palefaced, dumpling-bodied little woman, who rose with the lark that she might enjoy her pork and beans this morning, and who stood for a moment at her window that the breezes from buzzards bay might fan her troubled brow this afternoon, and who now, after a peaceful day, has folded her hands to rest (Sourcebook  256).

Apparently, in some cases, first impressions may be overcome. By the time of her acquittal, Howard seemed ready to number her among the saints. Howard is not alone in being won over by close observation of the defendant. Others begin with negative statements that become positively—positive. For example, Julian Ralph of the Fall River Herald, writes “In repose hers is a dull and lifeless looking face. When she smiles or laughs it is [a] bright and sensitive countenance, but her evidences of pleasure and humor are very effervescent. Always in a minute she casts off all traces of what stirred her, and her face becomes once again a dull heavy mark [sic]”   (Rebello 235).

The Boston Daily Globe likewise changes horses in midstream, beginning with an apparently unflattering portrait that gradually waxes sympathetic:

. . . her cheek bones are so prominent that the lower part of her countenance is greatly overweighted. . . . Her cheeks are very plump, and her jaws are strong and conspicuous. Her thick, protruding lips are pallid from sickness, and her mouth is drawn down into two very deep creases that denote either a melancholy or an irritable disposition. She is no Medusa or Gorgon. There is nothing wicked, criminal, or hard in her features. Her manner in public has often been described as if she were callous, or brazen (emphasis added). It was not so to-day (Sourcebook  206).

The day of the famous swoon the Boston Globe once again turns a bad impression on its head, beginning, “Of a phlegmatic nature she sits like a graven image by the hour, except for the motion of the hand which plies the fan. . . . in the main it is only her eyes that she moves. These reveal her intelligence and the activity of her mind” (Sourcebook  214). Finally the writer presents the swoon: 

She had fainted, but with no theatricalism. With the same undemonstrativeness that is her peculiarity she had yielded to more than she could endure. One thing is certain, she has no art. Another is that her conduct is as consistent with innocence as with guilt (emphasis added) [2].

This view of Lizzie the martyr cropped up in the sympathetic press from the time of the funeral to the verdict. (The unsympathetic press began to concentrate more on the circumstantial evidence than on her appearance.) For example, at the funeral, the Boston Herald, which notes “Her Personal Charms,” claims that her eyes,

ordinarily flashing [How could they know?], were dimmed, and her pale face was evidence of the physical suffering she was undergoing. . . . To sum up, Miss Lizzie Borden, without a word from herself in her own defence, is a strong argument in her own favor” (emphasis added) (Sourcebook  14). 

The Fall River Herald agrees: “Nothing in her manner would indicate that the finger of suspicion was pointed toward her, although it was easy to see that the burden of grief she was carrying was heavy” (Sourcebook  28). A year later Howard worries that 

Lizzie looked pale. She not only looked pale, but felt pale. [?] The strain upon her nerves has been steadily uninterrupted now for nearly a year, and that combined with a lack of customary and needed exercise. . . has unquestionably produced an effect upon her nervous system, the outcome from which her friends and physicians regard with unfeigned apprehension (Sourcebook  244).

The motto here seems to be, “I suffer; therefore I am innocent.”

In the end, I think we can draw very few conclusions about Lizzie’s guilt based on descriptions or photos. She is simply too likely to become that which others expect or want to see. We can form a clearer picture of the face she presented to the world, a face that is probably no more nor less elastic than our own, depending on our moods and circumstances. In short, we can form a picture that is human—for good or ill or both. 

Unless, of course, we decide she was not human, but a sort of chameleon, as the Boston Herald implies in its description of her reception of the verdict: “Then, like lightning, a purple cast spread all over her face,” but after burying her face in her handkerchief to sob with relief, “when she showed her face again it was blue” (Sourcebook  263).

NOTES: 

1. Breakdown of sources for hair and eye color:

HAIR—

Black Hair:

Boston Herald: “wealth of black hair” (Sourcebook  14).

Boston Daily Globe: “glossy black hair” (Sourcebook  214–the day after pronouncing it nut-brown).

Dark Brown Hair:

Joe Howard of Boston Globe: “dark brown” (Sourcebook 203).

Medium Brown Hair:

DeMille: “brown” (26).

Evening Standard 30 Aug. 92: “medium brown. . . fine and exceptionally glossy” (LAB Society Forum).

Rockland Independent: “brown, neither dark nor light” (Rebello 236).

Light Brown Hair:

Pearson: “light-brown” (82).

Nut-Brown Hair:

Kent: “nut-brown hair” (93).

Radin: “nut-brown or auburn tinged” (38).

Boston Daily Globe: “beautiful, fine, nut-brown hair, soft and glossy to a degree” (Sourcebook  206).

Red:

Lincoln: “. . . until it turned the mousy brown I remember in her later years it was red, and in her day red hair was considered ugly, a misfortune to be pitied.” (37).

Sullivan: “reddish hair” (20).

Brown: “She had red hair and a temper to match. . . .” (54).

Spiering: “dark reddish hair” (5-6).

“Light”

Ambiguous term used in jail register (http://www.frpd.org/images/lizzie/arrestbk1.jpg).

EYES—

Dark Eyes:

Boston Herald: “dark, lustrous” (Sourcebook  14).

Brown Eyes:

Boston Daily Globe: “large, brown eyes” (Sourcebook  206).

Gray Eyes:

Collier’s: “cold, gray eye” (Rebello 231).

Evening Standard: Nance O’Neil—“gray eyes” (Sourcebook  345).

Blue and Mixed Eyes:

Rockland Independent: lists 3 opinions: “blue”, “blueish gray”, and “greenish gray” (Rebello 236).

 2. This description tallies with a description in Ruth Bodwell’s interview of a friend after Lizzie’s death: “Even under the stress and strain of her life she would laugh when pleased like a child, a bubbling care-free laugh, that forced others to laugh out of joy with her” (Rebello 321).

The artless view is contradicted by Julian Ralph of the Fall River Herald: 

It had been said in these reports that this young woman has no art. That is a mistake. She has shown little weaknesses and her own conceptions of what she ought and ought not to do under the given circumstances. These are seen in trifling ways. . . . Whenever the lawyers who oppose her come to the subject of blood stains and the discussion of the gory details of the murders, she hides her face in her hands. But when her own lawyers take up the same subjects of inquiry, she keeps her head up and her eyes bright and tries not to miss a word of what is said.

At first it was thought she could not endure the horrible topic, but enough time has passed to show that it depends upon who discussed it (Rebello 234-35).

Works Cited

Brown, Arnold R. Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter. Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1991.

de Mille, Agnes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1968.

Fall River Police Department: Lizzie Borden’s Hometown PD. 1 Oct. 2004 <http://www.frpd.org/lizzie/photos.htm>.

Kent, David. Forty Whacks: New Evidence in the Life and Legend of Lizzie Borden. Emmaus, PA: Yankee Books, 1992.

Kent, David. The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook. Boston: Branden Publishing Co., 1992.

Lizzie Borden Society Forum archives 6 June 2004. 1 Oct. 2004 <http://lizzieandrewborden.com/archive.htm>.

Lincoln, Victoria. A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight. NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. 

Pearson, Edmund. The Trial of Lizzie Borden. NY: Doubleday, 1937. 

Radin, Edward. Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1961.

Rebello, Len. Lizzie Borden: Past and Present. Fall River: Al-Zach Press, 1999.

Spiering, Frank. Lizzie: The Story of Lizzie Borden. NY: Random House, 1984.

Sullivan, Robert. Goodbye Lizzie Borden. Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1974.