Letter to the Editor, August 2007

by Neilson Caplain

First published in August/September, 2007, Volume 4, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

May 12, 2007

Dear Hatchet:

At long last I have discovered why Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother. It was not lust for Pop’s money and it was not hate for the hag he chose for his second wife. Nay, neither of those two. She was driven to it by, of all things, tight corsets.

Remember this was in high Victorian times. In the late eighteenth century tightly laced corsets were needed to attain the stylish hour glass figure. This made breathing a problem. The liver, lungs and stomach were brought to a diseased state. It was almost impossible to bend over and touch the floor. Many years before a New York newspaper wrote, “a crusade for the abolition of such torture would be a blessed work.” 

Lizzie conformed to the fashions of the time. An article in the Fall River Herald News reported that Lizzie came to a store dressed in “Paris fashion, a trifle anomalous in her well corseted figure. In the novel “Burning Your Boats” Angela Carter wrote that under her frock Lizzie wore starched petticoats, long drawers, a chemise and a whalebone corset that squeezed her belly as in a vise. In “Lizzie Borden,” Elizabeth Engstrom said of one day that it was blazing hot and Lizzie was forced to loosen her corset.

On the morning of August fourth Lizzie dressed in the usual fashion.  

Lizzie felt sick.  The rooms were wretchedly hot, close and airless. Lizzie was distraught. Her corsets painfully squeezed her body so that she could scarcely breathe. She could stand it no longer. She exploded in frenzy, grabbed the axe, stumbled her way up the stairs, and struck poor Abby not once but yet again and again.

She dispatched Andrew in similar fashion. The police came and Lizzie sought relief. She was escorted by friends to her room where her corset was unlaced to relieve her distress and her return to normalcy.

Sincerely,

Neilson Caplain