Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in August/September, 2006, Volume 3, Issue 3, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
Lizzie Borden is typically described as a “spinster.” She lived in an era in which that was the normal, accepted term for an adult woman who had never married.
In our contemporary world, we have many single women but very few who are spinsters as the term was used in Borden’s day. We have swinging singles (though this term may be on its way to passé status), career women (ditto due to its lack of a male equivalent), just plain singles (the least problematic expression), and lesbians (“out,” closeted, and unconscious). We also have proud virgins of both genders who have made the talk show rounds and dared audiences to hurl that despised epithet—“sexually repressed”—at them. We even have those who apply the term spinster or “old maid” to themselves—but they do so ironically, as a member of a racial or sexual minority might use a despised fighting word for him or herself.
The word spinster carries connotations that are no longer applicable to the vast majority of modern unmarried women. The linguistic roots of the word associate it with domesticity. Deborah J. Mustard, writing in The Journal of Media Psychology, states that the word “spinster” derives from the way “the thankless task of spinning cloth had been pushed off to unmarried women as a way to earn their keep in the home.”1
Words like “pushed” and “thankless task” unfairly indicate that this work was undertaken reluctantly or is especially onerous. Spinning was valuable work that did indeed enable the spinners to “earn their keep in the home.” While some of those who spun to contribute to the household economy undoubtedly experienced this work as sheer drudgery, others must have found satisfaction in it, as do modern people who undertake it as a pastime.
Another reason the word spinster has fallen out of favor is that it carries a connotation of celibacy obviously inappropriate to our many single mothers or their childless but often sexually active counterparts. Partly because of its association with sexual abstinence, the word spinster evokes many opposing qualities: loneliness, envy, eccentricity, and sexual repression on the one hand and selfless service and purity on the other. The word nun has both light and dark associations in even more exaggerated form.
Conversely, the male counterpart of spinster, bachelor, connotes neither celibacy nor self-sacrifice. Bachelors are often seen as happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care, and virile. The primary negative characteristic popularly ascribed to them is that of irresponsibility.
Lizzie Borden, who had no career and held no paid job outside the home, can be seen as a domesticated sort of spinster, although she does not appear to have been a spinner of fabrics. Defense attorney ex-governor George Robinson appealed to the ideal of domesticity that he believed the jury shared when he tried to defuse the prosecution’s point about her opportunity to commit the crimes:
In the first place, they say she was in the house in the forenoon. Well, that may look to you like a very wrong place for her to be in. But it is her own home. I suspect you have a kind of an impression that it would be a little better for her than it would be to be out traveling the streets. I don’t know where I would want my daughter to be, at home ordinarily, or where it would speak more for her honor and care, and reflect somewhat of credit upon me and her mother (who is my wife, I want to say), than to say that she was at home, attending to the ordinary vocations of life, as a dutiful member of the household, as belonging there. So I do not think there is any criminal look about that. She was at home.2
Lizzie claimed she was indeed going about the ordinary business of her life at the time the crimes were committed. She said she had started a mundane domestic chore—that of ironing her handkerchiefs—when she made a trip to the barn to give the flats time to heat.
One of the chief mistakes modern-day commentators make in evaluating spinsters of the past is assuming that the unmarried state was not the individual woman’s own choice but the result of a neglectful or financially struggling family failing to make a match for her. Ann Jones in Women Who Kill presumes that Lizzie was frustrated by her single status and that her tour of Europe was a husband-hunting trip that failed: “Lizzie was no Consuela Vanderbilt or Jennie Jerome: she returned reluctantly without a lord.”3
However, it is important to realize that the aspects of life skipped by old-fashioned spinsters—romance, sex, and motherhood—are all two-edged swords. Psychologically healthy women may have chosen to forego them in past times just as they often forego one or two or all of them today.
The joys of romantic love are well known, as are its tensions, traumas, and heartaches. Women’s experiences of sex are profoundly mixed and, especially in past times, they often regarded it not as a source of pleasure but as a marital chore or even something akin to a minor operation. Moreover, before the 20th century, childbirth was extremely dangerous and birth control unreliable, making marriage high-risk for women. The joys and satisfactions of motherhood are incomparable but its burdens can be equally so: the ceaseless crying of a baby, endless diaper changes, the toddler who gets into everything, and the everyday struggles of disciplining children and straightening out their fights. Children can be a source of extraordinary pride but they can also be the cause of the bitterest disappointment.
Perhaps in part because of their freedom from the particular responsibilities and risks that married women have traditionally experienced, spinsters have quite a record of achievement in public life. Jane Austen wrote several magnificent novels that are part of our Western canon. Emily Brontë penned Wuthering Heights, a classic novel of poetic brilliance. Florence Nightingale modernized and professionalized nursing. Susan B. Anthony campaigned for more legal rights for women and became particularly famed for her work on behalf of extending them the vote. Like the vast majority of people, Lizzie Borden did not possess the special talents of the aforementioned women, but she appears to have put much of her abundant free time to constructive use.
As was typical of Victorian spinsters, at least of the upper class, Lizzie did not seek paid employment or prepare for a career. However, that does not mean that she and other similarly situated women were idle. She was a reliable volunteer worker in the Central Congregational Church that she regularly attended. She taught Sunday school. Leonard Rebello in Lizzie Borden Past & Present quotes a news item as saying, “She was given a class of rough, untutored boys and labored with them until her courage was almost gone and then she was given some girls to teach. Also connected with the church is a Chinese Sunday school and Miss Lizzie took one of the men to instruct. She had good success and her pupil has since left Fall River.” A member of both the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Fruit and Flower Mission, Lizzie served as treasurer of the former organization and secretary of the latter for a year.4
Less is known, however, about how Lizzie’s older sister Emma, also a spinster, spent her time. Emma does not seem to have had a record of social and charitable work similar to Lizzie’s. It is possible that she busied herself by helping Abby and Bridget with domestic chores or that she spent much time in needlework or reading. It is also possible that Emma possessed a personality that required little stimulation and was content to while away the hours in meditation or prayer or that she enjoyed a rich life of the imagination that was unknown to others.
The appellation “spinster” comes with dark associations and Lizzie has not escaped them. Spinsters are often depicted as unattractive and sometimes as envious, perhaps because a common reason for remaining single, especially in past eras, was indeed the inability to find a suitable mate. Today, traditional spinsterhood also conjures up images of sexual repression and frustration as well as women aching for romance. Since spinsters are not mothers, there is often a suspicion that they suffer a thwarted maternal instinct.
A classic example of the ugly duckling, romance-starved spinster as depicted in popular culture is Bette Davis playing Charlotte Vale in the 1942 film Now, Voyager. When we get our first sight of Charlotte, her appearance is that of the stereotypical spinster. She is wearing a frumpy dress and clunky shoes, has her hair in an unflattering bun, and is constantly wringing her hands and failing to look at people directly.
Photographs of Lizzie are familiar to all Bordennites of normal vision. They do not show a beauty nor someone especially unattractive. Her hair is pulled back but that was the standard style of the time period so no personality inferences can reasonably be drawn from it.
The character Charlotte is an adult living in an affluent household without a career or job. Her life appears as that which Jones depicts the life of an upper-class spinster as being, one of aimlessness and boredom. Writing specifically of Lizzie, Jones stated, “She tidied up her own bedroom, mended her own dresses, ironed her own hankies . . . She read magazines and the newspaper and sometimes a letter from a friend.” Jones elaborates in a manner designed to suggest that ennui led Lizzie to violence: “ . . . neither career woman nor society matron, [she] had none of the joys of work—or of ostentation. . . . Lizzie Borden’s life was all of a piece; for she was nothing but Andrew Borden’s daughter, a woman whose life was apparently without the possibility of an event.”5 Jones suggests that Lizzie’s dissatisfaction with her supposedly constricted life led her to commit the famous double murder.
The Evil Spinster
Whether or not Lizzie’s possible frustrations ever boiled over into violence will probably remain a source of controversy, but it is indisputable that the frustrations of some spinsters did lead to horror. In her fascinating book, Victorian Murderesses, Mary S. Hartman discusses the case of Célestine Doudet in France.6 In June 1852, widower and homeopathic doctor James Marsden left his five young daughters in the care of governess Doudet, a 34-year-old spinster. When he hired her, Marsden confided a secret: some of his daughters engaged in what was then regarded as a terrible vice, that of masturbation. This was at the height of masturbation hysteria when the practice was believed to lead to an array of ills and, most hideously, that girls who indulged in it were fated for the brothel. Would Mlle. Doudet try to break them of this habit? She promised she would.
Marsden gave Doudet the money to set up her Paris apartment as a little boarding school for the Marsden girls. The doctor lived in another town and visited occasionally. During one of his lengthy absences, he married for a second time.
The physician believed he had left his children in good hands, as Doudet enjoyed a reputation for piety. She also came highly recommended. She had lived in England for a time and had been wardrobe mistress to Queen Victoria when the monarch was trying to improve her French. Hartman quotes the queen as writing, “I consider Mademoiselle Doudet an excellent person, of mild disposition and amiable character . . .”7
However, a close examination of her life before being employed by Marsden discloses hints of a problem. Hartman reports that a relative of her previous employer said that Mlle. Doudet had become upset when his nephew put his arm around his niece as they were reading. The grandmother of the Marsden girls claimed Mlle. Doudet once confided that while she worked for the Queen, Prince Albert had made improper advances to her. Thus, Hartman concludes that Doudet possessed a negative trait often associated with spinsterhood: “she appear[ed] to have developed the morbid fascination with sexual matters characteristic of many persons whose circumstances deny them socially sanctioned sexual expression.”8
The case came to public notice in 1855 when Doudet stood trial for causing the death of one of the Marsden girls and abusing the other four. Doudet’s defense was that the deceased child had died of whooping cough. She also said that Marsden had told her to inflict some of the punishments she had performed on the girls and that injuries that prosecutors attributed to her mistreatment were actually caused by the children’s masturbation. At least some of the torments Doudet practiced on the children were in fact Marsden approved: he had used corporal punishment to curb their supposed vice and also tied their wrists and ankles to the bed so they would be unable to masturbate. Doudet followed suit. Like many people of the time, Marsden believed restricting meat from the diet would help depress passions. However, Doudet took this one dangerous step further, harshly restricting food of all sorts and keeping them on diets that caused rapid weight loss.
At trial one of the girls “testified that if they made the slightest movement in their beds at night, their vigilant governess would order them stand with bare feet on the cold floor and arms outstretched. . . . the girls remained in this position until they begged for mercy or collapsed.” Mlle. Doudet apparently also made a habit of rubbing soap around the girls’ eyes, hitting them in their chests, and stamping on their feet until they were bloodied and swollen. Hartman observes, “These punishments appear to have had a special purpose: Célestine Doudet was taking no chances that the physical signs attributed to masturbation should be absent. These procedures were surely employed to produce the emaciated, deformed bodies, puffy eyes, and tender feet believed characteristic of those addicted to the vice. Especially disturbing in this regard was the testimony of the girls that their governess had tied a rough cord between their legs and forced them to wear it for days at a time, thereby creating the inflamed areas which provided telltale evidence for the examining physicians.” It was believed at the time that there would be obvious signs of “self-abuse” on the genitals.9
Doudet was acquitted of causing the death of her young charge but convicted of abusing the others and sentenced to prison. She served three years. Hartman notes that she was often perceived as a kind of “monster spinster.” Her horrible cruelties were the result of many things including the zeitgeist of the era, the orders of the man she worked for, sexual repression and the sexual obsession that can accompany it, as well as an evident personal sadistic streak. Prosecutors at one point tried to explain her abuses as the consequences of a love-starved spinster’s thwarted yearning for romance. They suggested that Mlle. Doudet dreamed of marrying Marsden and when he wed another woman, took her disappointment out on the children. This explanation is similar to one at least hinted at by Jones for Lizzie’s supposed violence: unable to find a husband on her European tour and frustrated at the prospect of lifelong celibacy, she took revenge on her stepmother and father, perhaps believing they should have done more to bring her out into society and contract a marriage.
The Romantic Spinster
Many popular stories about spinsters, particularly in film, portray longed-for romance coming into their previously empty lives. Now, Voyager shows Charlotte Vale transformed from her ugly-duckling persona into a chic woman as she enjoys a romantic relationship.
Similarly, there have long been rumors that Lizzie’s life was not as devoid of romance and sexuality as it, at first glance, appears to have been. One of the first such stories was made public with the notorious Trickey-McHenry Affair. On October 10, 1892, the Fall River Daily Globe carried a story by reporter Henry Trickey headlined, “Lizzie Borden Had A Secret, Mr. Borden Discovered It Then A Quarrel.”10
The secret Lizzie supposedly had was that she was pregnant. An outraged Andrew Borden violently argued with the daughter who was “in trouble” and threatened to disinherit her and expel her from the home.
Two days later, the completely fabricated story miscarried with the Globe’s retraction. It expressed sorrow that “being thus misled” the newspaper “has innocently added to the terrible burdens of Miss Lizzie Borden. So far as lies in our power to repair the wrong, we are anxious to do so, and hereby tender her our heartfelt apology for the inhuman reflection upon her honor as a woman . . .”11
While injecting romance into the life of this famous, or infamous, spinster may have started with Trickey-McHenry, it hardly ended there. Jones observes that some scenarios depicting her as guilty “find a credible motive in ‘true love’; either Lizzie wants a man but can’t get him, or has a man but (thanks to Andrew) can’t keep him, or—in suggestive Freudian scripts—has a taboo yen for Andrew himself. In one such tale she nerves herself for murder by imagining herself in the ‘hungry arms’ of her forbidden suitor, ‘his full lips seeking and finding her quivering mouth.’”12
The elderly Ruby Frances Cameron made headlines in 1984 when she asserted that a Fall River resident named David Anthony had murdered Abby and Andrew.13 Cameron claimed that David Anthony had been Lizzie’s boyfriend and wanted to marry her. Intrinsic to this theory is the perception that Andrew, and probably Abby, opposed the marriage and sought to block it.
The Repressed Spinster and the Lesbian Spinster
The idea that the lacks in a spinster’s life could drive a woman to madness has been artfully expressed in the popular media. The Haunting, in its original 1963 version, may be the most powerful film on this theme. Directed by Robert Wise, the movie opens by giving us a brief history of Hill House, a large, old mansion with a history of mysterious deaths that is believed to be haunted. Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson), an anthropologist, sets out to investigate.
Hill House’s owner insists that her nephew, a skeptical playboy named Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), accompany the anthropologist to Hill House. Dr. Markway recruits two people whom he believes to be especially sensitive to the paranormal to stay in the house when he does. One is a chic, self-confident professional psychic known only as Theodora (Claire Bloom). The other is a woman named Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris). Markway believes Eleanor is apt to be particularly sensitive to the paranormal because when she was a child her home was the object of a poltergeist attack in which showers of rocks inexplicably fell on the house for three days. Eleanor is a middle-aged spinster who conforms to the word’s stereotypes. Her hair in a low bun, she dresses in a classically bland manner. She has no job and no place of her own but sleeps in the living room of her married sister. She appears to have no romances in her past. Her invalid mother has recently died and Eleanor had spent the last eleven years, which we are given to understand is all of her adult life, taking care of the sick woman.
Eleanor appears nervous and self-conscious. She seems an odd choice for someone to live even briefly in a haunted house and, indeed, she often appears terrified. However, she does not want to leave Hill House. For all the fear it provokes in this apparently easily frightened woman, she is deeply attracted to it. She feels that being at the mysterious Hill House is “the first time something’s really happened to me,” a sentiment that reminds one of Jones’ calling Lizzie Borden “a woman whose life seemed without the possibility of an event.”
The audience often finds itself within Eleanor’s mind and hearing her thoughts. Much of the film is told from her point of view and we never know to what extent this spinster may be hallucinating, to what extent she may be infecting those around her with her own fantasies, or to what extent she is drawing supernatural forces to her.
Theo appears to harbor a secret. She speaks of a “we” in her home but is not married. At one point Eleanor calls her an “unnatural thing,” indicating that Theo is a conscious, sexually active lesbian. The possibility of lesbianism is part of the mystique of spinsterhood.
Evan Hunter wrote a novel called Lizzie in which Abby catches Lizzie in bed with Bridget and is bludgeoned to death with a candlestick as a result. The scenario is inspired by rumors that supposedly began within Lizzie’s lifetime that she was a lesbian. There is an oft-told tale that a man suing his wife for divorce on the grounds of lesbianism named her as co-respondent.
It is possible that the story is one of the many legends that have attached themselves to her. Rebello reports: “New England novelist Esther Forbes told Agnes deMille that her father, William Trowbridge Forbes, Judge of Probate Court in Worcester County [Massachusetts], had a curious case at the turn of the century, of a man divorcing his wife on charges of lesbianism. The co-respondent named in the proceeding was Miss Lizbeth A. Borden of Fall River. Judge Forbes dismissed the charge as frivolous . . .” The italics are in Rebello and he writes that this quote came from de Mille’s Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death. However, he adds in a note, “No information could be found to support the claim made in Miss deMille’s book.”14
Frank Spiering, in Lizzie, writes about a missive reproduced in his book that he claims Lizzie wrote “to a young woman.” The epistle is addressed “My dear Friend,” dated “August twenty second 1897” and signed “L. A. Borden.” The letter says, “I dreamed of you the other night but I do not dare to put my dream on paper.” She also writes, “Every time we pass your corner the pony wants to turn down.” Spiering claims the line about her dream shows “she could be explicit about her sexual longings” and seems to consider it proof positive of her gay preferences.15
The letter is no such thing. The salutation is ambiguous and one cannot know why Lizzie does not want to put the content of her dream on paper. That her dream was of a romantic or sexual nature is pure speculation. Sherry Chapman, writing in the December 2004 issue of The Hatchet, discovered that the Fall River Historical Society possesses the envelope in which this later was mailed, and that it was addressed to Mrs. Cummings, Lizzie’s dressmaker. This means that there was a warm friendship as well as a dressmaker-client relationship between the two of them. While it could indicate lesbian feelings, we cannot be certain of this reading. It should also be remembered that in Lizzie’s era, women could have lesbian inclinations, and even lesbian relationships, without being consciously aware of them.
Lizzie was a friend for a while with the lovely actress Nance O’Neil. Their relationship was rumored to be a sexual one but gossip is hardly proof.
One reason some contemporary people may jump to the conclusion that a spinster of past times was likely lesbian is that we have more awareness of homosexuality than of asexuality. The latter is a reality for many people including those who are not mental cases, serial killers, or axe murderers. A recent study by psychologist and human sexuality expert Anthony Bogaert, first published in The Journal of Sex Research and then in New Scientist, found that at least 1% of the population is asexual. In our sexually liberated time, we may also lose sight of the important fact that both women and men who have sexual feelings, even strong sexual feelings, can and do live without any sort of sexual expression.
While there may seem to be a decline in the domestic and celibate spinster, it is not accurate to conclude that they have disappeared from modern life. This writer recalls a letter to a prominent advice columnist in which the author said she was an older woman dating an older man and troubled by the man’s unusually close (but she did not indicate incestuous) relationship with his middle-aged daughter. The letter described this adult daughter as someone who lived at home with dad and “has never held a job or had a date.” This writer also had a friend who claimed to have known a family in which an adult daughter lived at home with her parents, apparently earning her keep through domestic chores, and had neither beaus nor a job. He said he found the situation “creepy,” a sentiment that might be shared by most contemporary people, at least in the West. For better or worse, unmarried adult women are, like their male counterparts, expected to be self-supporting in this culture.
One can never predict the future but it seems unlikely we will see an upsurge in the numbers of domesticated spinsters in the near future. The labor force opportunities open to women mean that their families are likely to continue to expect them, like men, to become self-supporting at adulthood. Of course, it is also possible that opportunities in the job market will dry up for both sexes. Our population is aging which means that our elderly often need more care from their adult children. These factors could lead to more adult single women, and perhaps single men as well, “earning their keep” in the parental home.
The celibate spinster may have a better chance of making a comeback. The dangers posed by sexually transmitted diseases coupled with moral concerns about abortion have led many people of both genders to reevaluate the costs and benefits of sexual activity. However, the AIDS crisis broke more than twenty years ago and our popular media’s focus remains about as sexy as ever while soap operas and drugstore novels unabatedly promote romance.
True spinsterhood as a common circumstance will probably remain a thing of the past. An antique and peculiarly eerie quality is attached to the state of being a spinster, qualities that hover over Lizzie Borden and the mystery forever bound up with her name.
Endnotes:
1 Deborah J. Mustard, “Spinster: An Evolving Stereotype Revealed Through Film,” Journal of Media Psychology 20 January 2000, California State University, Los Angeles 14 July 2006 <http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/spinster.html>.
2 Frank H. Burt, The Trial of Lizzie A. Borden. Upon an indictment charging her with the murders of Abby Durfee Borden and Andrew Jackson Borden. Before the Superior Court for the County of Bristol. Presiding, C.J. Mason, J.J. Blodgett, and J.J. Dewey. Official stenographic report by Frank H. Burt (New Bedford, MA, 1893, 2 volumes; Orlando: PearTree Press, 2001): 1645-6.
3 Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996): 210.
4 Leonard Rebello, Lizzie Borden Past & Present (Fall River, MA: Al-Zach Press, 1999): 12.
5 Jones 211.
6 Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (Great Britain: Robson Books, 1985): 85-129.
7 Ibid 88.
8 Ibid 102.
9 Ibid 111-112.
10 Rebello 163.
11 Jones 224.
12 Ibid 234.
13 Rebello 138-139.
14 Ibid 307.
15 Frank Spiering, Lizzie (NY: Pinnacle Books, 1984): 278-9.
