Denise Noeby Denise Noe
First published in November/December, 2006, Volume 3, Issue 4, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.
Former Governor Robinson, in his summation for Lizzie Borden’s defense, said, “To find [Lizzie Borden] guilty you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it?”
Anyone who has seen photographs of Lizzie Borden knows that the men of that jury did not see a great beauty when they looked at the defendant. Neither did they see someone horribly ugly. At 32, Lizzie Borden was a slightly plump woman with wide-set eyes and a softly tilting nose. She had light brown hair that she wore up in the fashion of the day.
At least one modern observer has found her appearance slightly unsettling. In an article appearing in Newsweek, Florence Brigham, who was curator of the Fall River Historical Society for many years and whose mother-in-law testified as a character witness at the trial, was quoted as saying, “I always thought her eyes looked peculiar.”
The “peculiar,” rather pale appearance of Lizzie’s eyes may have been the effect of the photography of the day. However, in his inquest testimony, Eli Bence, who claimed Lizzie had been in his drugstore the day before the murders attempting to buy a poison, described her as having “a peculiar expression around the eyes.”
Despite the perceptions of both Bence and Brigham, a commentator who saw her in the flesh found her appearance utterly inconsistent with the heinous acts of which she was accused. Journalist Julian Ralph wrote, “She is no Medusa or Gorgon. There is nothing wicked, criminal, or hard in her features.”
The assumption that an evil person should have distorted features reflecting inner depravity may be an irrational prejudice, but it is certainly a common one. Perhaps it is human nature to expect, even against all logic, to see the inner life written on the outer visage.
The Evil Visage in The Picture of Dorian Gray
That expectation, or rather the frustration of it, was developed in a fascinating manner in Oscar Wilde’s magnificent Victorian horror classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Published in 1890, just two years before the Borden murders, the novel opens in a painter’s well-furnished studio, one filled with the rich and pleasant fragrance of fresh flowers.
The mood is one of indolence and luxury as the reader meets friends Lord Henry Wotton and painter Basil Hallward. Basil has just painted a particularly handsome young man. The man is described as possessing ivory skin, cleanly delineated features with a curvy red mouth, and a head of golden curls. Both the painting itself and the attractive appearance of its subject strongly impress Lord Henry.
Basil informs Henry that the visage he so admires is that of Dorian Gray and soon introduces the aristocrat to Dorian. Henry idly remarks on how the beauty of Dorian will inevitably fade in time, with his face getting wrinkled and flabby, while the picture retains the freshness and glamour of his youth. A distressed Dorian expresses aloud the wish that it could be the other way around.
Lord Henry and Dorian become fast friends, or more accurately, mentor and pupil as the former fills the latter with the precepts of hedonism and the joys of a cynical, exploitative approach to other people.
Dorian soon finds himself enamored of a lovely young actress. Her name is Sybil Vane. She works in a low-rate theater but her talents shine despite the deficiencies of her co-workers. The naturalness with which she inhabits a variety of characters, bringing them to life on the stage with her utterly plausible simulation of their personalities and emotions, has enthralled Dorian. He considers her a true genius among thespians and shares his idolization of her with Lord Henry and Basil. They are eager to see this brilliant actress in her glory and accompany Dorian to one of her performances. She is appearing as the female lead in Romeo and Juliet. Dorian can hardly wait to see this beloved and wondrously talented woman play the part of what may be the greatest love heroine ever created. He anticipates seeing Sybil as a superb Juliet.
At the theater, Dorian finds himself dismayed and disappointed. Sybil is as lovely as ever but her performance as Juliet is flat, forced, and artificial. Her acting is unnatural and uninspired. Her recital of her lines is listless and stilted. Dorian is crushed by this display of simple bad acting.
Afterwards, a disillusioned and heartsick Dorian goes backstage to confront her. He is amazed to find her seeming almost proud of her wretched performance. Smiling and happy, she proclaims, “How badly I acted tonight, Dorian!”
He readily agrees and asks if she is sick. No, she replies. She is not sick. She is in love, really in love, and so can no longer fake love. Reality has replaced, and displaced, art for her. Sybil tells him,
Dorian, before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought it was all true. . . .The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came,—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but reflection. You have made me understand what love really is.
That understanding, she indicated, took away the power of artifice necessary for her art.
Dorian is aghast. He fell in love with Sybil because of her talent as an actress. “You have killed my love,” he tells her. He continues that he will never see her again or even think of her for without her art Sybil is “nothing.”
Terrified and heartbroken, Sybil begs Dorian not to leave her. He and her love for him are her only reality. Dorian coldly spurns her. She pleads with him to give her another chance. She promises to try to regain her acting powers and reminds him that she only gave a disappointing performance one time.
Dorian is unmoved and tells her that this is goodbye, leaving her crushed.
When Dorian returns home, he happens to take a look at his portrait. He is astonished by what he sees. There appears to be a subtle but definite alteration in the painting as there is “a touch of cruelty in the mouth.” Dorian tells himself he must be imagining things. Again and again he checks the portrait. Each time he sees that slight change, that “cruelty in the mouth.”
This leads him to some soul-searching that begins that evening and continues through the next afternoon. He concludes that, however “monstrous” it seems, the wish he had made when the painting was first finished had somehow been granted. Then he determines to turn this odd, supernatural fortune to good use. He decides that the painting will “be to him the visible emblem of conscience.” He will resist temptation and conduct himself with moral rectitude to prevent further troubling alterations to the portrait. No longer will he follow Lord Henry’s cynical, hedonistic theories.
He also realizes that the “cruelty in the mouth” reflects the truth of his treatment of Sybil Vane and he resolves to set matters right. Despite his disappointment over her performance, he will marry her. The next day, he writes a long letter to Sybil telling her that he is sorry for his mistreatment of her and asking her forgiveness. A sense of being clean and whole fills him when he finishes this epistle.
Lord Henry pays a call. He is distressed and wishes to comfort Dorian. “Do you mean about Sybil Vane?” Dorian queries and receives the reply, “Yes, of course.”
Dorian does not appear to need much comforting for which Lord Henry is glad—until he learns that the reason for Dorian’s good spirits is that he plans to marry Sybil Vane. Lord Henry informs him that Sybil is dead, an apparent suicide.
Shocked, Dorian also realizes he is not as devastated by this news as many men would be and wonders if it reflects a lack of normal feeling. He is calmed by Lord Henry’s reassurances and spends the evening at the Opera.
It is quite possible that Oscar Wilde intended Sybil Vane’s last name to be heavily and doubly symbolic. It may represent both her own vanity that could not survive a loved one’s rejection and Dorian’s, which led him to reject her and to a shallow, self-absorbed reaction to her death. It is also likely that it has the connotations of a weather vane since Dorian’s relationship with her, a relationship fatal for her, is a portent of the direction his life will take.
Dorian has accepted the supernatural reality that his portrait will take on both the signs of his aging and those of his debaucheries and cruelties. He moves the portrait into the attic to keep it hidden from other eyes.
At this critical juncture in Dorian’s life, Lord Henry leaves him a book. Wilde never names that book but tells us that Dorian found it “the strangest book he had ever read.” Wilde goes on to describe it as “a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own.” Wilde continues that it was “a poisonous book” that endlessly fascinated Dorian.
This book, coupled with the seductive cynicisms of Lord Henry, leads him to discard the initial decision to use his portrait as a kind of visual conscience and guide to good behavior. Dorian adopts a hedonistic lifestyle and ruthless, exploitive stance toward others.
Basil Hallward confronts Dorian about his increasingly blighted reputation, quoting an acquaintance as saying, ”you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.” That is enough to let the reader know that Dorian is an experienced and wily seducer, that he may have caused out-of-wedlock pregnancies and impregnated married women.
The painter continues, “Why is your friendship so fateful to young men?” He runs through a list of Dorian’s male friends, one of whom committed suicide, another of whom fled England to escape the disgrace of a sullied reputation, and others who found themselves ostracized and ruined.
Dorian then describes how one man married an unsuitable woman and another forged a friend’s name on a check and says he can hardly be held responsible for his friends’ bad choices or their vices and debaucheries.
Part of the reason for the vagueness of terms and allusions is that Wilde could not in the book baldly state one of the major “vices” Dorian was practicing—that of homosexual relations. It was Wilde’s own lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, who coined the term “the love that dare not speak its name” for eroticism between men.
Thinly veiled references to gay male preferences and behavior permeate The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian’s very name probably comes from that of an ancient Greek tribe called the Dorians and characters frequently make reference to ancient Greece.
Oscar Wilde once said that having homosexual relations in his Victorian culture was so dangerous that it was like “feasting with panthers.” It is natural to him that he would be fascinated by ancient Hellenic culture in which sexual love between men was accepted and even glorified.
Lizzie Borden’s Sexual Nature
Like Oscar Wilde and the unforgettable character of Dorian Gray that he created, the sexuality—or lack thereof—of Lizzie Borden has been the subject of much conjecture. Lizzie never married. Several years after the trial, she became friends with actress Nance O’Neil. Authors have speculated that they had a lesbian affair.
It is quite possible that they did. However, conjecture is not proof. We must also remember that unacceptable sexual feelings are often repressed and that those who have them may not even be conscious of them. This is especially true of women who may be more likely to think of themselves simply as especially “pure” if they have little or no attraction to men. Their relationships with other women may be sexual without the parties ever being aware of it.
Indeed, one difference between male and female homosexuality may be that it is far easier for women to even participate in sexual activities without knowing that they are doing so. Women who consider themselves traditionally “chaste” may sleep in the same bed, hug each other as friends, and eventually start rubbing a bit until they discover that this can lead to a very good feeling indeed. However, if they are sexual innocents who have never even heard the word “orgasm” and associate sexuality with men, they are unlikely to put the same construction that a more sophisticated person would on their private discoveries.
The Victorian era was especially apt to be a time when lesbian feelings were misunderstood or not acknowledged. While male homosexuality was the love that dare not speak its name, female homosexuality was often the love that did not know it. After all, in the same England that put Oscar Wilde in prison for private consensual homosexual activities, no woman could be prosecuted for lesbianism—the Labouchere Amendment, introduced in 1885, removed references to lesbianism from the law for fear that criminalizing the act would alert women to its possibility and thus inspire this behavior.
The situation regarding lesbian invisibility may have been slightly different in the United States but it is a certainty that its existence was something unspoken in polite company and often unacknowledged even by women whose true yearnings were in that direction.
Lizzie’s sexuality is the subject of contradiction and conjecture. There is some reason to believe that, if she were sexual at all, her sexuality included an attraction to members of her own gender. This would give her something in common with both Oscar Wilde and his fictional creation of Dorian Gray. There is a Greek connection as well since “Sapphic love,” as a term for women’s erotic love, comes from the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the ancient Greeks are well known for their approval of male homosexuality, an acceptance that led Wilde to put in many references to that culture in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Filmed Versions
The Picture of Dorian Gray has been made into a movie several times. The most famous, and possibly the best, cinematic treatment of it is the 1945 version directed by Albert Lewin who also wrote its screenplay. Hurd Hatfield stars as Dorian Gray, George Sanders plays Lord Henry Wotton, Lowell Gilmore plays Basil Hallward, and Angela Lansbury plays Sybil Vane.
While sticking fairly close to its origins, the movie makes significant departures from Wilde’s novel. One change is that the movie places a statue of a black cat, said to have been sculpted in ancient Egypt and to represent a feline god, near Dorian when he makes his fervent wish that the picture would grow old while he remains young. Thus, there is a horror-movie “explanation” for the granting of Dorian’s wish. This clever addition lends the tale an extra bit of spookiness.
Interestingly, just as the ancient Greek and ancient Roman cultures have an association with male homosexuality, ancient Egypt has an association with the eerie. The link between ancient Egypt and the supernatural is undoubtedly because no other culture put so much work into a hoped-for afterlife with its practice of mummification and its tombs built as pyramids.
Another alteration the movie makes is in the depiction of Dorian. The character in Wilde’s novel is described as having a cherub-like appearance with a head of golden curls and is often emotionally expressive. Hurd Hatfield has dark, slicked-back hair and plays Dorian with an almost complete lack of affect. Like the black cat-god, this absence of expression works to intensify the sense of horror.
One extremely significant way in which the movie differs from its source is in the reason why Dorian breaks his engagement to Sibyl Vane, a theatrical singer in this film. Lord Henry tells him to test her chastity by giving her an ultimatum, threatening to end their relationship unless she agrees to a premarital sexual relationship. If Dorian successfully seduces her, he should make the break permanent.
The change of the source of Dorian’s disillusionment from Sybil’s unexpected failure as an actress to his successful seduction of her works to obscure one of the primary themes of the story, the uneasy relationship between art and reality. However, the expression of this theme through contrastingly good and poor acting performances might have been difficult to translate from prose to the silver screen.
Overall, the 1945 cinematic The Picture of Dorian Gray is a wonderfully entertaining and exquisitely rendered motion picture. It is filmed in black and white except for the showings of Dorian’s portrait that switch suddenly to a lush color. George Sanders plays the part of Lord Henry in the oily and glib manner that he used successfully in his many world-weary roles.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that shows off the full range of its author’s brilliance. As might be expected in a book by a man who could easily be considered the King of the One-Liners, it is rich in witticisms and arresting descriptions. Lord Henry says, “The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.” The reader is told that a character is “a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.”
It is important that we not mistake Wilde’s wit for shallowness, as there is often great depth within his epigrams that point out major paradoxes in many areas of life. The Picture of Dorian Gray is about many things, including the relationship between art and life, between images and truth, the nature of temptation, of good and evil, and of identity. It is also about sexuality. Perhaps above all, it is an enthralling, eerie, and beautifully told story.
This classic fiction has some parallels already noted to the mystery that is Lizzie Borden. The ultimate link may be that both fictional story and real-life mystery are inextricably linked to the Victorian era yet both continue to fascinate across time and cultural divides.
Works Cited:
“A New Whack at the Borden Case.” Newsweek 4 June 1984.
Burt, Frank H. The Trial of Lizzie A. Borden. (New Bedford, MA, 1893, 2 volumes; Orlando: PearTree Press, 2001).
DeMille, Agnes. Lizzie Borden, Dance of Death. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968.
Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Rebello, Leonard. Lizzie Borden Past & Present. Fall River, MA: Al-Zach Press, 1999.
Reading Wilde, Querying Spaces: Part 6. 31 October 2006. “The Artist’s Studio.” New York University. <http://nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/exhibits/wilde/5studio.htm>.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. NY: Random House, Modern Library Edition, 1992.
