The love/hate relationship

[snokkums]

I got to thinking the other night about Lizzie and the relationship with her father. We all know that she and Abby didn't get along to well, but what about the relationship with her father? Is it possible that she both loved and hated her father?

I was just thinking of what Arnold Brown was saying in an interview that she couldn't have killed her parents because she loved her father too much.

But couldn't she have gotten someone to do the deed? Maybe she subconsiously hated him because he was a tight wad or maybe because of some sort of abuse?

[1bigsteve]

It is not uncommon for people to have a "love-hate" relationship with family members. I love my dad but there are times when I'd like to break his neck. I'm sure if your hate out weighs your love for that person at any given point in time you can kill that person. Perhaps Lizzie was in that "period of time." I'm no psychologist but it sounds reasonable to me that Lizzie could have reached a point when her hate for her father tipped her toward murder. I think Lizzie felt she was getting older and still single. The only way out of it was to kill her parents, take the money and start living a "respectable" life. In those days women didn't leave their "father's house" until they found a husband or received a lot of money somehow. Lizzie didn't have either and at 32 I'm sure she heard the clock ticking.

-1bigsteve (o:

[Kat]

I've been watching that show called Women Behind Bars.
There are 2 segments per hour. It's a woman who killed. Usually they had abuse or plead abuse as a child. I'm sure that does contribute. But the choice to kill usually shows a disregard for human life and an anti-social personality. Some of the women are Borderline Personality Disorder.
A couple of the ladies voices would break and they might put a hankie to their eyes, looking like they were crying, but I never saw a tear! They would bemoan how their children have to grow up without a mother, because they were unjustly incarcerated.
I'd think that if Lizzie killed, she was a Borderline, or Sociopath or a Narcissist. I don't know if that is the result of nature or nurture: probably a combination.
We would have to look at how she appeared to others, before and after the crimes. One does not just get up one day, slaughter 2 people and go back to being *normal*, unless they have fooled people thru a personality disorder and continue to fool people.

[snokkums]

I think Lizzie might have had a borderline personality. If you look how she live after the muders. She live high off the hog, making up for lost time I suppose. Then she almost became a hermit.

And before the murders, I read somewhere that people said she was nice but a bit peculair at times.

[augusta]

Snookums - Yes, a lot of people said that Lizzie was strange or weird. I think it was Lizzie herself that described being with her girlfriends at Dr. Handy's cottage and she stared off into space for a long time. It sounded like something was wrong with her. Her eyes seem to show it.

They say you can't hate a person unless you love them, as the two emotions are so strong.

I don't think Lizzie was a "hermit" in later life. She was always going someplace, and she had a circle of friends. Fall River, for the most part, may have snubbed her but she didn't spend the rest of her life in a steamer chair reading out on her piazza (just some of her life ... )

Please give to the Edwin Porter grave marker fund.

[snokkums]

I just figured she was like that because the townspeople pretty much shunned her. 'Course, I'm not so sure I would want to be seen in the presents of an accused axe murderer.