Lesbian Theory

In the positive vein, Lizzie expressing an alternative sexuality can be understood as courageous; she is our protagonist, after all. Reaching for love and affection forbidden to her by society’s stifling norms reveals a relatable quest for self-actualization; Lizzie not only insists on the freedom to be herself but will risk everything for noble love. Of course, she will pay a price when she is inevitably caught, as depicted in the 2018 film, Lizzie, with Chloe Sevigny. In that movie, Lizzie’s father, after secretly watching Lizzie and Bridget together, calls her “an abomination” and tells her he has arranged to commit her to asylum. Her subsequent murder of him thus becomes a form of self-defense and ultimately makes her heroic. As Sevigny, who also produced the film, said in an interview, “I wanted it to be this rousing, smash-the-patriarchy piece.”

In the negative vein, Lizzie’s choice of a same-sex partner can be understood as a dangerous willingness to subvert the rules of civilized society. Lizzie as lesbian has already resisted the moral order and crossed into transgression. In other words, a Lizzie who is sexually “deviant” helps explain how she could be so morally deviant as to commit murder. According to movie critic Ruby Rich, filmmakers may introduce the “lethal lesbian” trope to help portray a female character as villainous or psychotic. (Think Sharon Stone as the bi-sexual Catherine Trammell, the ice pick serial killer, in Basic Instinct.)

In Lizzie’s case, making her a lesbian certainly helps a movie viewer make the leap from Lizzie the sedate Sunday school teacher to Lizzie the enraged axe murderess. A “normal” Victorian woman, with her gentle femininity and proper submission to men, is understood as unlikely to have committed such a vicious crime, but with a homosexual woman, any wrongdoing becomes more possible.

Then again, filmmakers might choose to portray Lizzie as a lesbian, enjoying heated clinches with Bridget in the barn, simply for the same reason Ed McBain said he chose lesbian relationships for his portrayal of Lizzie in the 1984 novel he wrote about her under the pseudonym of Evan Hunter. It was McBain who first whipped up the idea that Lizzie and Bridget were lovers. Why? Because, as McBain told Borden scholar Stefani Koorey when she interviewed him, “Sex sells.”

Other authors have clearly agreed. According to Braid, “Elizabeth Engstrom’s Lizzie Borden (1990) similarly hints at Lizzie’s relationships with women and includes scenes of lesbian erotica and more … The possibility of a lesbian relationship is also presented in the rock musical, Lizzie (2013) … in which Lizzie has an affair with her friend and neighbor Alice Russell, following the traumatic experience of suffering sexual abuse at the hands of her father.”

While the choice to portray the relationships between Lizzie and Alice or Lizzie and Bridget as something hot and streamy have no basis in fact—Lizzie and Bridget were actually fairly disinterested in each other—there had long been rumors that Lizzie could have, at least at one period of her life, been drawn to women, if not actually intimate with any. Of course, that kind of speculation has often shadowed women who chose not to marry, whether there was any basis for it or not. But in Lizzie’s time, it was not particularly unusual for a woman to remain unmarried, and, in Lizzie’s circle especially, spinsters abounded. So, why the rumors?

Gay Seeds are Planted

Victoria Lincoln, who lived not far from an elderly Lizzie as a child, wrote in her 1967 book, A Private Disgrace, that she grew up hearing whispers of Lizzie’s homosexuality from “dirty-minded old puritans in Fall River.” Lincoln said, “I think that they were wrong—in any overt sense, at least. Young Lizzie had crushes on schoolteachers that she talked about freely; her closer friendships had always been slightly overcharged and demanding; she was sentimental, and sexually immature.” But in Lincoln’s typically uncharitable view of Lizzie, she added that her sentimentality was “sort of sickening,” and she doubted that Lizzie “was capable of any kind of love affair.”

Agnes DeMille, however, writing a year later in Dance of Death, had no problem seeing Lizzie as capable of an affair and described a story she said was related to her by novelist Esther Forbes, who said that her father, “William Trowbridge Forbes, Judge of Probate Court in Worcester County, 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.” But Borden historian Leonard Rebello noted in his own 1999 book, Lizzie Borden: Past and Present, that “no information could be found to support the claim made in Miss DeMille’s book.” The story does seem unlikely as Lizzie did not yet call herself Lizbeth at the turn of the century; that didn’t begin until 1905.

By 1906, Lizzie was turning up in the home of Boston author and philanthropist Annie Fields, who was the partner of renowned author Sarah Orne Jewett, or so wrote Carolyn Gage, a playwright who penned several one-act plays about Lizzie. Jewett and Fields had a wide circle of New England women friends who were also living in “Boston Marriages,” the term used for women cohabitating together, and this suggested to Gage that Lizzie “had most likely found her way into Boston’s most elite network of lesbians.” 

Others who suggest Lizzie was a lesbian point to a letter she wrote, dated August 22nd, 1897, that was addressed to “My Dear Friend.” In it, she begins, “Where are you how are you and what are you doing? I dreamed of you the other night, but I do not dare to put my dream on paper.” She then added, “Every time we pass your corner the pony wants to turn down.” Author Frank Spiering, in his 1984 book, Lizzie, claimed the line about her dream shows “she could be explicit about her sexual longings,” and so, claiming he had been told by the director of the Fall River Historical Society the letter had been sent to “a young woman,” Spiering concluded that Lizzie was likely a homosexual.

As it turns out, the letter was indeed addressed to a woman, but it was not a young woman, it had been written to an older married woman, Mrs. Emma Cummings, Lizzie and Emma’s dressmaker and clearly also a friend who Lizzie wrote to several times. As the authors of Parallel Lives said of the letter, it would be “presumptuous” to assume the dream Lizzie spoke of was sexual or romantic in nature, pointing out that “as was typical of the correspondence of woman women during the nineteenth century, the letter was written in a dreamy, passionate style, which can be easily misinterpreted by the modern reader.”

But perhaps the strongest basis for the belief that Lizzie may have enjoyed a lesbian liaison, however briefly, rests in her well-known friendship with a particular stage actress.

Enter Nance O’Neil

While a number of other papers also mentioned Lizzie’s friendship with Nance O’Neil as the reason for what became a permanent estrangement between the Borden sisters, these stories also blamed Nance’s unseemly profession as an actress as the reason why the relationship may have been distasteful to Emma. According to Victorian Lincoln, that was the story as it was presented in public and was likely nonsense, as Lincoln claimed many of the elite in Fall River, including her own uncle, entertained theater people.

However, in private, said Lincoln, the gossip in Fall River swirled around the possibility that Lizzie and Nance O’Neil were having “a blatant homosexual affair.” Although Lincoln didn’t believe that gossip either, it was apparently known in theatrical circles that Nance O’Neil was sexually interested in women. Of course, it wasn’t only women who attracted her; she later married actor Alfred Hickman when she was 42 years old. However, love letters she had written to a female friend discovered after her death in 1965 attest to her probable bisexuality.

A volume of poetry that Nance gifted to Lizzie in June, 1904, was inscribed “For my dear Lizbeth, with love from Daphne,” which certainly indicates a warm bond. The private use pet names for each other could also suggest a romance, especially since we know that Lizzie adopted the name Lizbeth for herself around that time. The final lines of the poem Nance quoted above the inscription could be interpreted as provocative as well when we realize that the 30-year-old Nance was writing them to 44-year old Lizzie. The verse, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, was about flowers. “Take them and keep them/Who can tell? Someday dear/Though they be withered/Flower and thorn and blossom/Held for an instant/Up against they bosom/They might make December/Seem to thee like May dear.” The phrase “May-December romance” was commonly used by the late 19th century; could Nance have been waxing poetic about how unimportant their age difference?

So, perhaps there was indeed a sexual component to their friendship, or at least Nance was indulging in the Victorian version of flirting. One almost hopes that Lizzie did indeed get to enjoy the pleasures of a romance at least once in her life. However, from the way the actress later spoke of Lizzie, it didn’t appear as though that was the way the actress looked upon her friend. In 1927, nine days after Lizzie’s death, the New Bedford Evening Standard interviewed Nance O’Neil about her memories of Lizzie, and Nance described her as a “quiet, reserved, frail, little old-fashioned gentlewoman.”

Nance recalled that after one of her performances in Boston at the Tremont Theater, there came a “bouquet of flowers” to her dressing room along with, wrote the reporter who interviewed her, “a note from Miss Borden expressing admiration for the brilliant acting of the star and asking permission to call on her.” Nance had found Lizzie, “with her gray eyes and graying hair and her unmistakable air of refinement and intellect, distinctly attractive. She was exceedingly well read, conversant with the best literature, and spoke interestingly of her travels abroad, which Miss O’Neil recalled as extensive. With [Lizzie’s] intellectual qualities she combined kindness and thought for others and a great fondness for animals.”

The article also noted that as their friendship progressed through visits back and forth between their homes (Nance lived for several years in Tynesboro, Massachusetts), the actress observed that Lizzie had “seemed utterly lonely,” and “obviously always depressed by the shadow of some tragedy, the nature of which Miss O’Neil did not know until sometime after their brief friendship began.” Nance made it a point to say that learning about Lizzie’s history as a suspect in two murders made no difference to their friendship because although the two women never discussed it, Nance simply did not believe the Lizzie she knew could have committed such a crime. “I always felt a great sympathy for her and great deal of admiration for the way she carried on.”

The article finished by saying that the two didn’t exchange letters after Nance left the East Coast to go out on tour. “I am afraid I am a rather poor correspondent,” she said. “We were like ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing.”

Below the Surface

Nance’s 1927 memory that the suspicion of murder that dogged Lizzie made no difference to their friendship may have changed by the early 1950s, when poet Eugene Walter encountered Nance at a dinner party and asked her about the time she spent with Lizzie. As explained by Kathleen Carbone in The Hatchet, Walter first pointed out that Nance, who was in her 70s by that time, was an over-the-top character who sought to entertain her listeners. Even so, the way he described Nance’s attitude toward Lizzie’s history was somewhat cavalier. In his book, he quotes her:

“I won’t say I was nervous being in a house with Lizzie Borden. After all, there were a lot of us together. You can be sure we looked out for each other and made a point never to be alone with her. And to notice how sharp her dinner knife was. But there was one thing I do remember as striking me. She would often make me repeat for her at teatime Medea’s famous speech:

Often the night of thunder I have a message from the gods on high. They ask me why I have not slept. Why in the morning I will touch no food. Then I’d tell them of my sleepless night and why I did not sleep. Because, I tell them, this house smells of blood.”

Some, of course, interpret Lizzie’s alleged interest in this speech by the mythological Medea, who murdered her own sons, as some kind of hint that she was also guilty of the murders of her own family members. However, there is nothing in that passage that speaks of guilt, only the trauma of living in a house where blood has been spilled. The speech may have resonated with Lizzie who was known to eat very little and be unable to sleep in the weeks after the murders. Either way, there is nothing about Nance’s reported memories of Lizzie that suggests a romantic bond, at least not from Nance’s direction.

Most Borden scholars today would say that however much Nance may have personally liked Lizzie, her interest in her older, “utterly lonely” friend was likely opportunistic. And it wasn’t just the several lavish parties that Lizzie famously threw for Nance and her theater group that were the draw. Just as actors without a steady stream of income struggle financially today, so did actors back then, and theater folk often glommed on to rich people to help them stay afloat between paying work.

In another article about Nance in The Hatchet by Tina Kate Rouse, we find that Nance’s career was overseen by a man, McKee Rankin, overly fond of alcohol, who was continually mismanaging her money and plunging her into financial peril. According to Edmund Pearson, when Nance was forced to appear at a hearing to litigate her debts, her friend Lizzie Borden showed up daily in the courtroom to support her.

Meanwhile, In Parallel Lives, we find a letter written to Nance by another member of Raskin’s theater troupe, Ricca Allen, about loans Lizzie made to both Nance and Ricca, and Lizzie’s attempt to recoup that money. “What emerges,” wrote the authors,” is a complicated web of financial shenanigans and evasive letters, causing one to question the true nature of the women’s relationship with Lizzie.” The authors reasoned that Nance, “by befriending a social outcast, especially one who was wealthy and extremely generous, may have eradicated some of her financial problems before moving on to the next phase of her career.”

Victoria Lincoln seemed to think this likely as well, writing that many in Fall River “saw Lizzie being taken for a sucker by a second-rate actress on her way out. They laughed and shrugged less than kindly and turned aside.” While Lizzie may have been grateful for her friendship with Nance, however long it lasted, in the end, said Lincoln, it did her no favors. The relationship, considered distasteful to others, cost her “what little Fall River support she had left.”

When the Idea of Lizzie as Lesbian Becomes a Problem

Lack of proof that Lizzie was a closeted lesbian will not make depictions of Lizzie in the throes of same-sex pleasure go away. After all, we can’t possibly know what Lizzie’s true longings really were, and there is no way to disprove the idea that they may have been focused on other women—and reason enough to suspect they were. As cultural critic Marc Napolitano observed, “the fact that Lizzie is grounded in historical detail grants a strange authenticity to the queer reinterpretation, as though the creative liberties reveal a possible, albeit undocumented, historical actuality.”

If one is going to creatively invent a version of Lizzie and her life, as is what happens when artists are inspired by a pop culture phenomenon, then why not go ahead and give Lizzie a love life? Where’s the harm in it? If our goal is simply to be entertained, then perhaps there is no harm; well, except for perpetuating the “lethal lesbian” stereotype. As Napolitano also observed, every account of the murders that depicts Lizzie as homosexual is also an account that depicts Lizzie as guilty of those murders.

However, if our goal is to try to figure out the truth of the murders and whether Lizzie Borden was actually the one who wielded the hatchet that killed Andrew and Abby Borden, then the lesbian backstory is a red herring, a distraction that nudges us away from looking clearly at the evidence in the case. No, it’s worse than a distraction because, thanks to negative cultural messaging about homosexuality, it subtly influences us toward weighing the evidence differently than we might otherwise.

As Annette Holba, Ph.D., wrote in her article, “Lizzie as Deviant Other,” published in The Hatchet, “Even though today homosexuality is more readily becoming mainstream in our Western culture compared to the status of homosexuality in the Victorian Era, we still seem preoccupied with justifying, excusing, or understanding Lizzie’s potential guilt through a lens that makes her different from other women—or women of the norm.”

Holba describes the idea of Lizzie as homosexual as a “screen” or lens that we interpret the case through, a screen that we are drawn toward because it helps make the incomprehensible more comprehensible. It is indeed difficult to understand how a supposedly God-fearing Sunday school teacher known for her good works could suddenly rise up and slaughter the father and stepmother she had lived with peaceably for 27 years. But if we look at her through the screen of “deviant other,” then it is suddenly not quite so difficult. And therein lies the trap, because if we allow ourselves to be pulled away from confronting the incomprehensible, then we are failing to confront the truths that incomprehensibility may be revealing. In essence, we are allowing ourselves to be manipulated by the media.

Holba concluded that portrayals of Lizzie as a lesbian in books and film tell us far more about the storyteller than it does about Lizzie or her potential responsibility for the murders, calling those portrayals “evidence of the author’s conceptualization of who can commit such a ‘deviant’ act.” In the end, “whether we need to justify in our mind how a woman could have killed her parents or whether we want to capitalize on the gruesome story that will make a successful theatre production or film, we still need to consider looking for the truth and the truths connected to this case.”

There is no denying that it’s interesting to speculate on Lizzie’s sexuality. There is also no denying that sex sells. But it’s important to remember that whatever her orientation may have been, or whether it was acted upon or not, has nothing to do with her guilt or innocence in the murders of her father and stepmother. It is important, always, to simply stick to the evidence.