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Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender. By Joseph A. Conforti. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 256 pages. $19.95 (paperback).
Most Americans are familiar with the popular children's rhyme about the accused Massachusetts woman Lizzie Borden and the 40, and subsequent 41, whacks she supposedly inflicted on her parents during their violent assassinations in the family home. However, few people know much about the actual history behind the Borden story. Over generations, popular depictions in literature, film, and television have skewed the details. In Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender, scholar Joseph Conforti provides a new perspective on the deaths of the Borden couple and an innovative look into why jurors acquitted Lizzie of killing her parents. Conforti argues that ethnicity, class, and gender not only fueled the tensions in the Borden household that spurred the murders but also shaped the circumstances leading to Lizzie's freedom after she was tried for the crimes. Conforti contends that Lizzie Borden's exoneration was the result of her and her defense team's ability to play on the Victorian notions of gender difference and her reputation as a respectable upper-class woman, as well as efforts to manipulate the media and ethnic and class connections within the community to generate support. At the heart of the book is legal evidence pertaining to the town, investigation, inquest, and the trials and materials gleaned from various local, state, and national newspapers. Given his attention to the nineteenth-century backdrop in which the crimes occurred, Conforti's work is as much a legal and criminal history as it is a social and cultural history.
Conforti is uniquely qualified to write about the Borden case because he is from Fall River, Massachusetts, where Lizzie's parents lived and died. Well acquainted with the area and the local past, Conforti opens with a description of what the town was like leading up to the Borden murders in 1892. He argues that during the Gilded Age, the community increasingly split along class lines. The upper classes lived in an area above the rivers and the coast known as "The Hill," while the working classes lived near the centers of industrial production below. By the turn of the twentieth century, Fall River, once dominated by British or...