‘How Unbearably Heavy these Skirts can be’: Popular Feminism in 1970s America and The Legend of Lizzie Borden

Abstract

This article argues that American made-for-TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden offers an explicit-but-contained engagement with feminist content typical of its time and genre; however, the female violence at the heart of its plot combines with its unique cultural positioning to reveal the depth and complexity of the anxieties about gender and feminism to which it responds. The story of Lizzie Borden, a nineteenth-century Massachusetts ‘spinster’ famously tried for parricidal axe murder, has inspired a variety of fictionalisations, including poems, short stories, novels, songs, operas, ballet, television and film. The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) emerges from a cultural moment in which certain debates within and about feminism came to a head. Within the film's discordant plotlines and characterisations play out some of the politically charged dichotomies at the very core of those debates, vexed binaries with which feminism continues to grapple: radical/liberal, sameness/difference, individual/collective, personal/political.

Legend's conflicted representation of feminism is reflected in its contradictory depictions of Lizzie's self-control and self-awareness, the nature of her implied motives, and her generalisability as a character. In brief, Legend presents a woman both in control and self-aware, and out of control and unconscious. Correspondingly, it presents Lizzie's motives as deriving simultaneously from greedy premeditation and from incest-damaged entrancement, offering an absurd proliferation of explanatory and thus, in a sense, excusatory storylines. Through the bizarre overdetermination that results, Legend manages to suggest both that every woman has reason to kill and that Lizzie is a monster unlike any other woman. Ultimately, Legend's convoluted storyline, far-fetched proliferation of motives, and self-contradictory characterisation of Lizzie accentuate both the intricacy and the hefty political stakes of the film's engagement with its feminist contexts.

Keywords:

• context
• feminism
• film
• horror
• narrative
• popular culture
• representation
• second wave
• television
• women's lib

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Dr Jane Elliott for her invaluable advice and assistance in the preparation of this article. Thanks also to Dr Naomi Hetherington for her most helpful editorial input.

Notes

¹For the most pertinent treatments of Legend, see Schofield 1993: 97, which examines the film in a feminist context, and Adler 1994, which considers it in relation to earlier historical and fictional versions of the story. Hilary Neroni notes the influence of 1970s feminism on Legend's shaping of the Lizzie Borden story in The Violent Woman (2005: 177). For a contemporaneous feminist review of the film, see Taylor 1975: 106–09.

²For a discussion of the support the historical Lizzie received from women's groups, see Nickerson 1999: 268, or Jones 1996: 235–36.

³Kathleen Chamberlain notes a very similar effect in ‘Dash Dare on His Mettle’, an 1892 Lizzie Borden-based dime novel (Chamberlain 1997).