The Fall River Axe Murders – Angela Carter
Reviewed by Amanda Read
Lizzie Borden
This short story takes place in the moments before the Borden family awake on that fateful day when:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
It sets the scene on the stultifying existence of an unmarried woman in a New England backwater at the end of the nineteenth century. Past her sell-by date, Lizzie is unlikely ever to marry and thus lives a ‘protracted childhood’ in the confines of her family home. The decay and stench of the day’s cloying heat intensify the claustrophobia of her life. Lizzie Borden is a pressure cooker about to blow.
In a style lyrical and earthy, Angela Carter focuses on the minutiae of a family behind locked doors. The playground rhyme with which she commences the story is echoed by a narration occasionally reminiscent of the Janet and John books – with great effect: in response to an earlier violent ransacking of the Borden house, the narrator chirrups ‘What a mess!’
We all know what Lizzie did next. Now, with Angela Carter’s story, we get a sense of why.
The story is published in a collection of short stories Burning your Boats by Angela Carter. The individual story is available to download free of charge from http://www.epubbud.com/read.php?g=LXP66YAL&tocp=37
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