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Narrative and Culture in Versions of the Lizzie Borden Story (A Performative Approach)

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Narrative and Culture in Versions of the Lizzie Borden Story (A Performative Approach) Intersecting Axes: Narrative and Culture in Versions of the Lizzie Borden Story (A Performative Approach) Stephanie Miller PhD Department of English and Related Literature September 2010 Miller 2 ABSTRACT This thesis examines versions of the story of 32-year-old New Englander Lizzie Andrew Borden, famously accused of axe-murdering her stepmother Abby and father Andrew in 1892. Informed by narrative and feminist theories, Intersecting Axes draws upon interdisciplinary, contemporary re-workings of Judith Butler’s concept of “performativity” to explore the ways in which versions of the Lizzie Borden story negotiate such themes as repetition and difference, freedom and constraint, revision and reprisal, contingency and determinism, the specific and the universal. The project emphasizes and embraces the paradoxical sense in which interpretations are both enabled and constrained by the contextual situation of the interpreter and analyzes the relationship between individual versions and the cultural constructs they enact while purporting to describe. Moving away from symptomatic reading and its psychoanalytic underpinnings to focus upon the interpretive frames by which our understandings of Lizzie Borden versions (and of narrative/cultural texts more broadly) are shaped, this project exposes the complex performative processes whereby meaning is created. The chapters of this thesis offer contextual readings of a short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, a ballet by Agnes de Mille, a made-for-television by Paul Wendkos, and a short story by Angela Carter to argue for the theoretical, political, narratological, cultural, and interpretive benefits of approaching the relationship between texts and contexts through a uniquely contemporary concept of performativity, bringing a valuable new perspective to current debates about the intersection of narrative and culture. Miller 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments.................................................................................................... 4 Author’s Declaration................................................................................................ 5 Introduction:............................................................................................................. 6 Part I: Lizzie Borden as Narrative Phenomenon: Approaching the Archive......................................................................................................... 8 Part II: Lizzie Borden as Cultural Phenomenon: “Doing Things” with Performativity............................................................................................... 28 Chapter One: “Almost Abnormal”: Re-Contextualizing (the Absurd Phallus in) Mary Wilkins Freeman’s (and J. Edgar Chamberlin’s) “The Long Arm”............... 50 Chapter Two: Lizzie’s “Dance of Death”: Shifting Symbols in Agnes De Mille’s Fall River Legend........................................................................................ 89 Chapter Three: “How Unbearably Heavy These Skirts Can Be”: The Lizzie Borden of 1970s American Primetime.................................................................... 122 Chapter Four: Limited Performativity in Angela Carter’s “The Fall River Axe Murders”.................................................................................................................. 142 Epilogue: Contemporary Lizzies and Narrative/Culture Today.............................. 184 Appendix: “The” Historical Lizzie.......................................................................... 192 Works Cited............................................................................................................. 212 Miller 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My greatest thanks go to my supervisor Dr. Jane Elliott for her remarkable enthusiasm, insight and patience. Dr. Elliott offered unlimited support and guidance at every stage of the project, and her helpful and innovative suggestions have greatly enhanced the quality of the thesis. One could not wish for greater wisdom, intellectual empathy, professionalism, or personality in a mentor. Thank you to Professor Lawrence Rainey for the unique and valuable perspective he brought to my thesis advisory panel and to Professor Vicki Mahaffey for her feedback on early drafts. I would also like to thank the Agnes de Mille Foundation, for granting me permission to consult selected materials at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (Dance Division), and the Library of Congress, for providing a copy of a letter from Joseph Edgar Chamberlin to Thomas Schuler Shaw held at their Rare Books and Special Collections Division. Thanks to my friends and family for always texting/emailing/calling when they encountered a Lizzie version, a devotion that has often resulted in charming messages in the vein of, “Lizzie Borden on TV last night. Thought of you. ☺” Special thanks to my wonderful parents, for their ongoing encouragement, and for never taking my obsessive interest in an alleged parent-killer personally. Finally, I am beyond grateful to my partner, Zelte, without whose constant companionship and selfless support I could never have completed this project. Miller 5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. Versions of Chapters 3 and 4 were submitted toward a taught Master of Arts in Modern Literature and Culture in 2007, but the degree was formally suspended in order to transfer the MA research toward the obtaining of a doctoral degree, so the work contained in this thesis has not previously been used in the obtaining of any other degree. Miller 6 INTRODUCTION Miss Lizzie (“so christened”1) Andrew Borden: Victorian New-English spinster, philanthropist, and oft-alleged giver of doubly parricidal axe-whacks. Animal-lover, lesbian, masturbator, menstruator, kleptomaniac, necrophiliac, hysteric, epileptic. Maybe. Each of these descriptors has at one time or another been applied to Lizzie Borden, a woman whom an astonishing number of writers and artists have sought to understand, to represent, to erase, or to champion. As this dissertation will explore, versions of the Lizzie Borden story have emerged from an enormous range of genres, forms, and media over the 118 years since the daytime murders of Abby and Andrew Borden, a middle-aged couple from Fall River, Massachusetts. Owing to this trans-temporal ubiquity, the representing of the Borden story serves as a constant against which the variable cultural and historical circumstances of narrative production are thrown into relief (or challenged) by any given representation. Lizzie Borden versions thus offer a unique and valuable archive for the consideration of the relationship between narrative and culture—a project with weighty consequences (intellectual and political) for the interdisciplinary present. The concerns this project raises bear upon contemporary narratology, cultural studies, and feminism, as well as upon literary criticism. In this introduction, I will first present some methodological concerns surrounding attempts to understand the historical Lizzie. Drawing upon these concerns, I explore the problematic relationship between culture and narrative (within both narratology and cultural criticism), exposing the inadequacy of existing concepts of “cultural narrative” to account for the interrelationship between the texts 1 This phrase is drawn from “Lizzie Borden’s Inquest Testimony,” The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook (Kent and Flynn 52). Miller 7 and contexts of the Lizzie Borden phenomenon. In Part I, I approach this problem from the narrative side, exploring the status of culture in narrative theory today and identifying the role of a dichotomy between “intentional” and “symptomatic” readings (and the psychoanalytic metaphor informing it) in limiting the success of some narrative/cultural projects. I reflect upon what sort of narrative theory one should bring to the interpretation of a cultural narrative (narrative texts-in-contexts); I suggest a model that is characterized by its recognition of the common gesture entailed in, on the one hand, advancing an argument with respect to a text’s “disposition of values” (Walsh Rhetoric 67) and, on the other hand, advancing an argument based on a proposed relationship between a text and its cultural contexts. Neither the relationship between a formal feature and its perceived narrative “whole” (or organizing agency, or “disposition of values,” or whatever) nor between a text and its contexts (whether those conventionally conceived of as “internal” or those considered “external”) are self-evident. Both are constructed, interpretive, and selective. I thus advocate as an alternative to psychoanalytic formulations a communicative model incorporating a pragmatic approach to fictionality (informed by Richard Walsh’s The Rhetoric of Fictionality) as a superior formulation to bring to the engagement with texts-in-contexts. In Part II, I approach the narrative/culture question from the culture side. Acknowledging its complex interdisciplinary heritage, I introduce a self-consciously re-versioned concept of “performativity,” drawing upon recent work by Judith Butler, as an overarching framework to link my narrative agenda and my cultural agenda, and I consider broader applications for the model. I acknowledge those who have identified the Lizzie Borden fictional archive as a whole in the past and explain why the Lizzie Borden phenomenon provides a uniquely revealing archive for my Miller 8 particular consideration of the relationship between narrative and culture,
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