The latest in the Ryan Murphy Monster series on Netflix, telling the infamous story of Lizzie Borden, who in 1892 was accused of the gruesome axe murders of her father and stepmother.
This is the very first in the Monster series to feature a female protagonist, and it’s a very divisive choice, as the real Lizzie Borden maintained her innocence in the killings of her parents until the day she died. Plenty of other potentially inaccurate things occur in the show – the age of Lizzie during the actual killings, a romance with the maid of house, her supposed obsession with Countess Bathory and more, but one has to expect embellishment for the sake of entertainment in a show like this. Grab your feminine rage in one hand and your favorite axe handle in the other, and let’s cleave into this!
We begin in the sleepy town of Fall River Massachusetts, somewhere in the 1890’s, and the house of Andrew Borden (Charlie Hunnam) and his second wife Abby (Rebecca Hall), plus daughters Lizzie (Ella Beatty) and Emma (Billie Lourd), is about to get a new maid-of-all-work Bridget Sullivan (Vicky Krieps). Abby Borden is well known for going through servants like tissue paper, loudly remonstrating both her stepdaughters but Lizzie in particular, and in general being an absolute wreck of a cee-you-next-Tuesday to everyone around her, including her husband. And Abby immediately brands Bridget as the new “Maggie” of the household, whether she likes it or not.
The character of Bridget aka Maggie, how she calmly sells “extra services” to Andrew Borden much to his willing bemusement, how she deals with the disgusting abuse she endures on a daily basis as an Irish servant in a proper American household, including being farmed out to other proper ladies for unpaid use, is a curiously feminist one, especially for the time period the show is set in. Maggie knows all about period problems and how to scrub Abby’s idiotic heirloom fainting couch in just the right way to remove poor Lizzie’s bloodstains, and the two of them seem to bond over the experience. Maggie is stuffed full of righteous feminine rage, at the men who use her body for their pleasure and expect her to take care of whatever “issues” arise from that, at the snooty ladies who think classisms and physical abuse is a perfectly normal way to treat another woman, and at an uncaring world in general. By contrast, Lizzie is sweet, and kind, and quite innocent of the cruel ways of the world – to a point.
Lizzie has an allee of cherry trees behind the Borden house, which leads to a dovecote where she houses her beloved birds. Lizzie swallows her pride and dutifully meets with a potential suitor after some less-than-helpful instructions from Abby, only to be soundly rejected on her looks alone. In fact, just about everyone seems to reject Lizzie – Abby, despite raising the girl, wants little if nothing to do with Lizzie and makes that loudly quite clear as often as possible; society in general ignores her or calls her odd for her many idiosyncrasies and great love of animals; even Andrew Borden himself avoids Lizzie, as he lost his beloved first wife Sarah to Lizzie’s own birth. And then she meets Maggie, who starts introducing Lizzie to all sorts of strange new things – thoughts, possibilities, a life free from the constant harassment of her family, acceptance of her own pleasures. And when Lizzie is the only one who doesn’t seem phased by blood, Maggie introduces Lizzie to the true story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
The story of Countess Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman who, with her servants’ help, was said to have tortured and killed some 300 or so girls and women from the surrounding countryside in the late 1500’s, is presented in this version as a potentially sympathetic figure, at least in the beginning of her story. Also played by Vicky Krieps, a young Countess Bathory finds herself stalked and raped by a stranger in her home country, she is vilified for the whole thing and her baby is ripped from her arms, never to be seen again. Furious, an older Countess Bathory commands many female sacrifices to be brought into her castle dungeons, and she bathes in their blood to maintain her youth and vitality and, well, because she’s a vengeful freak by this point.
Both Lizzie and Maggie are abused by the Bordens and others, and since trauma-bonding is A Thing, as the two women make tentative steps towards a sapphic but very secretive relationship, it only makes sense that they’d begin to plan the murder of both Borden wardens as well. The presence of the overly flamboyant actress Nance O’Neill (Jessica Barden), who for one reason or another seems to have taken an interest in Lizzie too, doesn’t stop our conspirators and kind of seems to encourage them, as Nance is a free and independent woman, famous on the stage, whom most people even Abby herself, will give way to when she points her prodigious … ‘talents’ at them.
Then there’s Borden patriarch, Andrew himself, a man known to be stoic and miserly with everything – his money, his time and attention, and most certainly his affections. Andrew is particular about his axe collection, he gave each and every one of them a womans name, and doesn’t even hesitate when Maggie offers to clean and sharpen his axes as a paid bonus of her duties. Andrew is so cheap he will cut the feet off a corpse at his undertaker business, rather than spring for a bigger coffin, he insists on a fine house but in a run-down area of town, and he pinches every last penny until the copper practically falls off. Andrew drinks like a fish and somehow manages to remain more or less calm, even with a ton of idiocy going on constantly all around him. Yet the facade cracks when his old brother-in-law, John Morse (Joey Pollari), shows back up in the Bordens life to, you guessed it, demand money from Andrew. In a particularly fine performance from Charlie Hunnam, Andrew Borden proceeds to rant down the heavens, about how he’s surrounded and being suffocated by all the women in his world – the real Andrew Borden would probably have appreciated such shrieked sentiments, if not the loss of control for even a moment.
One would think all these fascinating characters would be plenty, but no. As with other Monster chapters, Episode 4 introduces another female murderer into the mix, serial killer Aileen Wournos (Sarah Paulson), who murdered seven men in the early 90’s.
The tale of Wournos, how she was abused from a very early age by literally everyone in her life daily – brother, father, grandfather, and more – was forced to give up her child from said abuse, and grew from a screamingly angry teenager into an actual murderous woman, is fairly well-known at this point. Some claim she was justified in her feminine rage, and plenty of feminist groups protested her execution by lethal injection when the time finally came. This version of the Aileen Wournos story follows “Lee” as she generally seems to prefer to be called, and her lesbian lover Shelby (Jessie Lee) as they take a vacation in the Borden household, which has been since converted to an Airbnb. It is there that Lee, high on a great myriad of drugs and murders, has a vision, a ghostly visit if you will, from Lizzie herself. The two seem to share a great understanding, across generations, of women who were oppressed their whole lives, finally reacting in violent acts of rather permanent bloodshed, and bravely facing the consequences later. The ghost of Lizzie even returns when its time for Aileen to leave this mortal coil, an escort to whatever these branded “nasty women” will find on the other side.
What Lizzie supposedly did, whether or not she had help, if it was justified as a response to the abuse Lizzie suffered, these questions are all irrelevant in the face of a simple fact – both Borden parents were murdered via a very violent axe attack. And while the cops are taking Lizzie’s statements (the show features the actual initial interview responses Lizzie Borden herself gave via historical records), most of them simply cannot fathom the idea that a woman could do this. The idea of feminist rage erupting in bloody brutality isn’t something that early 1900’s men in authority would ever credit. And while Lizzie may have been acquitted in legal court due to the purported weakness of her gender, she was executed repeatedly in the court of public opinion. Childrens’ rhymes (who doesn’t know “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks”?), unauthorized books, historical Halloween costumes for pitys sake, they all insist Lizzie did it. All the work Lizzie supposedly did for the suffragettes and the womens right to vote, it matters not in the face of bloody murderous executions that turns out to be her only real legacy. The irony is not lost on us.
Get your murderous rage on and see Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix now!
Reviewed by Alicia Glass