“In the Gothic Mirror”: Reflections of Female Monstrosity in “The Long Arm”

Abstract

The story of Lizzie Borden has served as a creative impetus in the American imagination; following the hundred years after the Borden murders, a remarkable body of creative work has been produced. Ann Schofield asserts that the Borden story has become an “ur-text for the contemplation of power, of patriarchy, [and] of sexuality” (92). In reading Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “The Long Arm” (1895), this essay re-considers Schofield’s claim that the Borden story and its subsequent renditions enable a revisionary take on female subjectivity and resistance to patriarchal order. More specifically, this essay examines how Freeman’s text (one of the first to fictionalize the saga of Lizzie Borden) reflects back the gendered subjectivity in the in the gothic mirror for us to consider whether that reflection began as an image of subjection or that of autonomy.