Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden as “Conscious Pariah”: A Discussion About Private Life

Lizzie Borden and the Borden murders are often sensationalized and exploited in some fashion by contemporary media. From the 1975 made-for-television movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, to some more recent mediated offerings that have exploited the Borden story through the slasher film genre, The Curse of Lizzie Borden (2006) and The Curse of Lizzie Borden 2: Prom Night (2008), it is evident that the stories lose factual basis and they are potentially exploited. 

This presentation enters the conversation about the Borden phenomenon through an alternative lens intended to shed a different light on the person, Lizzie Borden. Unmarred by her post-trial reputation and disconnected from some of the theories that have come and gone in the last one hundred years, this presentation looks at some of Lizzie’s public action as a parallel to one of the twentieth century’s most significant female political theorists, Hannah Arendt. 

Lizzie Borden made life choices in the aftermath of the murders that are consistent with Hannah Arendt’s notion of a “conscious pariah,” a label that Arendt gave to herself in the aftermath of her noteworthy critique of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Lizzie also made conscious choices in her public life that perhaps she knew would be in disfavor with the larger public. Consequently, we can learn more about Lizzie as a conscious pariah in her environment that might offer more constructive insight for ongoing contemporary public discourse.

Dr. Annette M. Holba is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the Communication and Media Studies Department at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire. She earned her B.A. in Law & Justice Studies from Rowan University, her M.A. in Liberal Studies from Rutgers University (Camden), and her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Duquesne University. She has articles published in The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies, World Leisure Journal, PRism, Cosmos and History: Journal of Social and Natural Philosophy, The Pennsylvania Speech Communication Annual, New Hampshire Journal of Education, Florida Communication Journal, and The Review of Communication. Dr. Holba has a book chapter in Media(ted) Deviance and Social Otherness: 

Interrogating Influential Representations, and is the author of Handbook for the Humanities Doctoral Student; Philosophical Leisure: Recuperative Praxis for Human Communication; and co-editor of Philosophies of Communication: Implications for Everyday Experience; and Lizzie Borden Took an Axe, Or Did She?