Lizzie Borden may have been acquitted for the 1892 murder of her father and stepmother but popular consciousness still brands her as guilty. Borden has been immortalised not only in nursery rhyme – “Lizzie Borden took an axe / Gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one” – but in a ballet, an opera, a podcast, a television miniseries starring Christina Ricci, and a host of other cultural products. Even the house in Fall River, Massachusetts, in which the family lived and where the gruesome murders occurred, is now a bed-and-breakfast museum – yes, people actually spend money to sleep over at the scene of the crime.
The Australian author Sarah Schmidt is one of them. The writer spent more than a decade obsessed with Lizzie, after the latter started appearing in her dreams. Unable to shake either the dreams or the subsequent fascination with this might-have-been murder, Schmidt began to write what would eventually become her debut novel.
In See What I Have Done, Schmidt reconstructs the story of the Borden murders in grisly detail. Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their home on 4 August 1892, their heads crushed in. Lizzie’s sister, Emma, was out of town; Bridget, the maid, had been sick in bed; Lizzie was the only other person in the house at the time. Lizzie was arrested, put on trial for the murders, and eventually acquitted. But was she really the killer?
This seems to be the question that the novel’s publishers, at least, want us to ask, but the vast tracts of whodunnit marketing surrounding its release belies the fact that the art of Schmidt’s novel is her characterisation: how she takes the basic facts of the case and imagines a cast of complex, deep and troubled protagonists who inflict careful cruelties on one another as a matter of course. It’s the kind of power play that could only happen in families: a long game of push and pull fuelled by razor-sharp spitefulness.
Everyone in the Borden household is yearning for escape. Emma has taken a temporary sojourn in Fairhaven; Bridget, with plans to return to her native Scotland, has been hoarding her wages in a tin under her bed (which her changeable and overbearing boss, Abby, discovers, and in an act of fear, hideous selfishness or proprietorial pique, confiscates); and Lizzie – but what does Lizzie really want?
Schmidt’s Lizzie is infuriating and infantile, forever pawing at her sister in an almost babyish manner, completely unable to extricate her needs from her wants. She wants to be cosseted but at the same time craves an escape, returning over and over to memories of a long trip abroad she once took at her father’s expense. She wants love but deliberately makes herself insufferable. She wants freedom yet she refuses to let go of those closest to her.
She’s a remarkable character but it’s hard to either believe her or feel sorry for her, and this is perhaps the most frustrating element of the novel. If any space for empathy is to be found, it is with Bridget and Emma – both women are trapped in their places by convention but only one of them has the means to leave. Her choices in this respect are similarly frustrating; this is not a novel to read when you want to take your anxiety levels down.
Not all characters exist to be liked by the reader, but See What I Have Done can feel stifling, the claustrophobia of that house in Fall River and Lizzie’s own internal monologue threatening to overwhelm the pull of the narrative. This is not helped by the fact that the language, while carefully paced and evocative, can give the impression of having been picked over a few too many times – with short, dense sentences and odd constructions that leave little room to breathe.
But these are predominantly issues of taste, not talent. Schmidt’s writing is rich and confident, painting a vivid portrait of a household with something rotten at its core. It’s a strong debut that promises much from an original and compelling new voice in Australian literature.
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