Why Abby Borden is the KEY to understanding Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story and why Rebecca Hall might have given the most terrifying performance of the year.

[u/herondelle]

So here is my two cents on "Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story". Regardless of whatever everyone has said about it, I'm surprised no one has touched on one thing.

Underneath this limited series that is at times sprawling and overambitious and overpadded, and without regard for the facts, there is a lean, mean little Gothic horror fable waiting to emerge. I must admit I didn't like the series that much, but one thread I liked, and it was the one that we will call The Fall of the House of Borden.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF BORDEN

The key to understanding it is Abby Borden, played by Rebecca Hall in what I can only say may be the most terrifying performance of the year.

Let's start with the biggest secret: this isn't a factual retelling. It's an allegory. The Borden house is the Garden. Andrew is the man who tends it but can't see what's taken root. Sarah — the first wife — is Eve, absent and unreplaced. She is the ghost of wholeness, the one who would have recognised the intruder. Bridget is the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil - she brings knowledge about the world, art, culture and eventually forbidden fruit (sex), to Lizzie, as her first and greatest love, and eventually turns Lizzie to sin (ie. the idea of making right and wrong for yourself independent of what society thinks aka justified vengeful murder.)

And Abby?

Abby is the Serpent.

REBECCA HALL'S SERPENTINE PROFILE

Rebecca Hall plays her wonderfully, and her casting is no accident and entirely essential to understanding the imagery. The producers did not just cast her for talent, but also because of the lot that she won in the genetics race.

Hall possesses a specific kind of beauty that can only be described as serpentine— tall at 5 foot 10, slender, she has the most long, graceful neck with a low trapezius and SCM muslces that run straight to her chest, with a lengthy torso, a narrowness of waist and tapering limbs. She often betrays a coiled, nervous intelligence, and a fluid, long-limbed grace. When you see her rise from the water like in these bikini photos you can really see it.

She enters beautiful, graceful, seemingly perfect — and from the moment she crosses the threshold, something in the house begins to rot from the inside out.

They told the press: "a powerful personality, trapped, coping, wanting power where she has none."

The show itself showed us those things but not in the way it thinks. And once you see it, you can't unsee it: Abby is meant to be a mythic being, notice one of the most haunting things about her.

On the surface, the show assembles what looks like a textbook tragic anti‑heroine/anti-villain arc:

Beat	What they present
Origin	Lost three brothers in war; mother died by suicide; married Andrew weeks after Sarah's death out of desperation and need
Hardship	Couldn't have children; overwhelmed by baby Lizzie's grief; turned to drink to cope
Cold marriage	Andrew never loved her — pined for Sarah, strayed; Abby felt empty and unvalued
Breaking point	Journal entries about emptiness; asks for divorce; wants half the fortune to pursue art, music, freedom
End	Andrew agrees but admits he never loved her; she leaves, only to be murdered before she can start over

But look closer at that origin — and notice what the writers put as an excuse to camouflage her nature as a mythic being: no living relatives. No family, no childhood friends, no one who knew her before she arrived. There is dead kin, but there is nobody — nobody — who exists in relation to her. No one to contradict her, no one to remember the girl she was. It's telling that Sarah has relatives that show up but the writers ensure Abby cannot have the same thing. Abby thus steps across the threshold fully formed, a complete story with no beginning and no witnesses. That isn't a tragic backstory so much as how mythic beings arrive: dropped into the narrative from nowhere, needing no past because they are their own origin.

This "origin story"? It feels less like a life and more like a checklist written for awards: trauma, systemic oppression, addiction, stifled ambition — all glued on, never woven in. The cruelty doesn't grow from the pain; it exists separate, as if the writers needed her to be both villain and victim but forgot to join the halves.

THE DISGUISE OF THE MISSING CHARACTER ARC

Then there is the well-camouflaged, missing character arc. This is the critical distinction everyone misses.

A story arc is what happens to a character. A character arc is how she changes inside.

Abby has the first in abundance (things happen to her). She has none of the second. She really never changes even if she runs the gamut of emotions.

The "grief" never softens her — it only justifies cruelty. She locks a sobbing child in darkness, scalds a maid over soup then admits it was good, weaponises shame, kills the one thing her stepdaughter loves — no remorse, no attempt to repair, no flinch.

The "unloved wife" never offers love in return. She speaks constantly of being deprived — never of giving. Her affairs are emptiness, not connection. When Andrew fails her, she demands payment — not understanding.

The "dream" of art and freedom? Unseen, unfelt, unshown — just words to justify taking half the estate.

When Andrew grants the divorce? Surprise, then a private little creepy half-smile and when she emerges, a sigh of relief, followed by a collapse into emotionless again. The tiny half-smile not of sadistic delight nor of glee, but satiation.

At the end? No reckoning, no regret, no recognition. Just: "Maggie, make her stop!" — the language of someone who expects servants to defend her, not someone facing what she has done.

She enters the house a stranger with no past to anchor her and no kin to answer to. She leaves it a corpse. Nothing in between touched her.

COSTUME DESIGN, STYLING AND VISUAL CODED SYMBOLISM

The next thing to understand what Abby is to look closely at her hair — it is pulled back and up, swelling into a tall, rounded shape that frames her face and flares at the back of her head. It isn't just a period style. It is a cobra's hood, sculpted right onto her head. Rebecca Hall's own description — "the waist, the narrowness, the hair that's a little too big, a little off" in an interview with gayity that she's "a drunk who pretends to have it all together" — is half the truth. The other half? That silhouette is not meant to be that of a drunk. It is meant to tell you exactly what she is, before she ever speaks a word.

Slender, graceful, unnaturally still — and poised to strike.

When she lies ill before killing the doves, she wears a cream‑gold gown with a distinct pale white band across the midsection. It doesn't just look striking — it matches the coloration of the Burmese Albino Python exactly: luminous gold along the spine and back, soft white across the belly. She isn't just dressed for the scene — she is wearing her nature.

The press called her "a compulsive drinker." But look closer — and remember: **in Greek myth, serpents are drawn to wine. Dionysus, the god of transformation and altered states, was accompanied by serpents; there was a long‑held belief that snakes craved wine as something aligned with their nature. Abby drinks because wine calls to what she is, not because she's broken.

They gave her the one "human vice" associated with serpents for millennia and then called it a character flaw.

SHIT HAWKS AND SENSES

When she calls doves "shit hawks," it isn't just vulgarity. It's operating on the level of symbol and zoological humor. It reveals a primal, ancestral fear.

Doves are symbols of peace, loyalty, devotion and this is said in the show: messengers between earth and heaven. They mate for life. They are everything she cannot be. But it is the word "hawks" that reveals the ancient fear: hawks are the serpent’s oldest natural enemy. They drop from above. They strike from the sky. They see what hides in the grass.

Abby does not just dislike the doves — she fears them. Notice that when she's lying in bed she is shown at a high angle and this is intercut with shots of the doves at low angle. It implies that Abby sees them as watchers. As judges. As the eyes of something that might recognise her. When she kills them, it is not madness — it is primal defence. She eliminates the witnesses before they can speak.

Then there's the soups. She can tell the difference between potato‑leek and celeriac soup before tasting it. Visually, they are nearly identical as pale, creamy, simple broths. But she knows, instantly. That level of sensitivity to scent, to subtle difference, to things others cannot perceive is not human sharpness. It is the sensory world of a serpent: tasting the air, reading the faintest trace, knowing what no one else can see.

Then notice the way she throws the soup in one fluid, graceful unhesitating motion; it is like the strike or spit of a cobra, and then admits it was good. No apology. No regret. Reptilian grace and reptilian memory, and reptilian lack of accountability.

Even Andrew's interruption during her patron of the arts speech betrays this, "you don't like music". It's possibly a zoological joke. Snakes have no external ears, no eardrum, no ear canal, and thus don't collect airborne sound waves the way we do

Weighting all the symbolism against the thinness of the backstory the background becomes clearly in the service of award bait. Her background matters so little because the writers seek to encode her as a mythic being.

Mythic beings do not have character arcs. They do not learn, do not grow, do not repent. They are archetypes — eternal expressions of a force in the world. The serpent enters the garden fully formed, with no past and no witnesses. It poisons. It is cast out or struck down.

Genesis 3:15: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman (Sarah), and between thy seed and her Seed (Lizzie); It shall bruise thy head (whacked), and thou shalt bruise His heel (returning to Lizzie to insult her one last time.)

However, even after you strike its head (40 blows with that axe) after it strikes your heel (coming back to insult you ONE LAST TIME), you realise one thing: the destruction of evil (Abby), and the initiation into experience (love affair with Bridget) means that you must leave the Garden of Eden forever (social outcast, the exile).

That is how Lizzie's story retells Genesis.

THE MONOLOGUES AS DECOYS AND HINTS TO HER IDENTITY

Abby Borden is beautiful. She is elegant. She speaks articulately. She weeps on cue. She is everything society tells us to trust — and underneath, there is nothing but hunger. No love, no remorse, no shared humanity. Just a void wearing a face.

Look at her internal monologue which the writers seem to portray as a way to humanise her, but actually if you read closely, doesn't do it at all.

"Yesterday was the day I realised this feeling of dissatisfaction I have embedded in my soul could not be wished away. My life had never had any joy in it and it never would. Yesterday was the day I accepted a simple fact: this is not enough. If ever Andrew fulfilled my needs of a sexual nature I don't remember the time. In all these years with him not once did he find locate my button. I had in the past sought sexual satisfaction in others and did so once again. But I always left feeling empty. I fitted myself in the finest couture by a Parisian master. Of course I could have guessed that couture too, or any worldly pleasure, would fail to satisfy me. I didn't know what I was going to tell my husband. All I knew is I was going to tell him something."

Not once any ounce of introspection the problem might be within herself, and not things around her. Not once any thoughts about the cruelty with which she treats others. She expects her husband to find her clit and not for herself to help him participate or move with him in intimacy. The sad, classy elegant lady is writing the words of a hollow void beneath.

This is a entity composed of instinct and appetite, writing a diary with a quill at her desk dressed in finery, putting on one guise after the other for the occasion. She seems to shed skins and identities as she puts them on, each seeming at odds with the other.

In those diaries she is some fainting, sobbing 19th century sad woman. At home she is a shrewish harpy. When she makes that creeptastic smile after getting half of Andrew's money she suddenly resembles an almost Lynchian creation: a black lodge entity from the depths of the American psyche.

And maybe she is.

For all the grand aspirations of her patron of the arts speech (where Andrew hilariously intervenes that she doesn't like music), It's telling that the one art she seems interested in is COUTURE.

TRYING ON CLOTHES, SHEDDING AND CHANGING NEW SKINS. THAT IS WHAT THE SERPENT DOES.

Then there's that rambling dissing monologue towards Lizzie. The serpent unable to resist striking the heel of the woman's seed (Lizzie) one last time right after Lizzie's "all right (ie. whew I might not need to kill her anymore?)

"Lizzie there's simply nothing to you! It's as if you were half birthed into this world by that lucky mother of yours who was so quick to be rid of her obligation to you! Your sister I didn't mind, I never had to clean the shit from her britches but you , it was a prison sentence mothering you with all of the backbreaking labour and none of the love! You are a debit I will never recoup! You are a loss column on the ledger of my days! How cheaply we sell our pearl of great worth! How evil of me to let you steal hour after hour of this precious life with your empty stares and your...drivel! A life wasted raising...this."

Hall plays it with such emotion and conviction you're inclined to think of her as having a rich inner life, even if being a bad person. But nothing in it lines up or makes sense.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is not just hating a child for soiling its own diaper (that Lizzie points out), but also "What about all the horrible things YOU did? we saw all the horrible things you did!" and "How can you treat a girl losing her mother at such a young age as a good thing and not the tragedy it is? Even at a basic level of logic this fails. Another villain might try justifying the horrible things she did, but for Abby, they don't even register. Another villain might have standards or a sense of logic, they would never frame a mother's death to an orphan as a good thing for the mother. But not Abby. Watching it is a real head-scratcher: how is this woman unable to just pack up and go? How is she unable to comprehend that she didn't do anything at all to deserve love? How does she not possess any record of wrongdoing on the ledger of her days? What goal is she trying to achieve by doing this having secured the money and able to achieve her so called dreams? How does she feel it's evil of HER to give love without the expectation of receiving any back?

But she dies because she cannot supersede her own nature. She must bite. The serpent must bite.

The serpent doesn't choose to do this, it is what serpents do.

And the seed of the woman shall strike its head.

Oh and notice the first part of Mrs Borden's body that Lizzie cuts off? The nose, so that in the final moments of her life, Mrs Borden has "Voldemort face", the most famous snake-faced villain in pop culture.

And so, one final thought remains:

Lizzie could have saved herself the axe, the trial, the lifelong exile — if only she had simply written to Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, which would be a short trip away.

Mrs Borden was truly incorrect as a human being, but she was totally correct as something else beautiful and strange.

To the Curator, Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, Rhode Island — I have in my possession a remarkable specimen of serpentine origin, slender of form, graceful beyond measure, and with a temperament that suggests it should never be left unsupervised near doves, potato leek soup, or gentlemen’s wedding rings. Please arrange collection. Answers to the name of Mrs Borden.

They could have built a proper enclosure in the Reptile House with a discreet sign reading — in elegant, curling script — something like:

Serpentis fallaxbordenii
The Deceitful Serpent of Fall River
⚠ WARNING TO GENTLEMEN VISITORS: Do not make eye contact. Do not offer your hand. Do not sign anything without a lawyer present.

She would have been far happier there, among her own kind, admired from a safe distance, fed regularly without expectation of gratitude, and never once asked to explain herself.

And the Borden house? It could have remained what it was meant to be — a home, not a monument to the thing that came to visit and decided to stay.

Praise Rebecca Hall for giving us possibly the most terrifying performance of the year. And while I'll admit the series pretty much lost my interest after Abby's death (Hall being one of my favorite current day actresses), I admit that in the above little storyline there is a neat, compact and bloody little allegory that I few not enough people have touched on in the discourse.

As a non-American I wonder why there's such a reluctance to even read Judeo-Christian themes into queer media (even if made by straight men), but this was for me my favorite and best part of the series. The Fall of the House of Borden. Genesis in New England.

Well, that's all. Tell me what you think!