Lizzie Borden Argumentative Essay

Modern society has become emotionally numb and drastically morbid. It is proven by the fact that negative headlines sell better than positive ones. The same can be said of the human tendency to accept negative information about someone more readily than positive information. The writer of the article “Lizzie Borden: Her School and Later Life – A Noble Woman, Though Retiring”, published in The Boston Herald, advocates for Lizzie Borden’s innocence, despite the human tendency to reject positive information about an individual. Lizzie Borden was being accused of murder and the writer sought to prove, through an extensive analysis of her appearance, that Lizzie could not be guilty. The author’s use of faulty logic, due to the lack of substantial

We, as the readers, have to interpret much of what he says into what Borden might possibly be feeling. The sympathy we feel is very small and comes from our assumptions of how Borden might be feeling, not from what the author writes. For example, when he says that “her dark, lustrous eyes, ordinarily flashing, were dimmed…. suffering she was undergoing and had experienced” (Herald,1). The eyes of someone can be deceiving, as the eyes can be easily misread and emotions can be faked, too. His superficial reading is not plausible because he doesn’t personally know Borden or what her tendencies are when she is upset. There is no way he can accurately assess what she feels without even knowing her on a deeper level. Even if his judgment was correct, there is no guaranteed, as contorted as this sounds, that the reason she was sad was because her parents had just been killed. There are too many variables to judge accurately what an individual is feeling or thinking. We cannot fully sympathize and feel for her because what he is saying is so vague and he has no prove of it either. Had all of it come from a personal confession from Borden, it would be a different case, but he is simply assuming that is the way she feels. We feel much less sympathetic when the author says that Borden “is a strong argument in her own favor” (1). No. Her beauty does not make her and sad eyes are not strong proof of her innocence at all. It also points towards how shallow the argument truly is. Rather than draw a nod of approval, it brings out a strong distaste from the author as he, to a certain extent, objectifies Borden. He doesn’t really know anything about Borden, merely scratching the surface of who she is by inferring who she is and what she feels through her looks alone. There is a huge difference between inferring someone’s feelings