De Quincey’s Liminal Interspaces: ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Abstract

Claims that in his 1854 “Postscript” to the three essays collectively titled “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” De Quincey uses the iconography of doors and thresholds to explore the dynamics of transgressive violence. These liminal sites become metonymic analogues for his conception of masculinized agency, specifically in response to what in “The Household Wreck” (1838) he calls “the mighty Juggernaut of social life,” and function tropologically to develop his aesthetic of “dark” sublimity, as set forth in his well-known refection, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1832). Believes that in dramatizing the murderer John Williams’ 1812 invasion of two homes in London’s East End, De Quincey concentrates attention on moments of “suspersion,” when conventional boundaries between public and private spheres are broken and cultural constructions of value are blurred. Concludes that by focusing on the tracing of these tensions as figurative interspaces, the “Postscript” can be read as addressing certain symptoms and impasses of modernity, not least the simulacral nature of the “self".