Accident or Murder? Intentionality, the Picturesque, and the Body of Thomas De Quincey

Abstract

Explores the characteristics of the picturesque that led De Quincey to exploit that genre in many of his works, including Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Suspiria De Profundis, The English Mail-Coach, and “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Believes De Quincey found the picturesque a useful construct because its self-conscious detachment of aesthetic vision from material reality, its atemporality, and its blurring of questions of agency and control allowed him to use the picturesque perspective to distance himself from his own body – not only from physical pain, but also from psychological distress. Demonstrates how the immateriality of the picturesque perspective is dramatized in De Quincey’s obsession with the complementary tropes of accident and murder, used throughout his writings to define a spectrum of differing degrees of intentionality and agency along which his own actions are measured.