De Quincey's Liminal Interspaces: "on Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts"‪.‬

In his 1854 "Postscript," the last of three essays collectively titled "On murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," Thomas De Quincey uses the iconography of doors and thresholds to explore the dynamics of transgressive violence. Such 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." They also function tropologically to develop his aesthetic of "dark" sublimity, as set forth in his well-known reflection, "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" (1823). In dramatizing the murderer John Williams' 1812 invasion of two homes in London's East End, De Quincey concentrates attention on moments of "suspersion," wherein we witness not simply the breaching of conventional boundaries between public and private spheres, but also the blurring of cultural constructions of value associated with them. Williams' depredations thus represent an ambivalent fetishizing of power that is inseparable from De Quincey's apprehensions regarding the "colossal pace of advance" in mid-Victorian England. Through its 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." **********