[In the following essay, Rzepka contends that De Quincey's portraits of violence are deeply influenced by his reading of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.]

“The Greek Tragedy is a dark problem,” announces Thomas De Quincey at the beginning of his essay, “Theory of Greek Tragedy” (X, 342),¹ the problem being, first, how to distinguish between Greek and Modern, or “Shakespearean,” tragedy, and secondly, how to make this distinction intelligible to the un-Greeked, middle-class audience of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February, 1840. De Quincey, an adept popularizer, solves both problems by nesting Greek Tragedy within the framework of a Shakespearean example universally familiar to the literate classes of England: the “play within a play” of Hamlet, which he likens, in turn, to a painting within a painting:

We see a chamber, suppose, exhibited by the artist, on the walls of which … hangs a picture. And, as this picture again might represent a room furnished with pictures, in the mere logical possibility of the case we might imagine this descent into a life below a life going on ad infinitum. … The original picture is a mimic, an unreal, life. But this unreal life is itself a real life with respect to the secondary picture; which again must be supposed realized with relation to the tertiary picture, if such a thing were attempted. Consequently, at every step of the involution … each term in the descending series, being first of all a mode of non-reality to the spectator, is next to assume the functions of a real life in its relations to the next lower or interior term of the series.

(X, 344)

By means of such “involutions,” De Quincey says, Shakespeare insured “that the secondary or inner drama should be non-realized upon a scale that would throw, by comparison, a reflex colouring of reality upon the principal drama” (344-45). For De Quincey, Greek Tragedy “stands in the very same circumstances” as the play within the play of Hamlet, a derealized “life within a life which the painter sometimes exhibits to the eye, and which the Hamlet of Shakespeare exhibits to the mind.”

De Quincey's structural analogy between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy is founded upon an essential, and revealing, elision, which emerges only as he proceeds: Ancient tragedy, he reiterates, is “what the inner life of the mimetic play in Hamlet is to the outer life of the Hamlet itself. It is a life below a life” (347). But then, the question almost seems to form itself in De Quincey's mind as it must have in the minds of his readers, what is it to our life? That, after all, is the original “dark problem”: How does one relate the ancient tragedy to oneself, to the modern, middle-class spectator of modern, Shakespearean tragedies like Hamlet?

Specifically, if the play within Hamlet “realizes” the “life” of Hamlet for its spectators, then what gets “realized” when we view directly, and without the mediation of another “picture,” the “derealized” “life within a life” framed by Greek tragedy? De Quincey's answer is, our own life: “The Greek tragic life presupposed another life” like the play within Hamlet, but this life is actually “the spectator's, thrown into relief before it” (347). In the median place of that material signifier of our life occupied, in modern practice, by a play called Hamlet, we find only what De Quincey calls “an immeasurable gulf of shadows” that are, it turns out, nothing less than our own shadows, dematerialized phantasms that seem to inhabit the very mind beholding them.

The phrase “immeasurable gulf of shadows” recalls De Quincey's earliest published essay on Shakespearean tragedy, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” There, the knocking at the gate immediately following the murder of Duncan interrupts the frantic exchanges of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, reminding us, “by reaction” and the sudden “reflux” of “ordinary life,” that we have for a time been suspended in a nightmare from which we are about to awaken. Macbeth and his wife have been “conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed”:

The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess … time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.

(Lindop, 84; italics added)

The knocking at the gate “first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended” ordinary life (85).

This scene from the second act of Macbeth clearly assumed for De Quincey, as early as 1823, something of the same dreamlike status that Greek tragedy was to assume in his essay for Blackwood's seventeen years later—sequestered, recessed, insulated, self-withdrawn, slumbering, inhuman, this Shakespearean moment strikes him almost as though it were itself “a play within the play” we call Macbeth. That the Macbeths are “devils,” that we are indeed looking, as De Quincey puts it, “into … hell” (83), was probably suggested to him by the Porter's lines immediately following, which open scene three: “Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of Hell gate, he should have [grown] old turning the key. Knock, knock, knock! Who's there, i’ the name of Beelzebub?” (1-4). In the later essay on Greek tragedy, De Quincey likens its “life within a life,” its “life sequestrated into some far-off slumbering state,” to “Hades” (359).

Accordingly, says De Quincey, compared to the “painting” that is magically brought to life by that “Cornelius Agrippa” of the stage, Shakespeare, as “a thing now passing” (350) before our eyes, the “Tragedy of Greece is always held up as a thing long past”: “We are invited by Sophocles or Euripides, as by some great necromancer, to see long-buried forms standing in solemn groups upon the stage—phantoms from Thebes or from Cyclopian cities” (350). The Greek tragedians enable us to stand in the presence of the “long past” dead, like Odysseus on the far shores of Oceanus (Odyssey, Book 11), and listen to their tale of suffering. In an otherwise irreverent and facetious essay on Greek literature predating “Theory of Greek Tragedy” by two years, De Quincey even goes so far as to say, in one of his few serious moments, that the presiding power of ancient tragedy is Death: “That sort of death, or of life locked up and frozen into everlasting slumber, which we see in sculpture” (X, 315).

If life of the spectator “presupposed” by Greek tragedy is indeed “thrown into relief before it,” then this is not so much a life represented in present time across the limen of proscenium or orchestra, as in modern tragedy, as it is merged with the “immeasurable gulf” inhabited by the “long past” “shadows” of the dead we see before us. Theatrical spectacle has become a species of hallucination, and the symbolic space of modern tragedy has collapsed into the unmediated, pure Imaginary.

The state of mind in which, according to De Quincey, we view Greek tragedy resembles hypnogogic states of dream-waking that are typical of the opium hallucinations described in the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, where, “as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain” (Lindop, 68). In an unpublished fragment of the 1845 Suspiria de Profundus De Quincey described such experiences in terms more closely linked to his idea of Greek tragedy. Here he recalls his power as a child to “project a vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures moving forwards or backwards between [the] bed-curtains and the chamber walls,” and adds that similar “powers of self-projection lurk in the dark places of the human spirit—in grief, in fear, in vindictive wrath” (Japp, I, 7-8)—in short, in the pity and terror that Aristotle makes central to Greek tragedy.

As Nigel Leask puts it in a recent and important essay, “The deep ‘recess’ and ‘life of shadows’ that for De Quincey characterize the Greek tragic stage and the opium dream alike is evidently a psychic space, a site where the ‘deep deep tragedies of childhood’ are metamorphosed into a ‘literature of power’ (109).² Indeed, since De Quincey's only access to Greek tragedy (until 1846, when he reviewed a performance of Antigone on the Edinburgh stage) would have been through texts, the physical playspace of Greek theatre would have necessarily been introjected as “psychic space,” a waking-dream or hallucination, a “vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures” unfolding in the mind, rather than before the eyes. The words “project” and “projection” in De Quincey's reminiscences of hypnogogic power not only resemble the idea of “another life, the spectator's, thrown into relief before” the spectacle itself, but are exactly echoed, in cryptic fashion, by what De Quincey adds next in “Theory of Greek Tragedy”: “The tragedy was projected upon the eye from a vast profundity in the rear” (347).

De Quincey never tells us, in “the rear” of what? In the rear of the spectator's eye? or in the rear of the tragedy itself? I believe the ambiguity is deliberate. On the one hand, De Quincey means “from a vast profundity in the rear” of the eye, where, as he writes in the “Introductory Notice” to the Suspiria, “the machinery for dreaming” is located.

That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connexion with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of the human brain, and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind

(Lindop, 88).

“In the rear” of the spectator's eye lies the “vast profundity” leading, through the “one great tube” of the “dreaming organ,” to the very “life below a life” that Greek tragedy represents on stage before the spectator's eye.

On the other hand, however, De Quincey also seems to be referring to “a vast profundity in the rear” of the visible stage itself, a site that had a precise dramaturgical counterpart in ancient Greek stage practice: the skene or stage house set in back of the public orchestra space where the chorus sang and danced. With its doors located in the center of the stage, the skene represented palace, house, temple, or hut, as the demands of the play required. It was also, typically, the site of any bloody acts of off-stage violence understood to be performed indoors.³

“The vast profundity in the rear” of the Greek stage, then, would refer to what went on behind the closed doors of the skene. The ambiguity of De Quincey's phrasing, like so much else that is ambiguous in his writings, points to a hidden identity: the “chambers of the brain” at the rear of the spector's eye lead obliquely, via the “machinery of dreaming,” down, under, and away—literally, according to one etymological derivation in the OED, in a sublime direction—toward that realm of death-like, superhuman, dreamlike stasis, that “life within” or “below a life” projected before the eye from the “vast profundity in the rear” of the stage itself, from beyond the “limen” or sacred threshold of the oikos.⁴ Household violence, the recurrent and obsessive sado-masochistic fantasy that informs so much of De Quincey's autobiographical writings, fiction, and “impassioned prose”—including the Macbeth essay, the notorious three-part essay, “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” the novel, Klosterheim, and the story “The Avenger”—lies at the hidden heart of his theorization of ancient Greek tragedy as well.⁵

Violence, for De Quincey as for the Greek tragedians, achieves its sublime power by remaining hidden from the public eye, which is to say, out of the eye of public spectators or the “mob.” Its power derives from its occlusion precisely because relegating violence to the realm of the “shadowy” forces it to express itself, almost literally, according to De Quincey's hydraulic metaphor, through the “one great tube” of the dreaming machinery, in the form of a hallucination that seems to envelope the spectator himself. The point of occlusion in this circuit of tragic sublimation is the point of empowerment: the limen, the threshold between public and private spheres.

De Quincey's understanding of the sub-liminal or sublime power of hidden violence depends on patriarchal cultural assumptions endemic to classical Greece. As Hannah Arendt argues, in The Human Condition (22-68), the public sphere of the Greek polis rested, ultimately, on each male citizen's power to exclude from public view all events and processes that could be understood as revealing his subjection to natural forces beyond his control: birth, death, illness, hunger—in general, all events endemic to the life of the body. Such events were relegated to the private, domestic sphere that lay beyond the threshold of the oikos, where female citizens were sequestered.

Of course, the male citizen's absolute—if nominal—authority over that domestic sphere could not encompass a corresponding power to control the dark forces circumscribed within it. Children were born, parents died. But the fiction of absolute patriarchal power over the oikos was essential to maintaining the fiction of the male citizen's absolute autonomy as a participant in the deliberations of the polis. This is why an outsider crossing the threshold of the oikos without permission, let alone doing violence to its inhabitants, was considered a crime second only in magnitude to the intramural defiance of the authority of the patriarch, or kyrios, by wife, children, or slaves. At the same time, however, the hubris displayed in such acts of violence—Oedipus's patricide, Clytemnestra's murder of her spouse—laid claim, as in a sublime orator's violations of the standard rules of rhetoric in Longinus's Peri Hypsous, to superhuman prerogatives in defiance of the laws of gods and men, with commensurate risks of violent punishment. The result, on the Greek stage, was to make the criminal both reprehensible and sublime.

Like the Greek tragedians, De Quincey understood that hubristic violence derived its imaginative power from its public occlusion. Relegated to the realm of the “shadowy,” violence is forced to exert its power—almost palpably, according to De Quincey's hydraulic metaphor, through the “one great tube” of the dreaming machinery, in the displaced form of a hallucination that seems to envelope the spectator himself. The point of occlusion in this circuit of tragic sublimation is the point of imaginative empowerment: the limen, the threshold between public and private spheres.

In the highly sensational 1854 “Postscript” to his first two essays “On Murder Considered as a Fine Art” which were published separately in 1827 and 1839, De Quincey “sublimates” this threshold, traces this subterranean circuit, by pointedly shifting our imaginary point of view away from the murderer John Williams' imminent “extermination” of the Marr household at 29 Radcliffe Highway and then, only after the mayhem has ceased, bringing us back to the scene of the crime by means of an imaginative recreation pieced together from the “hieroglyphics” this “artist” left behind, as deciphered by the crowds who discovered them upon crossing the threshold themselves. Between the moment when Williams enters the house and the moment his “masterpiece” is discovered, however, we take up the point of view of a servant, Mary, who had been sent on an errand just prior to Williams' arrival and has returned just at the moment the bloody business is completed, but before Williams has left the house (XIII, 85).

What follows is a tour de force. We observe Mary arriving at the door and, finding it locked, knocking softly to be admitted. Receiving no answer from the inmates, who she assumes must still be awake, she begins to suspect that some disaster must have overtaken them. At that moment, she hears the stealthy footsteps of the murder[er] himself approaching the opposite side of the door. The two of them can hear each other breathing across the threshold. Suddenly, the horror of realization comes over her, and Mary starts “to ring the bell and to ply the knocker with unintermitting violence” (89). Williams flees, the crowd gathers, and the scene of carnage, like the corpses piled on the Greek cycclema, are displayed in all their gory splendor.

Mary's knocking had already, in the 1823 Macbeth essay, served to link Williams' 1811 “debut on the stage of Radcliffe Highway” with the murder of Duncan, to the delight of every “connoisseur in murder” (82). Leask offers a developmental reading of De Quincey's aesthetics of murder, moving from the “Knocking” essay of 1823 and the first two “Murder” essays of 1827 and 1839 through the period of De Quincey's writings on Greek tragedy (1838-1846) to the final “Postscript” to the “Murder” essays of 1854. Leask believes that De Quincey's shift to Mary's point of view in the more circumstantial “Postscript” marks an important departure from his earlier treatment of the Williams murders, insofar as, in the earlier “Knocking” and first two “Murder”essays, De Quincey professes the interest of murder to inhere primarily in our identification or “empathy” with the murderer, while in the “Postscript” that focus of empathy is centered on a potential victim, Mary. Leask attributes this “shift of narrative focus” to the “influence of the choric perspective of Greek tragedy” (114) resulting from the fact that in the years intervening between the second, “Murder” essay and the 1854 ““Postscript” “De Quincey sought to elaborate and deepen his earlier satirical aesthetics of murder [in the first two “Murder” essays] by means of a study of Greek tragedy” (106).

The influence of Greek tragedy on this shift cannot, I believe, be denied, but Leask's developmental theory may be too neat to fit all the facts of the case. First, it is fiendishly difficult to determine the dates of composition for most of De Quincey's published writings. His work habits were, to say the least, untidy, and he often wrote MS drafts for articles that were never published, or were published as parts of later works, or were rescued from the bathtub that served as his escritoire and revised much later for publication. Masson notes that De Quincey's curious reference in the 1854 “Postscript” to his two previous essays as one “paper” in the singular suggests that the Postscript may have been in manuscript shortly after the publication of the “First Paper” [in 1827] and before the “Second” had been written [in 1839]” (XIII, 70n). To which one might add the fact that De Quincey continues to use the singular thereafter: “this bagatelle” (70), “this lecture on the aesthetics of murder” (71), “my own little paper” (72). In addition, De Quincey's first essay on Greek tragedy, “A Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature,” predates by a year the publication of the second of the “Murder” essays, which shows no sign of what Leask contends is so important an influence on De Quincey's later aesthetic of murder. In the “Postscript” itself, moreover, the agenda of empathy is not as cleanly reversed as Leask would have it: for instance, we are never invited to identify with the actual victims of Williams' depredations, which is consistent with De Quincey's insistence, in the “Knocking” essay, that the feelings of victims are not aesthetically or psychologically interesting, while we are invited, several times, to look into the “wolfish” mind of Williams himself, who kills both for the aesthetic excitement of it and, more vulgarly, for money.

Most importantly, De Quincey had been since childhood an outstanding student of classical languages, especially Greek, in which, one of his teachers once declared, “he could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one” (Lindop, 7). Thus, his acquaintance with Greek tragedy long predated even the earliest of his published writings, and famously left its mark on that earliest piece as well. At the beginning of the second installment of the Confessions in the London Magazine for October 1821, De Quincey likens himself in the throes of opium withdrawal to Orestes suffering the wrath of the Eumenides after having killed Clytemnestra. De Quincey calls his ministering young wife, Margaret, his “Elektra!” who “neither in nobility of mind nor in long-suffering affection, wouldst permit that a Grecian sister should excel an English wife” (Lindop, 36). Here, two years before the “Knocking” essay, De Quincey mingles citations on the “blessed balm” of sleep (35) from the opening scene of Euripides' Orestes with Macbeth's famous line, “sleep no more!” We need not postulate a developmental scheme for De Quincey's apparently “choric” shift in point of view in the “Postscript” of 1854: Greek tragedy was never very far from De Quincey's thoughts when they turned to murder.

Nor do I accept Leask's contention that De Quincey's shift to an extramural vantage in the “Postscript” marks the adoption of a “choric” point of view. If anything, it is the London crowd, the “mob,” as De Quincey calls it (borrowing a common Euripidean epithet) that most clearly represents the “group think” De Quincey associates with the Greek chorus, whose function, as he indicates in the 1845 Suspiria, is “not to tell you anything absolutely new, that was done by the actors in the drama; but to recall you to your own lurking thoughts.” In addition, the chorus is “to place before you … such commentaries, prophetic or looking back, pointing the moral or deciphering the mystery” (Lindop, 156), much as the crowds rushing into No. 29 Radcliffe Highway are said to have deciphered Williams' bloody “hieroglyphics” and to have voiced, collectively, our own thirst for vengeance. The point of view De Quincey adopts at the crucial moment of truth is, indeed, exterior to the limen or threshold, but it is centered in a single young female, and a potential victim of the murderer, at that. Let me offer, then, a much more specific model for De Quincey's empathic regard, drawn from his favorite play and playwright: the character of Hermione, daughter of Helen, from Euripides' Orestes, the play that figured so prominently at the structural center of the original Confessions.

Leaving aside De Quincey's devoting an entire review to the Edinburgh Antigone—a choice of play dictated by circumstances—Euripides receives more citations (and more laudatory citations) than any other ancient playwright in the complete works, and Orestes receives more of these than any other Euripidean play. This should not surprise us: when he ran off from Manchester Grammar School at the age of 17 to seek his fortune in Wales and London, De Quincey took with him only two books: Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in one pocket, and “an odd volume, containing about one-half of Canter's ‘Euripides’ in the other” (III, 299).

William Canter's two-volume edition of Euripides (1602) is not exactly a pocket-sized affair by modern standards, and if De Quincey decided to take but one of the two volumes, it was most likely the first, weighing in at 757 pages, rather than the second, which, including Index and Annotations for the set, runs to 1248. The first volume contains Orestes, as well as two other plays featuring indoor violence—Medea and Hecuba. (Elektra is contained in the second volume.)

In “Theory of Greek Tragedy,” De Quincey praises Euripides as “the most Wordsworthian of the Athenian poets in the circumstance of having a peculiar theory of poetic diction, which lowered its tone of separation … These innovations ran in the very same direction as those of Wordsworth in our own times” (357n). Euripides' diction was designed to “impress pity,” making it “less grand (it is true) and stately” than that of his predecessors, but “with far greater power of pure (sometimes, we may say, of holy) household pathos. Such also was the change wrought by Wordsworth” (357n). There is some truth to this. Euripides was cited by Longinus for his use of colloquial diction, a tendency most pronounced in Andromache, and his innovations in monody and strophic form were ground-breaking. He also shares with Wordsworth a sympathy for the virtuous lower classes and an interest in the deranging effects of powerful emotions. In his review of Antigone, De Quincey defends Euripides' emotional range against the relatively cold “artistry” of Sophocles by stating, “He was able to sweep all the chords of the impassioned spirit” (X, 371).

De Quincey's admiration for Euripides' way with “household pathos” corresponds to his praise, in a footnote to the Orestes passage in the Confessions, for “the early scenes of the Orestes; one of the most beautiful exhibitions of the domestic affections which even the dramas of Euripides can furnish” (Lindop, 36n). This assessment leans uneasily against one translator's more recent, and more characteristic, description of the play: “howling spiritual lunacy,” “an image of heroic action seen as botched, disfigured, and sick” (Grene, 186). William Arrowsmith continues: “the unifying motif of the play is the gradual exposure of the real criminal depravity of Orestes and his accomplices,” his sister Elektra and his fast friend, Pylades—a motif, in short, entirely congruent with De Quincey's taste for household violence.

The action of the play is set in the interval between Orestes' murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, for their murder of his father, Agamemnon, and the son's journey to Athens where, according to legend, he will be released from the punishing torments of the Eumenides by the combined judgment of the Athenian assembly and the deciding vote of Athena herself, who thereby exonerates him. As the play opens, Elektra is watching by the side of Orestes' bed, where he has finally been able to fall asleep after six days of relentless mental torture by the Furies. Menalaus (Agamemnon's brother), Helen (his wife), and Hermione (their daughter), have come to pay their respects to the dead Clytemnestra, Helen's sister. The three are staying at the palace of Argos, with Orestes, Elektra, and Pylades. While Menelaus is abroad and Helen is within, Hermione has been sent to pour the libations at her aunt's grave. At the same moment, the townspeople of Argos are meeting to decide the fate of the matricide, his sister, and their friend. The decision comes back: the three are found guilty, but are allowed to take their own lives rather than be stoned to death.

Orestes, whose plea for help has been rejected by his uncle, decides to take the life of Helen in revenge, with the help of Pylades. Helen is within the palace, represented by the skene. Elektra adds to the plot—they shall seize Hermione upon her return from the grave and hold her hostage: “If, Helen slain, Menelaus seek to harm / Thee, him, or me,” she tells Orestes, “Cry, thou wilt slay Hermione: the sword / Drawn must thou hold hard at the maiden's neck, / Then, if Menelaus, lest his daughter die, / Will save thee … Yield to her sire's embrace the maiden's form. / But if, controlling not his furious mood, / He seek to slay thee, pierce the maid's neck through” (1191-99; all citations to trans. by Way).

Williams' characteristic method of murder was bludgeoning followed by the cutting of his victim's throats. In both of the mass murders for which he was famous, Williams was feared to have had an accomplice, the vestigial “Pylades” figure. In the Marr case, the crime is committed while Mary is away from the house, just as Helen is dispatched (actually, as we later discover, she is whisked away by Apollo at the very last instant and apotheosized) while Hermione is on her errand of piety. At the approach of any passer-by, Elektra is to “give token,” to “smite on the door, or send a cry within” (1221-22)—a “knocking at the gate” that never occurs. As the murder of Helen proceeds, Elektra and the chorus keep anxious watch, shying at shadows and chiding each other for their overactive imaginations. When Hermione arrives at the door, she is concerned and suspicious at having heard a cry within. Elektra tells her it is only the cry of Orestes, bewailing his and his sister's fate at the hands of Argos' citizenry. Then Elektra persuades Hermione to enter the house—a moment corresponding to the moment at which, as De Quincey imagines it, Mary was to be “inveigled” into entering the house by the insidious Williams (89). Unlike the valiant Mary, however, Hermione succumbs to Elektra's blandishments.

There is still another female figure from the saga of Orestes that informs the figure of Mary, however, and in some ways, even more precisely. In the Agamemnon of Aeschylus's trilogy, the Oresteia, it is Cassandra, the ever-unheeded prophetess of doom claimed by Agamemnon from the sack of Troy, who stands outside the palace while, within, the man who brought her back to Argos is ambushed by his wife in his bath. Having been invited by Clytemnestra just moments before to join Agamemnon inside, Cassandra hesitates, astonished at the visions of atrocity running through her mind. The chorus remains oblivious:

Cassandra:

What house is this?

Chorus:

The house of the Atreidae. If you understand not that, I can tell you; and so much at least is true.

Cassandra:

No, but a house that God hates, guilty within of kindred blood shed, torture of its own, the shambles for men's butchery, the dripping floor.

(1087-1092; all citations to Lattimore, trans.)

In what follows, Cassandra envisions both the violence that has led up to the slaying of Agamemnon—Atreus's murder of the children of his brother, Thyestes, and his serving them to their father to eat—and the slaying of Agamemnon that is now transpiring just beyond the doorsill: “That room reeks with blood like a slaughter house” (1309). Like Mary, Cassandra is suddenly overwhelmed by a realization of the violence taking place just across the limen. Unlike Mary, and again, like her Greek counterpart, Hermione, she bends to her fate: “So I am going in, and mourning as I go/ my death and Agamemnon's” (1313-14).

The point of De Quincey's focusing on the Mary/Hermione/Cassandra figure in his 1854 “Postscript” is not, as Leask would have it, to accentuate the “choric” perspective, but to enhance the spectator's sense of sublime terror by decreasing the distance between private violence and a potential victim who is protected by nothing more than her publicity, by her remaining in sight, on the near side of the sacred limen of the oikos.

There is no need to belabor Euripides' denouement: Menelaus returns, Orestes and Pylades appear on the roof of the skene with Orestes holding his sword to Hermione's throat, and Elektra follows, having just set fire to the palace. In Arrowsmith's words, “the quality of nightmare [is] pervasive” (188), and “all moral terms are either inverted or emptied of their meaning” (189), a judgment corresponding to De Quincey's characterizations in Act 2, scene 2 of Macbeth. At this point, the standard Euripidean deus ex machina intervenes, with ludicrous results: Apollo placates Menelaus by telling him that Helen is now living with the gods; he orders Pylades to marry Elektra; and (most fantastic!) he tells Orestes to drop his sword, marry Hermione, and set off immediately for Athens, where his fate is to be decided. In this melee of vengeance, betrayal, cowardice, and cold-blooded violence it is hard to remember the “household pathos” of the opening scene that De Quincey so much admired.

What remains constant, however, from the Oresteia of Aeschylus through the Elektra of Sophocles to the Elektra and Orestes of Euripides is the accentuated occlusion of violent household death, the hiding away from public view of “family extermination” unfolding behind the closed door of the skene.⁶ The impact of the Greek example, and of Euripides' Orestes in particular, appears not just in “Murder Considered,” but throughout De Quincey's writings: in Klosterheim, for instance, where the apparent victims of the avenging “Masque” turn out, like Helen, to be alive after all, and the Masque himself turns out to be motivated in his violence, like Euripides' Orestes, by the political betrayal of a usurping uncle. Other students of De Quincey can no doubt cite their own examples. In nearly every case, the sublime of De Quinceyan terror is charged, as it were, like an electrical capacitor, by the thin but impermeable barrier erected and maintained at the limen or threshold between the private and the public spheres, the closed doorway at the back of the stage that imaginatively empowers the hallucinatory violence at the back of the mind.

Notes

1. All citations from De Quincey's works are taken from the edition of Masson, except for those marked “Lindop,” which are from the Lindop edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings.

2. The influence of Greek tragedy on De Quincey's writings had not received much attention before Leask's article appeared. Bilsland examines several allusions to classical drama in an unsystematic way, while O’Quinn focuses more on Plato's influence on Kant and De Quincey than on Greek tragedy itself.

3. I have been unable to determine precisely how much De Quincey would have known concerning the actual details of Greek staging, or exactly how much was knowable during this lifetime. As early as 1835, G. C. W. Schneider published a comprehensive list of ancient references to theatre performance, but it was not until the advent of Albert Muller's and Wilhelm Dorpfeld's more comprehensive and archaeologically informed studies near the end of the century that an accurate picture of the ancient Greek stage began to emerge. De Quincey was aware, like most of the classicists of his day, of the general dimensions of the Greek amphitheaters, of the Greeks' use of the cothurnus or high boots to elevate the actor, of the mask and its mysterious devices for amplifying the voice, and of the voluminous robes meant to lend proportional amplitude to the figure on stage. Regardless of his acquaintance with the skene itself, however, or with the cycclema on which freshly dispatched corpses were wheeled out for display to the audience, it would have been impossible for him to miss signs in the speeches of the characters themselves, or in the stage directions inserted by Latin translators, indicating that a particular act of violence—the murder of Agamemnon or Clytemnestra, for instance, or the self-blinding of Oedipus or the suicide of Jocasta—was to be performed “within doors.”

4. The line of “vision” described by De Quincey seems to correspond to that of another “visionary” “tube,” a reflecting telescope constructed at the Glasgow Observatory in 1841, which the writer had occasion to see and use during a brief stay in Glasgow in 1841-42. An observer using the reflecting telescope would stand with his or her back to the object being observed, in effect seeing in “before” him the “shadows” of an “immeasureable gulf” “projected upon the eye from a vast profundity in the rear” of the eye itself. These experiences, and his acquaintance with the astronomer John Pringle Nichol, provided the basis for De Quincey's dream-like prose poem on the “Nebular Hypothesis” of the Earl of Rosse, which appeared in Tait's Magazine in September 1846. (I am indebted to Grevel Lindop for this observation.)

5. The most important work on De Quincey and violence has been that of Robert M. Maniquis and, more recently, Joel Black. For Maniquis, De Quincey's fascination with violence is inseparable from his ideological commitments to imperial domination and labor exploitation as a Tory conservative. For Black, it represents the first flowering of a modern, mass-mediated taste for violence. See also, in response to Black's reading, Fred Burwick, and for another reading, similar to Leask's, of De Quincey's views of tragedy in relation to Kant, see O’Quinn.

6. Aeschylus's Oresteia, in fact, is the first extant drama for which a large building like the skene would have been necessary at the theater of Dionysus (Bieber, 57), and the violence hidden in the house of Atreus predominates over all other classic examples of domestic violence in the Greek tragedies that have survived antiquity.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958.

Bieber, Margarete. The History of Greek and Roman Theater. 1961.

Bilsland, John W. “De Quincey's Critical Dilations,” U. of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1982): 79-93.

Black, Joel. The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. 1991.

Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Volume 4. 1992.

Japp, Alexander H., ed. The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey. 2 vols. 1891.

Leask, Nigel. “Toward a Universal Aesthetic: De Quincey on Murder as Carnival and Tragedy,” In Questioning Romanticism. Ed. John Beer. 1995. Pp. 92-120

Lindop, Grevel, ed. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. 1985.

Maniquis, Robert M. “The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious.” In Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies. Ed. Robert Lane Snyder. 1985. Pp. 109-39.

Maniquis, Robert M. Lonely Empires: Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey. 1976.

Masson, David, ed. Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey. 14 vols. 1890.

O’Quinn, Daniel. “The Evil Theatrocracy: De Quincey, Kant and the Normative Laws of Tragedy,” European Romantic Review 5:1 (1994): 32-48.