In his late-Romantic essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", Thomas De Quincey identifies a cultural preoccupation with the aestheticisation of violence and the lionisation of the sovereign subject's power over the passive victim. In this approximation, the artist-murderer is a subject who triumphs by annihilating a figure that is perceived as feminine or Other. There thus lies a misogyny at the heart of De Quincey’s murderer-as-artist, and the masculine exceptionalism which thrives on this has helped perpetuate the myth of the criminal hero/anti-hero. Figures such as Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Wilde's Dorian Gray, Highsmith’s Ripley and Harris's Hannibal Lecter permeate Western culture to this day. The ubiquity of this artist-murderer is emblematic of a problem which pervades wider society, from online misogyny, explored by Angela Nagle, to the phenomenon of mass shooting, as explored by Lisa Downing. The main tropes explored in this thesis—of the artist murderer, the queer murderer and the femme fatale—have all been established in this spirit, in which a masculinised perspective, written in a code of phallic symbolism, prevails. The misogyny which underpins this is rooted in a long-standing sexualisation of the image of the feminine that is predicated on masculine domination and ownership, as John Berger explores. This thesis analyses this violent relationship between the subject and the image in literature, as well as aestheticised murder in literature as a form of ekphrasis. Artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s theories of the matrixial offer a means of decoding representations of the subject-image relationship, and works in which these traditional paradigms of gender are undermined are highlighted. Therefore, a discourse of ekphrasis guided by matrixial theory will be brought to light which wrests the image of the feminine and the Other out of the violent hands of tradition.