Visual metaphors of liminality in Edward Hopper's paintings

This study examines liminality in Edward Hopper’s paintings through the analytical lens of visual metaphor, foregrounding how pictorial elements construct threshold experience. Liminality, understood as a state ‘betwixt and between,’ entails suspended temporality, spatial indeterminacy, and destabilized existential boundaries. While Hopper’s work has been widely discussed within art history, the metaphorical structures through which liminality is visually constructed have not been previously theorized. The article demonstrates that Hopper’s environments function as metaphorical projections of psychological and ontological states. Solitary houses operate as visual metaphors of the human condition: anthropomorphized facades stand for isolation, sealed or darkened windows for emotional opacity, and architectural stillness for temporal arrest. These structures figure existential in-betweenness, poised between habitation and abandonment, presence and absence. Threshold objects further articulate liminality through metaphorical transformation. Windows become metaphors of perceptual and epistemic boundaries, simultaneously connecting and separating interior and exterior realms. Doors signify denied transition, suggesting passage while withholding it, whereas stairways embody suspended movement without arrival. Spatial configurations generate additional metaphorical mappings. Railroads operate as metaphors of rupture and separation, dividing pictorial worlds into incompatible domains. Coastal edges and lighthouses figure ontological thresholds between stability and flux, safety and exposure. Emptied interiors metaphorize human absence, transforming domestic space into an index of psychological desolation. Light and shadow assume a metaphorical role: twilight atmospheres and artificial illumination convey temporal indeterminacy, while chiaroscuro figures cognitive uncertainty and perceptual ambiguity, rendering space unstable. The findings demonstrate that liminality in Hopper is actively constructed through a coherent system of visual metaphors of suspension, isolation, and thresholdness that convert architectural, spatial, and luminous forms into vehicles of existential meaning. The study advances a metaphor-centered framework for interpreting liminality in visual art and opens interdisciplinary pathways for liminality studies in visual culture.