Lifting the Lid on Poe's "Oblong Box"

Abstract

general indifference and lack curiosity with which most readers have reacted to The Oblong Box seems to defy a natural human impulse to uncover what is concealed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott's dismissal it as Poe's less successful tales horror(1) is characteristic a more widespread lack interest. Two recent discussions, however, which have drawn attention to the self-referential dimension The Oblong Box, have rescued the tale from undeserved obscurity.(2) Now that the nails have been drawn, it is time for a closer look at what has been packed away so long. My detailed examination seeks to demonstrate that, this story at least, self-referentiality and social or political statement were, for Poe, part the same exercise. Published 1844, The Oblong Box is the story a voyage by packet-ship, the Independence, from Charleston to New York. first-person narrator is pleased to see that the passenger list includes the name his university friend, the artist Cornelius Wyatt, who is traveling with his bride and his two sisters. Most the narrator's attention is taken up by the question why Wyatt has reserved three state-rooms for his party four, and with speculations about the contents the six by two and a half foot box that Wyatt keeps his state-room. After several days, the ship founders a storm off Cape Hatteras and Wyatt leaps from a lifeboat, swims back to the ship, and retrieves the box. He then lashes himself to it, jumps overboard, and disappears beneath the waves. When the narrator remarks on how suddenly they sank, the captain cryptically replies, They will soon rise again... but not till the salt melts (p. 933). A month later, the narrator meets the captain on Broadway, who informs him that the box contained the salted-down corpse Wyatt's adored wife, who died the morning before the scheduled departure. extra state-room was for her lady's-maid, who impersonated her on the voyage for the benefit the passengers, nine tenths them, who would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead (p. 933). This explanation does nothing to calm the narrator, who has been moody, nervous, and insomniac throughout the voyage. Haunted by Wyatt's hysterical laugh (p. 934), which he provoked by ill-judged witticisms about the contents the box, he concludes by complaining that of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night (p. 934). Packing his wife's body in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements (p. 856) was one the expedients considered by the protagonist The Black Cat, published the preceding year. idea, both stories, may have derived from a notorious New York murder. In 1841 John Colt, brother the inventor the Colt rifle, quarrelled with the printer Samuel Adams over a payment for books and killed him an apartment on Broadway and Chambers Street. He then disposed the body by packing it salt an oblong box and sending it on board the Kalamazoo at its Maiden Lane pier. Convicted and condemned, Colt further confirmed his place the annals criminal history by marrying and committing suicide prison the day he was scheduled to hang, November 1842.(3) So sensational was this murder that Herman Melville, alluding to it Bartleby more than ten years later, was able to rely on his readers' recollection the details. When Poe's boxed edition this murder, marriage, and suicide formula was published 1844, the incident was still very fresh the public mind. interest the story for Poe, as for Melville, however, was not simply the lurid aspects the case, which captured the popular imagination, but its connection with the passions and economics the contemporary New York publishing world. Poe's associate Rufus Griswold, whose intense and troubled relationship with Poe started 1841, began his career as a printer, like Colt's victim, Adams. …