The ocean and the urban: Poe's “The Oblong Box”

Abstract

ABSTRACTAt the end of Poe's oceanic tale “The Oblong Box,” the narrator makes the surprising confession that despite having solved the mystery of what lay inside the mysterious “box,” he rarely “sleeps soundly at night.” Given Poe's propensity for narrating the return of bodies, why might the loss, rather than the return, of a coffin evoke horror from the narrator in this tale at sea? This essay considers the ways that oceanic and urban spaces were constructed as interrelated and codependent, though contrasted, in antebellum literature. As opposed to the city, a space of surfaces and solidified forms, the ocean's fluidity presents a limitless depth, unable to be contained by figures like the city streets and solid geometric forms found in the true crime reporting of antebellum New York and imagined throughout Poe's urban detective fictions. The essay reads Poe's oceanic tale “The Oblong Box” in relation to conventions of detective and gothic fiction and with influence from studies of oceanic and spatial studies of literature before finally turning to city-mysteries to show how the ocean becomes a projected space of depth that refuses mapping in antebellum fiction. This prompts us to explore urban fiction in relation to oceanic space, a developing turn in American literary studies. Specifically, questions of surface and depth open up conversations regarding the epistemological problems of the ocean in an antebellum print world that was already struggling to map and contain the growing spaces of urban locales like Poe's New York and Philadelphia. In a telling inversion of the gothic notions of surface and depth, Poe's narrator discovers that at sea, looking below the surface serves to obfuscate and swallow meaning rather than to reveal it.