“What Was It?”: The Immaterial Self and Nineteenth-Century American Panic

“What was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” asks Edgar Allan Poe’s narrator in his 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The narrator finds himself inundated with sensations of “insufferable gloom… an utter depression… an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart— an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime” and struggles to find a source for these feelings.¹ At times, the feelings appear to come from the stones of the House, at other times from the objects in the house, and finally Roderick Usher seems to infect the narrator with his feelings. However, the narrator’s question emphasizes that the feelings result from his contemplation; as he thinks of the House, his nerve fails. Twenty years later, the narrator’s question would be echoed in Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1859 “What Was It?”² In these stories the question is both a diegetic and metafictional discussion of terror that is directed by narrators toward the source of their feelings and directing the reader to contemplate the nature of writing. “What was it?” becomes a larger question of what is terrifying in a text. For both authors, their texts’ terror emerges from the persistence of the question’s enigma that the texts never satisfy. Poe asserts the bodily role of

“Say, Rather, the Rending of Her Coffin.” Artist, Harry Clarke. From “The Fall of the House of Usher” in Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with Illustrations by Harry Clarke. (New York: Tudor, 1933), 139.

terror—a failure of narrator and reader to comprehend the terror. O’Brien, on the other hand, questions the reality and materiality of those bodies. “What Was It?” presents bodies as inherently spectral, things which can be investigated to no avail.

Both stories appeared within two years of two major nineteenth-century American financial crises: the Panic of 1837 and the Panic of 1857. Previous criticism has linked Poe’s brand of gothic grotesque to economic instability. Jill Lepore’s “The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror” contextualizes Poe’s writing completely within what she refers to as “the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy.”³ Gavin Jones describes “The Fall of the House of Usher” as an explicit allegory of “an era when rapid social and economic collapse was becoming the norm.” In response to economic insecurity, Jones argues that Poe’s “literature of revulsion” presents an “aesthetics of social failure” that reveals “how modern social relations have always been defined by… uncertainty.” It is telling that both Poe and O’Brien wrote their horror stories during a period when the term “revulsion” connoted economic downturn before it would later be replaced by “depression.”⁴ Both Poe and O’Brien react to the economic crises of their times by offering literary revulsions of their own. Poe responds by offering the text as an imaginative space of immateriality, one which constitutes the relationship between the bodies of authors and readers. Fitz-James O’Brien, on the other hand, troubles the assumptions of the realities of bodies—authorial, textual, and readerly. Telling the story of an encounter with an invisible body, O’Brien suggests the text creates a contact zone that turns back upon the reader, revealing her own immateriality within capitalism.

“what was it?”

Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story is frequently anthologized in collections of Victorian ghost or horror stories, but has largely escaped critical attention. While many of O’Brien’s works are unmemorable, he wrote a few fascinating short stories such as “What Was It?”, The Diamond Lens” (1858), and “The Pot of Tulips” (1855).⁵ O’Brien was wildly popular in his time and was part of a group of writers and artists in 1850-60s New York City called “The Bohemians.” Among their ranks were writers such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry Clapp, and John...