“I Saw One Woman Faint”

Abstract

The chapter on panic begins—as it must—with Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds, the panic it inspired, and the scholarly debate about panic that it also began. With War of the Worlds as a touchstone, the chapter turns to other supposed instances of panic in the decade: the stock market crash in 1929, the bank runs of 1933, and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which begins with Bigger Thomas’s panicked murder of Mary Dalton and ends with Wright’s depiction of the hysterical response to that crime on the part of white Chicagoans. Putting these texts together, the chapter argues that for as much as we remember the decade of the 1930s for its populism, it was also a decade in which people felt real fear about what individuals and crowds of people might be capable of when they panicked or otherwise lost control of their emotions.