45 pages • 1 hour read
Charles Brockden BrownEdgar Huntly: Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1799A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Edgar descends into Clithero’s cave, past the reach of daylight. Feeling his way along a wall, he reaches a pit of unknown depth, which causes him to consider returning later with a light. Edgar decides to continue.
After frequent rest breaks, Edgar reaches a chamber where air and light enter the cave, which opens into the “projecture of a rock” over a “glen” (108-09). He finds no place where he can jump to the opposite side of glen. Ascending the hill, he finds the narrowest point of the chasm and is awed by the misty natural scene.
Edgar spots Clithero across the chasm looking rough and hungry. He calls to him. They exchange a glance, and when Edgar looks down to edge slightly towards the chasm, Clithero disappears. Initially concerned that Clithero committed suicide, Edgar deliberates and decides it’s more likely there is another cave that Clithero retreated into.
To offer Clithero the “spectacle of sympathy” (113), Edgar realizes he can cut down a pine tree to bridge the chasm. However, he must return home for an axe. The journey back to his uncle’s lasts into the evening, so Edgar decides to wait until morning to return with an axe and food for Clithero.
Chapter 11 Summary
In a few morning hours, Edgar hikes to the tree with provisions and chops it down with his axe. Clinging to the tree, he crosses the chasm and reaches the other side where there’s another cave. Edgar enters the cave and finds Clithero in so deep a sleep that he looks dead.
Questioning the logic behind waking Clithero, Edgar decides against it, and instead leaves the food silently, and leaves the cave. After arriving home, Edgar receives an invitation from Inglefield to come to his house the next evening. Edgar pauses at the elm tree along the journey to Inglefield’s and marks the spot where Clithero was digging. Thinking that “there is always some significance in the actions of a sleeper” (117), Edgar resolves to dig up the hole and see what Clithero buried. As a guest, Edgar stays in the room that was previously occupied by Inglefield’s late brother.
This bed-situation haunts Edgar and, instead of sleeping, he recalls the housekeeper told him about a “square box” that Clithero left behind, and now sits near the bed. It’s difficult to tell how the box opens, but Edgar is determined.
Chapter 12 Summary
Edgar examines the puzzle box and, by running his hands over it, discovers a secret catch which raises the lid. Inside are several empty compartments. Frustrated, he finds that the box is impossible to close now that he’s opened it. Giving up, Edgar sets out to the dig site under the elm by the light of the moon. He unearths another puzzle box and takes it back toward Inglefield’s house. During his approach, Edgar sees Clithero leave; the latter sees the first open box, but not Edgar, and disappears into the landscape.
With the recently unearthed puzzle box, Edgar shows less restraint and crushes it under his heel, revealing a manuscript: Mrs. Lorimer’s “vindication of her conduct towards her brother” (123), which corroborates Clithero’s story. After reading it for the rest of the night, Edgar returns to the mountain.
The morning is stormy and Edgar loses some of the provisions he brought for Clithero on his tree-bridge. He plans to wait out the tempest in Clithero’s hideout before returning home for more food, but the tree-bridge is in danger of breaking, so he hides the manuscript to make his passage easier.
Edgar sees a panther, or “gray cougar” (126), across the chasm and realizes he didn’t bring his tomahawk. This creature crosses the tree-bridge and jumps into Clithero’s cave, leaving a path for Edgar to escape. Moments after Edgar crosses to the other side, the bridge falls, and the panther attempts to jump over the chasm but falls to the bottom.
Returning to Huntly farm, Edgar resolves to return to the mountain with both lamp and tomahawk before falling asleep.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The narrative focuses on Edgar and Clithero; Edgar’s obsession leads to unpreparedness for his conflicts with nature. He penetrates a dark cave without a light; must return for an axe to create a tree-bridge; and laments forgetting his tomahawk during his encounter with a panther.
Edgar crosses lines when it comes to items made with “rugged workmanship” (118) Clithero’s handmade boxes are created with cultivated skill, and Edgar breaks into them with the same unpreparedness as his natural, wild obstacles. Even the boxes are doubled like so many characters in the gothic genre. All paths are circuitous and retraced; Edgar moves back and forth between his familiar home and the awe-inspiring (and dangerous) mountain.
Again, Brown prefigures Poe; the “bottomless pit,” a trope of the gothic genre, reappears in Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In Poe’s work, we see many dark and stormy nights, but in Edgar Huntly, the daytime “tempest” initially casts “new forms of sublimity and grandeur” (125) on the scene and caves create darkness during the day.
What is seen and unseen gains significance in this section; for instance, Mrs. Lorimer’s manuscript is hidden twice, once by the sleepwalking Clithero and once by his waking pursuer, Edgar. This volume is like the unseen pit that Edgar avoids more easily when he returns with a lamp, and the manuscript comes to light after a process of penetrating the earth.
