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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Clithero’s story continues. He relates how Clarice’s friend, after a month, is still on her deathbed. He visits them in Donegal but returns to Dublin alone. Edgar interrupts and notes (to Mary, his letter’s recipient, and implicitly the reader) how Clithero goes pale and is too overwhelmed by emotion to speak.
When Clithero regains his composure, he describes Sarsefield at his bedside in Mrs. Lorimer’s home. Sarsefield reveals that, while Clithero was away, he saw Arthur at the edge of Mrs. Lorimer’s property. Clithero questions if he truly saw the previously thought deceased twin, and Sarsefield replies: “I should as easily fail to recognize his sister [...] as him” (80).
Sarsefield warns the porter, Old Gowan, that Arthur has returned. The following night, Gowan encounters Arthur at the gate and refuses him entry. Clithero and Sarsefield reflect on the situation: Arthur’s sentence of exile was seven years, and nine have passed, so they have no legal recourse. The men agree to keep these visits from Mrs. Lorimer. They plan to have someone follow Arthur after his next appearance to learn where his “haunts” (81) are. Clithero spends the night pacing in his apartment.
The next day, Mrs. Lorimer entertains some friends and, after the company has left, they interrogate the man whom they set on watch for Arthur. Arthur has not reappeared, so Clithero goes on a late-night errand to a banker’s house. Along a “dark, crooked, narrow lane” (84) on the way back to Mrs. Lorimer’s, Arthur shoots at Clithero, grazing his forehead, and pulls a knife. Clithero responds by pulling his own pistol and wounding his assailant.
When Clithero takes Arthur to a surgeon, he learns his identity, and the surgeon cannot save Mrs. Lorimer’s twin. It is a clear case of self-defense.
Chapter 8 Summary
Within his narrative, Clithero meditates on killing Arthur, and decides that when his “lady” hears the news, she will “shrink, swoon, and perish” (89).
A new concern emerges: the link between twins might mean that Mrs. Lorimer is already dead. Clithero decides to sneak into her bedchamber to see if his suspicion is true and discovers a sleeping figure in her curtained bed (but does not realize it is Clarice). He thinks of how Arthur’s death is his fault and worries over the emotional pain he will cause Mrs. Lorimer when she hears of it. He decides to kill her instead. Picking up a handy dagger, Clithero feels “possessed” (94) and readies to stab Mrs. Lorimer. Mrs. Lorimer, standing behind Clithero, shrieks and knocks the dagger off its path, saving the sleeper: Clarice. Clithero realizes his misidentification and tries to kill himself, but Mrs. Lorimer stops him.
Mrs. Lorimer questions Clithero, and he confesses the murder of her twin and his intent to murder her. This news causes Mrs. Lorimer to sink on the floor, and Clithero believes that she has perished, but she has only fainted.
He flees, dresses as a beggar, travels to Belfast with the money from the banker, and takes a ship to Philadelphia. This ends his past-tense, embedded narrative, and he again addresses Edgar in the present tense, admitting not only these crimes but also a lack of knowledge about his sleepwalking. Clithero says the death of Waldegrave is similar to the death of Arthur, which led him to the haunted elm in his sleep, but he is not Waldegrave’s murderer.
Chapter 9 Summary
Edgar resumes his role as narrator, using the past tense to describe Clithero’s flight into the “thickest of the wood” (100) after confessing. Left alone, Edgar ponders the story he has heard and decides Arthur’s murder was in self-defense, and the intent behind killing Mrs. Lorimer was “noble and compassionate” (101).
At this point, Edgar reveals his relationship to Sarsefield. He was Sarsefield’s pupil and had heard some of the same stories that Clithero had heard from Sarsefield. The men had promised to correspond after Sarsefield left Edgar’s uncle’s house, but Edgar hadn’t received a letter from his old teacher.
The next morning, Edgar gets a message that Clithero has not returned to Inglefield’s house, and he is missing for several days. Edgar fears he will commit suicide and decides to seek him in the “secrecies of nature in the rude retreats of Norwalk” (103). He travels to Clithero’s cave by daylight, and thus forgets to bring a light to find his way through the cave’s darkness and contemplates whether he should return home for a lamp or continue forward without one.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Movement between levels of narrative continues; this section concludes Clithero’s story-within-a-story and moves back into Edgar’s narration. There are several shifts between timelines: present tense discussion between Clithero and Edgar from Clithero’s point of view as well as Edgar’s past tense interruptions where Clithero’s narrative pauses and Edgar addresses Mary.
This section reveals Sarsefield’s identity to the reader and solidifies the link between Edgar and Clithero. Sarsefield will have the last word in the novel—he is the third and final narrator (in his letter to Edgar). His protectiveness towards Mrs. Lorimer that first appears in Chapter 7 will come up again in that final letter, and Edgar makes him out to be the most reliable of the three narrators; his “conduct was irreproachable” (102).
However, the inclusion of Sarsefield’s letter at the end of the novel highlights the lack of communication between Edgar and Sarsefield during the period when Sarsefield is with Clithero in Dublin. This is the first time letters are not exchanged between characters who promise to exchange them.
Edgar continually sympathizes and identifies with Clithero; he forgives the violence Clithero enacts and attempts to enact. His asides to Mary develop these sentiments and, at the end of Chapter 9, he seeks out Clithero’s cave as he fears Clithero will commit suicide.
When Clithero mistakes Clarice for Mrs. Lorimer, another set of doubles complicates the characterization. Mrs. Lorimer has the aforementioned doppelgänger in her evil twin, Arthur, and his daughter serves as Mrs. Lorimer’s stand-in during Clithero’s attempted murder. Clithero notes that through the bed-curtain, Clarice’s “imperfectly-irradiated features [...] bore, at all times, a powerful resemblance to those of Mrs. Lorimer” (95). Clarice complements Mrs. Lorimer; Arthur foils her.
This section introduces a few minor characters; of these, only Old Gowan, the porter, is named (the surgeon and the man who is on lookout for Arthur are not named). The more important “character” is nature: Clithero’s confession takes place in the woods and Edgar rambled through the rural Pennsylvania landscape as Sarsefield’s pupil “led by” his own “roaming disposition” (105). Edgar’s search for Clithero takes him to the gothic horror of unknown wilderness, past where he has previously explored.
