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.
Themes
Sleepwalking and DreamsSleepwalking and Dreams
Throughout the novel, sleep functions as a time when repressed desires can be enacted, a vehicle for transportation, and a temporary death. The first time the reader sees both Clithero and Edgar sleepwalk, they are acting out desires to repress information: Euphemia’s manuscript and Waldegrave’s letters, respectively. Clithero is transported by his somnambulatory limbs to bury the manuscript beneath the elm. Edgar’s initial noctambulations are in his uncle’s attic, secreting letters “between the rafters and shingles of the roof” (235), while dreaming of Waldegrave.
Edgar’s second bout of sleepwalking takes him much further—30 miles from his uncle’s home and into the pit of a cave where he experiences a type of rebirth. He exists, “as it were, in a wakeful dream” (156) in a pit that prefigures “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe. Dreams are a space for the unreal, where reality is questioned, transfigured, and veiled. When Edgar reunites with Sarsefield, who believes Edgar to be twice-dead, Sarsefield asks, “am I awake [...] convince me that I am not dreaming” (220).
Edgar and Clithero’s sleepwalking parallels both men being witnessed but not interrupted; Sarsefield observes Edgar and Edgar observes Clithero. That people are walking while asleep—unconsciously rather than under their own volition—is doubted by their witnesses.
Unreliable Narrators and Authorship
The authorship of crimes is a theme in Brown’s previous novel, Wieland, as well as in Edgar Huntly. While the investigation of Waldegrave’s murder is Edgar’s hunt for “the author of this guilt” (33), Edgar himself is not the conscious author of all his actions. In addition to sleepwalking, Edgar claims a “spirit” (182) controls his waking violence. This foils Clithero’s claim that he is possessed by a “demon” (94). Both men abdicate responsibility for their actions, citing a Cartesian discrepancy between the mind and body; the “metaphysical refinements” (133) of such a philosophy is discussed in Waldegrave’s letters that Edgar wants to hide from Mary.
Additionally, Edgar’s unreliability is revealed through the Rashomon effect—the retelling of events from multiple eyewitnesses in Chapters 25 through 27—and his own admissions directly addressed to Mary in his letters, such as how the “incidents” he describes will be “imperfectly revived and obscurely portrayed” (31).
In his story-within-a-story, Clithero is an unreliable narrator; Edgar and Sarsefield end up agreeing that he is a “maniac” and untrustworthy. Clithero’s incurable madness contrasts with Edgar’s “rashness” that Sarsefield believes his old student can overcome. Edgar forgives his killing of Native Americans as a temporary “spirit” possession, but Clithero’s successful manslaughter of rich, white Arthur, and his unsuccessful murder of Euphemia Lorimer are “evils for which no time would have provided a remedy” (261).
Nature as American Gothic
Edgar’s conflict with the “wilderness” in rural Pennsylvania—man against nature—transforms him. The site of horror in newly independent America is the wild, “uncultivated” (43) land rather than the decaying mansions of British gothic novels. Rather than being haunted by the constructed past, American settlers are haunted by the unknown terrain, the “secrecies of nature in the rude retreats of Norwalk” (103). Nature is like the unreal space of dreams and the unconscious—especially caves.
A wide variety of natural features, from distinct types of trees, like elm and pine, to classifications of the landscape—like chasms, fields, bushes, glens, rivers, and vales—are included as ways of trying to categorize and understand the natural world. Yet, nature has dangerous surprises, such as the “panther(s)” (126) that Edgar encounters. Brown offers a footnote that reclassifies this animal as a “gray cougar” (126), which is still exotic and “savage” (128).
Both the panther and the indigenous people are called “savage;” Native Americans are cast as part of the wild dangers lurking beyond “spots of cultivation, the well-pole, the worm fence, and the hayrick” (191). Brown fictionalizes the popular American genre of the captivity narrative and alludes to a number of “Indian Wars,” like the Northwest Indian War, that were occurring around the time Edgar Huntly was written. His decision distinguishes the Antebellum American gothic from the British tradition, which was a significant step in national literary identity formation after the Revolutionary War.
