44 pages • 1 hour read
AviThe Man Who Was Poe
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 11-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2
Chapter 11 Summary: “Beyond the Cemetery Grave”
Dupin leaves Edmund at the tenement feeling confused and unsure whether he can trust Dupin. He decides to follow Dupin to Helen’s as a test of his trustworthiness. He notices someone else following Dupin too but thinks he might be imagining it. Dupin enters the Unitarian Church, which disappoints Edmund.
Inside, Dupin ascends the steps to the bell tower, where he notices that the hemp of the bell rope matches the fiber he found earlier in the vault. From his vantage point, he notices an alley that ends at the back of the bank but is otherwise obscured from view, allowing someone easy access to the bank’s roof. Dupin realizes a child could have been lowered into the vault to package the gold (103).
Edmund is relieved to see Dupin eventually continue to Benefit Street. Catherine rushes out of the house, and Edmund follows her to Hotel American House. Dupin waits for Helen in the cemetery and finds the idea of “love amidst death and decay” appropriate for him (105). He goes to the mausoleum so that Helen can imagine him “emerging from death” (105), but instead he confronts a woman who looks like Edmund’s aunt emerging from the tomb. She demands that Dupin return her children before fleeing into the overgrowth. Convinced this is Aunty’s ghost, the terrified Dupin tries to run, but Throck suddenly catches him.
Chapter 12 Summary: “To See a Ghost”
Edmund observes Catherine leave the Hotel American House and go to Helen’s with Mr. Rachett. Lost in his thoughts about Rachett, Edmund does not realize someone is following him to the docks.
Meanwhile, Dupin desperately asks Throck if he saw the woman’s ghost too, but Throck thinks Dupin is “daft”. Dupin tentatively enters the mausoleum and discovers a straw mattress on the floor. Throck accuses Dupin of spying on him, having seen him at the inquest this morning. Throck admits he has been observing Dupin all day and suspects him of stealing the gold. Helen appears outside of her house and assures Throck that Dupin—whom she calls Mr. Poe—is a friend. Throck leaves with a threatening warning.
Helen expresses her worry, and Dupin explains that he is in enormous pain. She explains that her mother intercepted his note last night but wants to avoid scandal with him. Helen urges him to come inside for tea with her mother’s guests, who Helen refers to as their “enemies”.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Our Secret Fears”
As Dupin struggles to compose himself, Helen begs him to attend the gathering for the sake of their relationship. They enter the room where five people are having tea, and Helen introduces him as Edgar Allan Poe. He hallucinates that the guests’ faces are all Aunty Pru’s or Edmund’s, as if “he [has] descended into a gathering of demons” (115). Helen introduces the “portly” coat customer as Mr. Arnold, who considers himself an admirer of Poe’s work. Arnold starts interrogates Poe about his stories, asking if “these stories of crime, brutality, death [...] come from within [him]” (115). Dupin concludes that these “monsters” are “his own creations, his own torments, his own pain,” and that he must confront them (116).
Dupin explains that “what some writers know best is what they fear” (117). He goes on to ask the group to consider the “puzzle” of a man ordering a custom coat and suddenly deciding not to buy it. Suddenly flustered, Arnold immediately leaves the gathering, claiming he must tend to “urgent business.” By now, Dupin has recovered from his mania, and the group continues to have tea and discuss Poe’s work. One guest, a resident poet in Providence named McFarlane, admits Poe’s stories make him feel uncomfortable. He also finds Poe’s character Auguste Dupin to be “a most improbable personage” due to his impeccable detective skills, adding that the story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is too “bestial” and “sordid” to have come from someone with a face like Poe’s. This prompts the group to discuss the study of faces, and when Helen mentions the new portrait studio in town, Dupin decides to immediately get a daguerreotype taken to give to Helen.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Over the Edge”
Captain Elias, a dockhand and friend of Edmund and Sis, greets Edmund at the wharf. Not wanting to explain his ordeal, Edmund lies about Sis and Aunty returning. Elias tells Edmund he thought he saw Aunty early that morning; a distracted woman with tattered clothes wandered the wharf, asking about the discovered dead woman. Elias told her about the inquest to satisfy her curiosity. He confirms that Fortnoy just finished his three-day watch aboard The Lady Liberty when he found Aunty’s body, a fact which makes Edmund doubt Dupin’s earlier certainty.
Edmund restlessly meanders around the waterfront until he notices he is being followed. Edmund sneaks under the edge of a dock to catch a glimpse of his pursuer but is only able to make out white hair through the dense fog. Edmund suspects it could be Mr. Fortnoy and proudly wants to tell Dupin that he escaped a kidnapping. He starts toward Mrs. Whitman’s house.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Face on the Wall”
Edmund wanders in the graveyard behind Whitman’s house where he sees a person kneeling. Edmund believes this person with white-blond hair might be burying something or praying. As the back door to Helen’s house opens, the man hurries away and leaves behind a prayer book from the Unitarian Church. Dupin approaches and instructs Edmund to look inside the mausoleum. The straw mattress Dupin saw earlier is no longer there, making Dupin believe he is mad. He admits to Edmund he thinks he has been seeing ghosts and that “’the story is over’” (132).
Without explanation, Dupin rushes off to the daguerreotype studio. Edmund insists that Sis must still be alive and tries to stop Dupin from proceeding but fails. While Dupin sits still for his portrait, Edmund notices “a look of undisguised horror [come] into his eyes” (135). Dupin demands to know when one of the portraits on the wall was taken, and the camera operator explains that the woman came in for a sitting months ago. Edmund recognizes her as his mother, and when Dupin says it is Aunty, Edmund explains that the sisters are twins.
He rushes with Edmund back to the cemetery, telling the cameraman his name is Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin refuses to answer any of Edmund’s pleading questions and explains they must look all over the cemetery for some sort of clue. Dupin finds straw scattered about the ground and deduces the mattress must have been destroyed. They then search the mausoleum floor, where Dupin finds another white button matching the rest.
Part 2, Chapters 11-15 Analysis
Throughout these chapters, Dupin continues to find more clues and answers to the mystery: he concludes that the fiber in the vault must have been from a rope used to lower Sis from the roof of the bank through the air shaft into the vault to steal the gold. The mattress and button he finds in the mausoleum further suggests that the antagonists were keeping her hidden there. Meanwhile, Edmund finds some answers on his own: His conversation with Elias confirms that Fortnoy was innocent, proving that his character was used as a distraction for both Dupin and the reader—a red herring. Following his conversation with Elias, Edmund notices a boat in the harbor named Sunrise; this innocuous moment foreshadows significant information that helps the protagonists catch the criminals later.
Chapters 12 and 13 further underscore the theme of social class and reputation. Even though Helen desires a relationship with Poe, she nevertheless wants to avoid a potential scandal with him due to his erratic behavior. She knows that the tea party is a type of social test, even referring to the guests as “enemies” who are meant to undermine their relationship. Yet instead of defying her mother, she begs Poe to act presentably, accepting her own role in perpetuating these social expectations and hierarchies. She fears risking her own reputation and, subsequently, everything about her privileged lifestyle.
This section also reinforces the theme of fear, most notably in Dupin’s experience at the tea party. Among his secret fears, as the chapter title suggests, is not just death in general, but the judgment of him as a person and writer after his death. He arrives in Providence struggling for inspiration, which is why he seizes the chance to craft Edmund’s family’s story. Avi interprets Poe’s character to write about death so frequently because it is what he fears and what he knows best (117). Rachett also fears the metaphorical death of his reputation as the established William Arnold. Realizing that Poe has connected his two identities based on the moment in the clothing store, Rachett feels Poe has the power to expose him for who he truly is—which, ironically, was what Rachett intended Poe to do.
Poe speaks to this theme of dual or misleading identities when he tells the guests that “every image has two sides”. By this point, readers know that Rachett seeks to maintain his facade of being William Arnold and that Aunty Pru and her sister are twins. This means that the apparitions of Aunty’s ghost and the woman Elias spoke to were really Edmund’s mother. Poe is also struggling to redeem his reputation of being a drunk by presenting a side of him that is respectable, eloquent, and worthy of Helen. He also vacillates between his identity as Poe and his identity as Dupin, depending on who is nearby. In an ironic exchange at the tea party, MacFarlane admits to Poe that he finds Dupin to be unrealistically perceptive, not realizing that Poe chooses to embody Dupin’s character to solve his own murder mystery. The guests also do not see the uncomfortable darkness that is so characteristic of his writing visible in his face, even though his inner darkness is what he struggles with the most.
Again, Poe’s unstable mental health, exacerbated by the apparitions and hallucinations, is characteristic of the Gothic style. Gothic characters are often afflicted with “insanity” or “madness.” Dupin/Poe thinks he is “going mad” (132) when he is the only one to see Pru’s “ghost” at the mausoleum, not knowing this is Edmund’s mother. This section is full of additional Gothic elements: the scenes in the graveyard, the viciously dismal weather, the supposed ghosts, the grotesque images Poe hallucinates, and the continued eerie pursuits all contribute to the novel’s macabre mood.
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