Most early readers of The Sketch Book praised the volume for its humor and its graceful descriptive writing but did not single out “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” for special attention. Francis Jeffrey, in an 1820 review in Edinburgh Review, did note that the legend, along with “Rip Van Winkle,” was among only five or six pieces in the collection of thirty-five that relates “to subjects at all connected with America. . . . The rest relate entirely to England.” But other than pointing out its existence, he had nothing to say about the story. Jeffrey was clearly delighted with the collection and astonished that Irving was able to produce it: “It is the work of an American, entirely bred and trained in that country. . . . Now, the most remarkable thing in a work so circumstanced certainly is, that it should be written throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up to great purity and beauty of diction.”

More recently, critics have attempted to delineate just what is American about Irving’s fiction. Terence Martin, writing for American Literature in 1959, focuses his attention on the newness of the United States as a nation during Irving’s career and the American tendency at the time to equate “the imaginative and the childish.” Irving’s struggling to control his appetite and to use imagination properly can be seen as mirroring the struggles of the new society to behave maturely. He concludes, “for Irving there is no place, or a very limited place, for the hero of the imagination in the culture of early America.” In The Comic Imagination in American Literature (1973), Lewis Leary traces the influence Irving’s work had on American humor and claims that in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and other early tales, Irving “opened doors which gave access to native varieties of the comic spirit.”

Around the middle of the twentieth century, attention was turned toward finding the sources Irving used in crafting his tales. The most important work was done by Henry A. Pochmann in 1930. In articles in Studies in Philology and PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), Pochmann demonstrated that Irving had translated and adapted German stories to create “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and other tales. In a 1953 article in PMLA, Daniel G. Hoffman explored Irving’s use of American folkloric sources, finding that Irving used great “originality in interpreting American themes,” and he developed his ideas further in his 1961 book, Form and Fable in American Fiction.

In the last quarter century, some critics have examined the story from a feminist perspective, to examine what the story reveals about Irving’s ideas about the role of women. In her 1975 book The Lay of the Land, Annette Kolodny describes Sleepy Hollow as a feminine pastoral setting. She sees Ichabod Crane as a male aggressor who threatens this community and therefore must be driven away. In 1993, Laura Plummer and Michael Nelson again find that Crane is “an intrusive male who threatens the stability of a decidedly feminine place,” as they explain in an article in Studies in Short Fiction. They describe the story as a conflict between male and female forms of storytelling and point out its “misogynistic bent.”

Other critics have seen Crane as threatening, but in different ways. Writing for American Imago in 1981, Edward F. Pajak explains how the legend is a variation of the myth of Narcissus and describes Crane’s “poorly integrated identity.” Crane’s attraction to Katrina and her father masks his unconscious attraction to Brom Bones, and he can find resolution only by “a rejection of the world.” For Albert J. von Frank, Crane is more than paranoid and regressed. He finds in a 1987 article in Studies in American Fiction that “Irving’s genial reputation largely obscures the evil that Ichabod represents.” Crane’s envy, avarice, sloth, and gluttony, among other sins, threaten the community with “moral taint and eventual destruction,” making it necessary to drive him from the village.

Irving's narrator opens ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' with a brief description of Sleepy Hollow itself, ‘‘one of the quietest places in the whole world,’’ a place of ‘‘uniform tranquillity.’’ Before moving on to introduce his characters he concludes, ''If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.’’ In this opening, Irving establishes Sleepy Hollow as both of-this-world and not-of-this-world, an ‘‘enchanted region'' of unparalleled beauty and fertility. Tapping a literary tradition that stretches back literally thousands of years, he sets his story in a comic American version of what is often called an Earthly Paradise.

A. Bartlett Giamatti explains in his book The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic that ‘‘the desire for a state of perfect repose and life eternal has always haunted mankind, and poets have forever been the spokesmen for the dream.’’ Poets—and, more recently, prose writers—have created ‘‘idylls, eclogues, odes, epithalamia, epics, satires, romances, and occasional verses all [abounding] with descriptions of such an ideal life in an ideal landscape.’’ These works of literature have tended to depict their landscapes using a traditional set of images and ideas, and Irving uses and adapts many of them in creating his own ''enchanted region.''

Stories set in an earthly paradise often take place in a Golden Age, a distant time and way of existence without strife and care. In the eighth century BC the Greek poet Hesiod outlined the five ages of man in his Works and Days; the five were the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, the age of heroes, and the iron age in which we live now. The golden age was the first, the most simple and noble, and the yearning to return to the golden age has figured in ancient and more recent literature. As Giamatti writes, the image ''never failed, or fails yet, to evoke that time when the world was fresh with dew and man was happy.’’ Even today, Americans look to the past (''those were the days'') as a happier time, and tell themselves that ''things were simpler then.’’ In creating his earthly paradise, Irving comically sets his story in a new nation's version of ancient history, ‘‘in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since.’’

The attractive thing about the golden age landscape is that it does not change. The narrator pines, ''Though many years have elapsed since I trod the drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow, yet I question whether I should not find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom.’’ Sleepy Hollow is the kind of place where ‘‘the population, manners, and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.’’

But it is the landscape, not the society, that makes an earthly paradise. One of the most common ways of depicting paradise is as a garden, for example, the Bible's Garden of Eden. Giamatti finds that ''in a garden, meadow or field poets have always felt Nature most nearly approximates the ideals of harmony, beauty and peace which men constantly seek in some form or other.’’ Another common depiction is the beautiful but somewhat wilder landscape used in pastoral poetry as a setting for love to bloom. Albert J. von Frank sees elements of both the garden and the pastoral in ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’’ In a 1987 article in Studies in American Fiction, he writes, ‘‘Like other ideal settings, the larger Dutch community, Sleepy Hollow, and the Van Tassel farm are enclosed gardens, here concentrically frames, inviting, seductive, and as dangerous to itinerants as the island of the Sirens or the land of the Lotos-Eaters. The societies sheltered by these nested gardens are themselves closed and static ... yet magically productive. Following pastoral convention, Irving describes the land.’’

One example will demonstrate the images that Irving is working with. Theocritus, the third century BC Greek poet who is credited with inventing the pastoral, wrote a series of "idylls," or brief poems about contentment in country life. In his seventh idyll is found this passage:

Many an aspen, many an elm bowed and rustled overhead, and hard by, the hallowed water welled purling forth of a cave of the Nymphs, while the brown cricket chirped busily amid the shady leafage, and the tree frog murmured aloof in the dense thornbrake. Lark and goldfinch sang and turtle moaned, and about the spring the bees hummed and hovered to and fro. All nature smelt of the opulent summertime, smelt of the season of fruit. Pears lay at our feet, apples on either side, rolling abundantly. And the young branches lay splayed upon the ground because of the weight of their damsons.

Although Irving's story takes place in the fertile harvest time of autumn instead of summer, he builds his descriptive passages out of nearly the same images, adding a comic twist here and there. The approach to the Van Tassel farm resembles the opening lines of the Theocritus passage, if a barrel can be asked to stand for the cave of the Nymphs: ''A giant elmtree spread its broad branches over it, at the foot of which bubbled up a spring of the softest and sweetest water, in a little well formed of a barrel.'' Where the Greeks had lark and goldfinch, here in America Irving boasts of a long catalog of birds, ''taking their farewell banquets. In the fulness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking, from bush to bush and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them.'' Even the treefrog appears, not murmuring but giving a ‘‘boding cry.’’

And the food! The fruits of the American paradise are so much more than pears and apples and damsons (plums). There are apples, of course. Ichabod beholds ''vast stores of apples; some hanging in oppressive opulence on the trees; some gathered into baskets and barrels for the market; others heaped up in rich piles for the cider-press.’’ But there are also ''great fields of Indian corn, with its golden ears peeping from their leafy coverts’’ and ‘‘yellow pumpkins lying beneath them, turning up their fair round bellies to the sun'' and the ''fragrant buckwheat fields breathing the odor of the beehive. '' Nearly every feature of Theocritus' s poem is present in Irving's description.

One detail that is missing is the cricket, but Irving handles that in another way. In one of the most vivid images in the story, he shows Ichabod Crane riding off to meet his lady with ''his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle; his sharp elbows stuck out like grasshoppers.’’ Theocritus's cricket is brown, but Crane wears ‘‘rusty black.’’

This is not to say that Irving had read Theocritus (though he may have), but rather that Irving and Theocritus had read the same things, and had drawn from the same well of images. The earthly paradise often has other features, some of which Irving adopts or adapts: the landscape is situated on a high mountain (here it is ''a little valley, or rather lap of land, among high hills’’), there is a fountain (here the brook which seems to flow past every building in the valley), the west wind blows. In poems of the fourteenth century and later, the earthly paradise may be dangerous, the mountain may be in shadow, as Sleepy Hollow is. Giamatti describes a ''beautiful-seeming earthly paradise where man's will is softened, his moral fiber unraveled, and his soul ensnared. It is the garden where insidious luxury and sensuous love overcome duty and true devotion.’’

The danger appears in a familiar form. Giamatti traces the idea of the danger to the fourteenthcentury Italian poet Petrarch, in whose Triondo d'Amore ''a man is tempted to let down his guard, to succumb to the desire for security and female domination which the garden promises. Man is weakened in such a place ... in the arms of the woman who animates the place.’’ Ichabod lets down his guard—loses his head—in the same way. The narrator claims that ''he would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman.''

Irving' s use of classical images and themes was not an accident of native talent and inspiration. He was adequately literate in several languages, and had read the important literature of Europe and the classical world. He was well acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, whose own novels and poems were based on legends and myths. As Daniel Hoffman argues in Fame and Fable in American Fiction (1973), Washington Irving was ... something of an antiquary. His early Knickerbocker's History of New York reveals him to be enchanted with the very past he satirized ... Wherever Irving went he collected popular sayings and beliefs; he was prepossessed by a sense of the past, and recognized the power—and the usefulness to a creative artist—of popular antiquities.’’

Irving knew the value of calling up old images. By echoing the ancients he borrowed some of their power, and claimed for his story—even if in a mocking way—a place among them. By adapting European imagery to use American details, he showed in a form of shorthand that America had as much to offer as the Europeans, and more. In this, he was not alone. But he was one of the first, one of the reasons Giamatti can state that ‘‘American literature is constantly read as a record of the quest for happiness and innocence in the great unspoiled garden.''

Source: Cynthia Bily, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.
Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan.

Discussions of Washington Irving often concern gender and the artistic imagination, but these topics are usually mutually exclusive when associated with the two most enduring stories from the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20): ‘‘Rip Van Winkle’’ and ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'' Many readings of the former focus on gender, while discussions of the latter most often explore its conception of the artist's role in American society. ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’’ does indeed address this second theme, but also complicates it by making art an issue of gender. Ichabod Crane is not only a representative of bustling, practical New England who threatens imaginatively fertile rural America with his prosaic acquisitiveness; he is also an intrusive male who threatens the stability of a decidedly female place. For Irving, the issue of art is sexually charged; in Sleepy Hollow, this tension finally becomes a conflict between male and female storytelling. A close look at the stories that circulate through the Dutch community shows that Ichabod's expulsion follows directly from women's cultivation of local folklore. Female-centered Sleepy Hollow, by means of tales revolving around the emasculated, headless ''dominant spirit'' of the region, figuratively neuters threatening masculine interlopers like Ichabod to ensure the continuance of the old Dutch domesticity, the Dutch wives' hearths, and their old wives' tales.

Although Irving often places the feminine in a pejorative light—the "feminine" in Ichabod is his unmanly, superstitious, trembling, and gullible side— he himself seems, in this tale, begrudgingly to acquiesce to the female sphere of Sleepy Hollow. And this sphere has none of the abrasiveness so blatant in ''Rip Van Winkle.'' We have no shrewish wife, whose death in a ‘‘fit of passion’’ allows for Rip's carefree dotage upon his return to the village. Rather, we are left with a sense of relief at Ichabod's removal, at this snake's relegation to the mythology of the Hollow. Thus the tale presents a stark contrast to ''Rip Van Winkle.'' In that story, women attempt and fail to confront men openly; in Sleepy Hollow, female behavior is much more subversive, and effective.

In ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’’ Irving's conservatism subverts itself, since conservation of the existing power structure means the continuance of a female (though certainly not feminist) hierarchy. Irving's tale is one of preservation, then, of maintenance of the feminine, and the landscape is the predominant female. Sleepy Hollow lies ''in the bosom’’ of a cove lining the Hudson, the valley is ‘‘embosomed in the great state of New York,’’ and the vegetating families of Sleepy Hollow are rooted in its ‘‘sheltered bosom.’’ Clearly the repose and security of the place rest in the maternal landscape—an assumption so pervasive that even our male narrator attests to it. For as he observes, in this tale of a Dutch Eden even the adamic act of naming falls to women. ‘‘The good housewives of the adjacent country, from the inveterate propensity of their husbands to linger about the village tavern on market days,'' have named the nearby "rural port'' ''Tarry Town''; the name and the power of naming thus operate as a gently sardonic means of reproaching unruly husbands and of preserving female dominance over the valley.

The narrator is not simply an idle observer, however. He comes to the Hollow to hunt:

I recollect that when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel shooting was in a grove of tall walnut trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noon time, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the sabbath stillness around, and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know none more promising than this little valley.

The tale thus begins with a paradigm of masculine experience in the maternal bosom of Sleepy Hollow: an acquisitive, intrusive male both perpetuates female influence over the region and also acquiesces to constraints on male behavior. As the narrator remarks, the Hollow is his choice for ''retreat’’ and security. But although the return to Sleepy Hollow is therefore a return to the womb, unfortunately, he is no longer welcome there.

For as he praises the soporific atmosphere of the Dutch valley, the narrator also admits it has repulsed him. It is clear that Mother Nature here produces a bower not to be disturbed by the masculine aggression of hunting, regardless of its tameness in the case of this "stripling." Hunting is not permitted, and trespassers will be startled into submission. Our gun-toting narrator is surprised not only by the roar of his own gun, his own masculine explosion into the place, but also by the sense that his behavior is inappropriate. This womb-like grove is for nurturing dream, not bloodsport; to be treated with respect due the sabbath, not rent asunder by blunderbuss ejaculations. Indeed, the ‘‘angry echoes'' from the landscape suggest a rebellious reaction to such flagrant poaching. Indolent as the epigraph may make the place seem, Sleepy Hollow does not take kindly to intruders; hence the narrator is properly awed into acquiescence.

The youthful exploit of this opening scene is echoed by the actions of Ichabod and the Headless Horseman. For like the narrator, both Ichabod and ‘‘the dominant spirit’’ of Sleepy Hollow—‘‘the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head''— are masculine, mercenary interlopers in this feminine place. The bony schoolmaster's desire to liquidate heiress Katrina Van Tassel's wealth, invest it ''in immense tracts of wild land,'' and take Katrina from the Hollow mirrors both the narrator's childhood intrusion and the former Hessian trooper's attempt to win Sleepy Hollow for Royalist forces ''in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war.’’ They embody the essence of masculine imperialism: war, fortune hunting, and even squirrel hunting are all expressions of the same will to conquer. Gun, Hessian sword, or birch in hand, the narrator, the Horseman, and Ichabod all bear authority; and all three seek the spoils—political, material or sexual—of invading Sleepy Hollow.

Irving's bawdy imagery strongly suggests that all male intrusions in this female place are ultimately sexual. Ichabod, for example, is described in insistently phallic terms:

He had, however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form and spirit like a supple jack—yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away— jerk!—he was as erect, and carried his head as high as ever.

The pedagogue's ‘‘pliability and perseverance’’—Ichabod is elsewhere accredited with possessing ‘‘the dilating powers of an Anaconda’’— suggest that he will not be as easily scared or awed as the narrator. It will take more than just the roar of his gun to frighten this persistent "jack."

Storytelling is also a part of male imperialism. Of the numerous tales that circulate through Sleepy Hollow, those told by men concern their own fictionalized exploits. ''The sager folks'' at Van Tassel's farm sit ‘‘gossiping over former times, and drawling out long stories about the war"; "just sufficient time had elapsed to enable each storyteller to dress up his tale with a little becoming fiction, and in the indistinctness of his recollection, to make himself the hero of every exploit.'' These stories are designed to increase the teller's status in the minds of his listeners by linking him to the heroic, historic, and masculine past.

True to this male practice of self-aggrandizing storytelling, Ichabod regales his female companions with scientific ‘‘speculations upon comets and shooting stars, and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsyturvy!’’ Though fantastic in themselves, these stories are to Ichabod the height of learning and scholarly achievement. Even his tales of the supernatural show him as ‘‘a perfect master of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft.’’ Ichabod's familiarity with the subject attests to his book learning and his reliance on the great masters of American thought, not to his understanding of folklore. Boastfully displaying his knowledge of worldly matters, this ''travelling gazette'' brings word of the ' 'restless country'' of ''incessant change'' outside Sleepy Hollow. Part of the pioneer's repertoire, carried from town to town, his stories are meant to recommend him to each new audience by proving his erudition.

While male storytelling is a part of the will to compete and conquer, storytelling for the women of Sleepy Hollow moves beyond self-image to counter that male will. The ‘‘witching power’’ the narrator fails to define fully is a female influence that gently molds the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow through the folklore that emanates from that exclusively female, domestic province, the hearth:

Another of [Ichabod's] sources of fearful pleasure was, to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and sputtering along the hearth, and listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman, or galloping Hessian of the Hollow, as they sometimes called him.

Spinning, cooking, and spinning tales are simultaneous acts; the convergence of folklore and the domestic imbues everyday events with the supernatural.

The effectiveness of this domestication of the supernatural is clear from the extent to which folklore affects local inhabitants' behavior. At the tale's close, the bridge where the Horseman confronted Ichabod is no longer used, the schoolhouse is abandoned, and Ichabod's ‘‘magic books’’ have been burned in Hans Van Ripper's censorial flames; the community has accepted that the spirit world is larger than themselves, that despite their boasts and challenges, the lore of the place is still supreme and affects nearly every facet of their lives.

Perhaps the most convincing proof of the pervasiveness of female influence in Sleepy Hollow is that all the men have set themselves to challenging it. Accordingly, the narrator not only concedes the connection between women and spirits, but he also establishes women as the greatest source of fear for men:

[Ichabod] would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man, than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was—a woman.

Although this passage is supposed to be humorous, it nonetheless reveals Irving's characteristic misogyny and the male fear of disempowerment played out again and again throughout the tale. In contrast to Rip Van Winkle, however, the Hollow men displace this fear from women to characters of folklore. It is a misunderstanding that, as in the case of Ichabod, ensures men's continued thraldom.

Given the misogynistic bent of ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,'' it is not surprising that despite the tale's narrative complexity, Irving suppresses actual female speech; in fact, the only narratives directly or indirectly related are spoken by men. This conspicuous absence of female narration underscores the way in which males both fear and resist the feminine. Thus, the narrator is at a loss to relate what Katrina says to Ichabod in their teteatete after the frolic: ''What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know.’’ The war stories told at the Van Tassel frolic, like the narrative as a whole, are told by men. And it is Sleepy Hollow men who tell ghost stories at the frolic. Tales from the female sphere must be validated by male retelling. That is, the story of the Headless Horseman originates in a tradition kept by women; storytelling sessions with women make Ichabod susceptible to local superstition; but men first reinforce, and then—as we shall see in the confrontation between Ichabod and Brom Bones—capitalize on the fears and superstitions engendered by women.

The ultimate irony concerning gender and storytelling, then, is that the very female stories males debunk influence their lives, often through their own telling of them. The men who continually joust fictionally with the Headless Horseman not only inflate their prowess, but also repeatedly confront in narrative the threatening world formed, unbeknownst to them, by the alliance of female and spirit. Fighting mock battles in which they defeat what they mistakenly consider their greatest adversary, men actually strengthen the female hold on the community by reinforcing and perpetuating the narratives through which women maintain order.

Indeed, Brom Bones and Ichabod provide an example of males literally enacting these stories. In his role as the Headless Horseman, by means of which he intends to humiliate his rival, Brom unwittingly serves as the means to achieve the goal of the female community: the removal of Ichabod and himself as threats to Sleepy Hollow's quietude. Posing as the Headless Horseman of legend, Brom plays upon Ichabod's superstition and credulity to eliminate his opponent. And it is Ichabod's association of legend and place, engendered in his mind by the female-controlled mythology, that proves his undoing. Riding home alone from the Van Tassel farm at ''the very witching time of night,'' ' 'all the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in the afternoon, now came crowding upon his recollection"; "he was, moreover, approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost stories had been laid.'' Thus Brom Bones has at his disposal a carefully scripted and blocked drama with which to exploit Ichabod's credulity and superstitious fear.

The phallic language of this passage reiterates Ichabod's sexual threat and clearly indicates that the gullible pedagogue is essentially neutralized or neutered by figurative castration. Bones, masquerading as the Headless Horseman, appears as ‘‘something huge, misshapen, black and towering'' ''like some gigantic monster,’’ while Ichabod flees in terror from the apparition ‘‘stretch[ing] his long lank body away over his horse's head, in the eagerness of his flight.'' Indeed, in this drama of competing masculinity, Ichabod's fear is of dismemberment. Ichabod, ‘‘unskilful rider that he was!’’ has trouble staying on his mount, slipping and bouncing from one side to the other ''with a violence that he verily feared would cleave him asunder.’’ Ichabod's fear is nearly realized when Brom hurls his pumpkin/head at the schoolmaster, ‘‘tumbl[ing him] headlong into the dust.’’

Brom Bones triumphs in this phallic contest of horsemanship and sexual potency—Ichabod is never seen in Sleepy Hollow again—but ironically this ejaculatory coup de grace effects his own emasculation. His impersonation of the Horseman prefigures his domestication: donning the garb of the dismembered spirit, and ultimately throwing away his head, Brom insures that his days as a ''roaring, roystering blade'' are numbered. The ultimate beneficiary of Brom's midnight prank is the Dutch community itself, the maintenance of whose dreamy repose and domestic harmony is the province of women.

The altercation between Brom and Ichabod and its inevitable outcome meet with tacit approval from the female sphere. Brom Bones, the ‘‘hero of the country round'' with ''more mischief than ill will in his composition,’’ appears not to share the schoolmaster's desire to take Katrina and her wealth out of the Dutch community. Since marriage is a most soporific state for the men of Sleepy Hollow, it is more than likely that Brom, who ‘‘had for some time singled out the blooming Katrina for the object of his uncouth gallantries,’’ will soon become as content and domesticated, and as plump and vegetable-like, as Katrina's father. Accordingly, there are no ‘‘angry echoes’’ to greet Brom's adventures; indeed, ‘‘the old dames’’ of the country, content with merely remarking ‘‘aye, there goes Brom Bones and his gang,’’ indulge him in his revels and pranks. For Brom Bones would be a threat to Sleepy Hollow only if Ichabod should succeed in his suit, thus extending Brom's bachelorhood indefinitely (and enabling Ichabod to make off with the Van Tassel fortune).

Ichabod's expulsion from Sleepy Hollow, then, results from subtle manipulation of local folklore by women. ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’’ thus provides a foil to the open male-female confrontation of ‘‘Rip Van Winkle’’; the story is a darker, more paranoid vision of female power. Indeed, the narrative frame shows the lengths to which men go to find plausible alternatives to the female version of Ichabod's disappearance, which relegates him to the cosmos:

The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day, that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favourite story often told about the neighborhood round the evening fire.

The male account asserts that Ichabod:

had changed his quarters to a distant part of the country; had kept school and studied law at the same time; had been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally had been made a Justice of the Ten Pound Court.

This version translates the jerky young man into the self-reliant American jack-of-all-trades and self-made success. Yet this story is also an import; it arrives via ''an old farmer, who had been down to New York on a visit several years after.’’ The ending is brought into Sleepy Hollow from New York, and by a man; it dismisses the supernatural perspective with a very plausible account of Ichabod's fear and mortification as impetus for his speedy removal, and places Ichabod in a respected occupation.

In similar fashion, Diedrich Knickerbocker attempts in the tale's postscript to lend credibility—a factual backbone—to his story, by placing it within a masculine sphere:

The preceding Tale is given, almost in the precise words in which I heard it related at a corporation meeting of the ancient city of Manhattoes, at which were present many of its sagest and most illustrious burghers.

These wise old men are intended to lend credence and authority to a story that operates on a plane beyond that of burghers and business meetings. And, as Knickerbocker relies upon the authority of ‘‘precise words,’’ we are reminded of the narrator's having told us early in the narrative that his aim is to be ' 'precise and authentic.’’ Something there is in these male storytellers that doesn't love a ghost.

The narrator's sardonic comment that ‘‘the old country wives ... are the best judges of these matters’’ is clue enough to a rather disparaging attitude; resenting the authority of women is nothing new to Irving's fiction. Yet this remark does not alter the fact that the community listens to the women's stories. And this particular one is a favorite in Sleepy Hollow because it both warns and neutralizes threatening males. Ichabod becomes the community's most recent lesson by example, the shivering victim of his own acquisitive fantasies and proof positive of the truth of legend.

The postscript to the tale reiterates the gender conflict present in the story proper and the narrative frame. Diedrich Knickerbocker focuses on the confrontation between the narrator and a cynical listener that ends in the narrator's parodic syllogism and his ambiguous admission concerning his story that ''I don't believe one half of it myself.'' Their verbal jousting is reminiscent of Brom's and Ichabod's own rivalry. And Diedrich Knickerbocker's description of the narrator is most telling: he is ''one whom I strongly suspected of being poor, he made such efforts to be entertaining.''

This, too, allies the narrator with Ichabod and the men of the Dutch community; his performance stands as a final example of male self-aggrandizing storytelling. Indeed, the tale proper becomes the object of male desire and competition; it is the game our youthful narrator has waited the length of a ''troubled life'' to carry off. In turn, Diedrich Knickerbocker the antiquarian, and Geoffrey Crayon the sketch writer, extend this instance of storytelling as appropriation to fill the entire frame of the tale: its inclusion in The Sketch Book. The presence of gender as a central conflict is further buried under layers and layers of male acquisitiveness and competition.

But in ‘‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’’ stories, like wealth and game, are not exportable. It is the association of lore and place, of supernatural and practical, that gives the legend of the Headless Horseman its power and efficacy in controlling males within the Dutch community; the very title of the sketch reinforces the primacy of place in storytelling. Like the Horseman himself, the tale is powerless outside a circumscribed area. The ability to tell it in New York, where its supernatural elements are so easily debunked, attests not to the power of the male storyteller who does the debunking—as the postscript would have us believe—but to the element of female storytelling in Sleepy Hollow that insures the success of the female order: its subtle, self-effacing nature. Diffused throughout the folklore and the practical, everyday world of a particular place, the source of power in the Hollow—women—is disguised, making belief in the supernatural a matter of course, not compulsion. When the tale is told outside this female-controlled landscape of the naturalized supernatural, the effectiveness of the story dissolves, leaving only a Hollow husk.

Source: Laura Plummer and Michael Nelson, '‘‘Girls can take care of themselves': Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,'’’ in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, 1993, pp. 175-84.

Washington Irving, the first professional writer in the United States, was by inclination an amused observer of people and customs. By birth, he was in a position to be that observer; the son of a New York merchant in good financial standing, he was the youngest of eleven children, several of whom helped Irving take prolonged trips to Europe for his health and fancy. He was responsible for the evolution and popularity of two genres in American literature: the regional, legendary tale and the historical novel. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” belongs to the first genre. The two best-known of Irving’s stories are “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” both of which appeared originally in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), a collection of tales and familiar essays. Both stories were adapted by Irving from German folklore to a lower New York State setting and peopled with Dutch American farmers.

On one level, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” reveals Irving’s love for and use of folklore. As he had in “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving employed the fictional folklorist Diedrich Knickerbocker as an external narrator looking back on old tales. Ichabod Crane is an outsider, a Yankee schoolmaster among the canny Dutch farmers. As such, Crane becomes the butt of local humor and the natural victim for Brom Bones’s practical jokes. Most of the humorous sallies of the Sleepy Hollow boys are in the vein of good-natured ribbing, but Brom’s practical jokes are somewhat more serious because of the rather unequal rivalry between Brom and Ichabod for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel.

Several dichotomies are established in the story between Ichabod and the local men. On the one hand, Ichabod is of Connecticut stock, a New Englander, and an educated man, in contrast with the locally bred Sleepy Hollow men. He scorns the rougher male pursuits of the local men of Dutch heritage and instead spends his time working his way into the hearts of the women. He is a representative of the larger America that lurks outside the confines of Sleepy Hollow, a walking figure of the need of the growing United States to acquire and assimilate every element of the continent in its reach for Manifest Destiny. As is often the case in folklore, the local parties are validated and the interloper is vanquished.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” operates on more than one level, however. As in “Rip Van Winkle,” the primary tone in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is irony. “Rip Van Winkle” may be a story about a man who drinks from a flagon and sleeps for twenty years in the mountains, but it may also be a story about a man fleeing an insulting wife and shirking his responsibilities as a husband and father. Similarly, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” may be a story about an enterprising young man who is vanquished by a spectral figure on a dark autumn night. However, to a careful reader, the story is more than that. Throughout the text, almost all of the observations made by the narrator about Crane and his encounters with Katrina Van Tassel, Brom Bones, and the purported horseman are ironic and tongue-in-cheek.

Although Crane presumably tries not to hurt his weaker students, he has no compunction about doubling the punishment to others, in defiance of pedagogical objectivity. Ichabod fancies himself an amazing vocal talent, yet the text makes it clear that his singing is horrible, just as his dancing is such a sight that the servants gather to ogle him. Although he tries to make himself useful to farmers, it is always the ones with full larders and pretty daughters who receive his aid. His love of superstition may also reveal the kind of schoolmaster he is; this observation is particularly borne out by his admiration for the Puritan writer Cotton Mather, whose 1693 book The Wonders of the Invisible World served as an apology for the abuses of the Salem witch trials of 1692.

Ichabod is a ravenous eater in the story. His appetite is both literal and figurative. Beyond his physical need to consume, his hunger demonstrates avariciousness and greed. Even his interest in Katrina has very little to do with any kind of romantic attraction to her and much more to do with her father’s possessions and—more to the point—the food her father can provide. His feelings for Katrina are especially piqued after he has seen her father’s great wealth; indeed, the story makes very clear that the extent of Crane’s amorous feelings for Katrina extend only so far as her father’s wealth. He seems to regard her as a food to be consumed, considering her a tempting “morsel,” “plump as a partridge,” and “ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father’s peaches.” This conflation of food with sexual and romantic imagery continues when Ichabod attends a feast at the Van Tassel household and observes pigeons “snugly put to bed” and “ducks pairing cosily in dishes, like snug married couples.”

When considering his courtship of her, Ichabod’s thoughts are not of Katrina or what her feelings for him might be; rather, he considers her father’s lands and plans how he might dispose of them and use the cash gained from the sale. What is more, Katrina is overtly more interested in Brom Bones than in Crane. Although the narrator refers to her as a coquette, the text never once indicates that she gives Crane reasons to suspect she might entertain romantic notions toward him. When he seeks to ply his troth, she rejects him soundly enough that he leaves more like a man skulking after having raided a hen-roost than like a triumphant knight. The supernatural elements of the story are further questioned when a traveling farmer finds out that Crane has left Sleepy Hollow, studied for the bar, and become a politician and justice.

On a figurative level, Crane’s gluttony and greed may again reference the growth of American Manifest Destiny; old folkways and beliefs must fall beneath the encroaching new American way of life. Crane’s defeat and subsequent flight from Sleepy Hollow are, in a sense, a victory for the old Dutch American world. Katrina has married another Dutch man, who settles down with her without leaving the valley and without disrupting the farm or the ancient way of life of the old Dutch denizens of New York.