SOURCE: “The Man that Corrupted Sleepy Hollow,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 2, Autumn, 1987, pp. 129-43.

[In the following essay, Frank describes Ichabod Crane as a morally destructive force that enters Sleepy Hollow.]

Washington Irving's reputation as a genial writer—as, indeed, America's most genial writer—has been firmly established for a century and a half, despite general agreement that his most enduring works are satires. Knickerbocker's History maintains its good humor largely by making its narrator appear foolish, but it is harder to say what keeps “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from seemingly overtly caustic, since in the portrait of Ichabod Crane Irving comes rather closer than in the History to adopting the controlling assumption of Augustan satire that the ridiculous and the evil are one. If Irving's genial reputation largely obscures the evil that Ichabod represents, it must also obscure the mythical structure of the story and, consequently, its formal relationship to such later works as “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” and a score of others. That Ichabod is evil needs all the more to be said since several modern readings of the story have made impressive moral claims on his behalf, or, alternatively, have transformed him into a pathetic hero, a figure more sinned against than sinning. One urges that he be taken “seriously as a symbol of man's higher aspirations,” while another proclaims that “what he wants is simply a home, like anyone else.”¹ Even those who regard Ichabod as a threat to the Dutch community differ significantly in assessing the nature and seriousness of the problem he presents.²

As Donald Ringe pointed out in 1967, the story is a work of regional satire, pitting Dutch New York against the restless spirit of New England; it is a story that “pleads in effect for the values of the settler and conserver over those of the speculator and improver.”³ Irving's satire, however, works most significantly not at the sociological or political level, but—as all permanently valuable satire does—at the level of the underlying moral issues. The success of the satirical method in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” lies in Irving's ability to see the familiar Yankee character as only superficially comic while at the same time discretely ventilating the deeper moral disease of which that comedy is the not quite independently conceived mask. The complexity of tone arising from such a polarized treatment may be traced more specifically to the two uses that Irving makes of the setting. The world of the New York Dutch is something more and other than an ethnic region realistically sketched; it is, indeed, a mythically conceived community, unfallen and changeless, a place of perfect ripeness. Irving establishes the setting in precisely this light and locates Ichabod's mock-heroic chivalry in the most incongruous of all possible contexts, while at the same time raising that portentous central issue of American literature, the moral spoliation of the New World garden. Inasmuch as both the serious and the comic themes converge on the setting, Irving has made the recovery of its meaning a precondition for any interpretation.

The setting is not a frontier. Although Daniel Hoffman has persuasively argued that the portrait of Brom Bones owes a great deal to the type of the “ring-tailed roarer,”⁴ it is not a point with which one can do much more than Hoffman himself has done. Irving indicates that Sleepy Hollow is in most ways the precise reverse of a frontier. Not only has it long been a settled region (a rural one, to be sure), but it is also emphatically a European community with European values. Those forces which on the frontier operate to break down imported cultures—like the rest of the “incessant changes” that Irving abhors—are outside, beyond the “high hills,” and simply do not function in “such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great state of New York,” where “population, manners, and customs, remain fixed.”⁵ The true American frontier figures but once in the story and then only by way of the sharpest contrast with the Hudson Valley setting: knowing no more than Milton's Satan “to value right / The good before him,” Ichabod proposes to exchange the “middle landscape” of the Van Tassel patrimony for a tract of wild land in “Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where” (p. 280).

If the setting is not part of the frontier, it is a version of the American pastoral as Leo Marx has defined it,⁶ though ironically the distinction of Irving's version is that his innocent shepherds are all Europeans. They figure in this magic landscape as the stewards of their own abundant fruitfulness, which fertility takes on a sacramental character in the description of Baltus Van Tassel's farm, where architecture and institutions melt imperceptibly into the activity of farming, and that into a humanized version of the natural order, all under the benediction of an approving sun:

Hard by the farm house was a vast barn, that might have served for a church; every window and crevice of which seemed bursting forth with the treasures of the farm; the flail was busily resounding within it from morning to night; swallows and martins skimmed twittering about the eaves, and rows of pigeons, some with one eye turned up, as if watching the weather, some with their heads under their wings, or buried in their bosoms, and others swelling, and cooing, and bowing about their dames, were enjoying the sunshine on the roof (p. 279).

This sequestered community is more than home to a company of Dutch farmers; in its sheltered resistance to change, its ungrudging fruitfulness, its feminine character, and, ultimately, its vulnerability, it is the fully elaborated symbol of home as a romantic moral concept.

Like other ideal settings, the larger Dutch community, Sleepy Hollow, and the Van Tassel farm are enclosed gardens, here concentrically framed, inviting, seductive, and as dangerous to itinerants as the island of the Sirens or the land of the Lotus-Eaters. The societies sheltered by these nested gardens are themselves closed and static (again, unlike the frontier), yet magically productive. Following pastoral convention, Irving describes the land in eminently hospitable feminine imagery, indicating in the first sentence that “in the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson” lies the community named Tarry Town by the women of the region (p. 272). Two miles away is the smaller village of Sleepy Hollow, likened to a “mimic harbour, undisturbed by the passing current,” where one might find even yet “the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom” (p. 274). In the description of the Van Tassel farm these gender-specific topological features recur: it “was situated on the banks of the Hudson, in one of those green, sheltered, fertile nooks, in which the Dutch farmers are so fond of nestling” (p. 279). Each specific location is a repetition of the others; each involves the feminine principle, repose, and water, so the “small brook” that glides through Sleepy Hollow “with just murmur enough to lull one to repose” is made to well up on Van Tassel's quiet Xanadu as “a spring of the softest water” that bubbled along “among alders and dwarf willows” (p. 279).

Whatever significance may finally attach to the dandy-and-squatter form of Ichabod's conflict with Brom Bones, the moral satire surely depends on seeing Sleepy Hollow less as the frontier setting of a memorable joke than as Irving's romantic notion of any man's true home. The tone of the story is at all points favorable to the settled and home-loving Dutch; it supports their sense of tradition, their security, their relation to the land, their repose and plenitude, and, most of all, their imagination, while the interloper, Ichabod, is point for point the destructive antithesis of all these traits.⁷

Since the issue of the imagination has appeared to some to support a sympathetic view of Ichabod Crane, and since Irving himself indicates that Sleepy Hollow is an active abettor of the imagination, it is important to see how Irving discriminates between Ichabod and the Dutch on this point. “It is remarkable,” writes Irving, “that the visionary propensity I have mentioned is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time. However wide awake they may have been before they entered that sleepy region, they are sure, in a little time, to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions” (p. 273). As an Arcadian environment, Sleepy Hollow is necessarily a source of inspiration, and yet those who dream under its influence do so according to their personalities and capacities. The genuinely inspired acts of imagination all belong to the Dutch: to Brom Bones most conspicuously, the Pan by whom Ichabod is panicked, and a poet not of words, certainly, but of virtuous action; to Yost Van Houten, the inspired architect of the schoolhouse locking system, modelled on “the mystery of the eelpot,” whereby, “though a thief might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment in getting out” (p. 274); or to Baltus Van Tassel, who monitors Ichabod's quixotic courtship of his daughter by recognizing and observing its appropriate symbol, that is, by “watching the achievements of a little wooden warrior, who, armed with a sword in each hand, was most valiantly fighting the wind on the pinnacle of the barn” (p. 282). Ichabod's imagination is a truly sorry thing in contrast, compounded, at worst, of Cotton Mather and simple credulity, and never, at its best, escaping the small shrewdness of his New England heritage. In his vision of the Van Tassel farm all its teeming life lies dead, served up as food for him alone, so that Irving's early description of Ichabod as “the genius of famine” (p. 274) comes finally to have a profounder point of reference than his gaunt and awkward appearance. He can easily imagine sacrificing all life to his own; the business of the story, however, is to force him to imagine his own death and ultimately to make that imagination feed and sustain the life of the community.

Nowhere is the difference between the Dutch imagination and Ichabod's more evident than in their respective superstitions. As the allusions to Cotton Mather suggest, Ichabod's superstitiousness is the vestige of a decadent Puritanism from which God and glory have departed equally. The schoolmaster is thus left with a system of infernal providences in which all of nature is supposed to have the power—even the purpose—of doing harm to Ichabod Crane.⁸ Never wholly secure, he is especially skittish after dark when “every sound of nature … fluttered his excited imagination: the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hill side; the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger of storm; … or the sudden rustling in the thicket, of birds frightened from their roost” (p. 277). Ichabod is so radically disjoined from his environment that he and the natural world are fated enemies: nature frightens him, but, by the same token, he can and does frighten it. Put another way, the presence of death that he senses in nature, nature senses in him.

This development of the protagonist's character reveals an important aspect of Irving's method, because the frightening of the birds recalls the introduction of Ichabod as in appearance like a “scarecrow eloped from a cornfield” (p. 274) in a way that decisively alters its original comic application, just as the imagined devastation of the farm's teeming life recalled and deepened the earlier reference to Ichabod as the “genius of famine.” The thematic aptness of Irving's humor becomes increasingly apparent as this kind of transformation is several times repeated: the comic details are simply funny when first seen undeveloped or apart from a larger social or moral context (which is to say, from Ichabod's perspective); but when Irving then replants them in a more coherent universe (when he provides them, in effect, some of the morally settled quality of the Dutch perspective), the regional comedy darkens into moral satire.

It is, of course, the basic coherence of the Dutch imagination that prevents their very pronounced superstitiousness from having anything monstrous about it. They are on the best of terms with their ghosts, who are, like themselves and unlike Ichabod, intimately attached to life and the local scene. The Dutch women tell of “haunted fields and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges and haunted houses” (p. 277); the men tell of “funeral trains, and mourning cries and wailings heard and seen about the great tree where the unfortunate Major Andrew as taken” or “of the woman in white, that haunted the dark glen at Raven Rock” (p. 289). These manifestations are, in the way of folk mythology, so localized, so much a part of familiar nature, that to apply the term “supernatural” to them seems almost inappropriate. They tell of unexpected life in the landscape, not of death or threats of death. The Dutch, moreover, tell these tales artistically, neither as first-hand accounts nor as “extracts” from books, as Ichabod does, but as still living legends. The sole exception is Brom Bones' account of his match with the Headless Horseman, a tale combining a youthful irreverence for the mythology of his elders with a point that not even the supernatural is to be dreaded. Generically, the Dutch tales are poles apart from Ichabod's monstrous and unfriendly indication to his female hosts of the “fact that the world did absolutely turn round, and that they were half the time topsy-turvy!” (p. 277).

These unsettled and unsettling traits in Ichabod are manifestly related to, and yet go deeper than, the New England character that on one level is the object of Irving's regional satire. Not content merely to display and ridicule the social behavior of the type, Irving probes the character of his Yankee to give the most basic kinds of moral explanations for the comic inappropriateness of his outward actions. The nature of these explanations is determined by the structure of the story, which involves the penetration of an outsider into the very heart of an earthly paradise. Seen in this light, Ichabod's unsettling traits seem less significantly those of an awkwardly displaced regional character or even of a sinful individual than, at last, those of sin itself. Indeed, the characterizing details of the story seem clustered around the seven deadly sins, even though it is not certain that Irving consciously meant it to appear so.

Ichabod's envy is indicated in one way by his “large green glassy eyes” which are mentioned first as a part of a ludicrous physical description and then again with the moral implications more fully in evidence (pp. 274, 279-80). His envy is indicated in another way, of course, in his whole attitude toward the domain of Van Tassel:

As the enraptured Ichabod … rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchard burthened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and single palaces in the wilderness” (pp. 279-80).

This is not envy in the simple sense of wanting to own what others own but accords rather with the classic conception of the sin of envy in which, perversely, one seeks the annihilation of the object. The type of this sin is Satan's envy of the kingdom of God: he cannot hope to share in it, and so commits himself to its destruction. While it might be argued that merely selling the land would not destroy it, surely the point about these Dutch farms is that they never have been sold, never have had a “market value” or been held by strangers, and that what they represent would be forever lost if any of these conditions were to come to pass. Insidious as this threat is, however, it does not involve a passion that the Dutch, as the owners of the land, can directly be tainted with. In this sense, it is rather more disturbing that Ichabod has introduced envy in an altogether different way to people who seem never to have felt it before. While the schoolmaster escorts the village damsels about the churchyard on Sundays, “the more bashful country bumpkins hung sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address” (p. 276).

Ichabod's avarice is the concomitant of his envy and has already been suggested in the way his imagination is so casually dominated by the cash nexus. His plans for the Van Tassel-Crane estate show that he is interested not in the good life but in the immoderately wealthy life, which, for Ichabod, is the fiscal equivalent of never settling down. His “immense tracts” of frontier are for speculation, not for living on or farming, and reflect a characteristic desire that his wealth should come without labor.

Sloth ought to be a sin difficult to attain in this paradise, and yet Ichabod aspires even here. Aside from being a “flogger of urchins,” he earns his bread not so much by the sweat of his brow as by assisting the Dutch “occasionally in the lighter labours of their farms” (p. 275). These labors comprise the sort of tasks then commonly assigned to women and children and include taking the horses to water and making hay. Even these he manages largely to avoid by becoming “wonderfully gentle and ingratiating” with the women: “He found favour in the eyes of the mothers, by petting the children, particularly the youngest, and like the lion bold, which whilome so magnanimously the lamb did hold, he would sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot, for whole hours together” (pp. 275-76). Ichabod's almost systematic avoidance of productive labor is depicted mainly through his alliance with female society and through his adoption of the least consequential of the activities traditionally associated with women. Thus, for example, he is a major source of gossip in the community and would also “pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, … and listen to their marvellous tales” (p. 277). However, his masculinity is most directly challenged by his being a “man of letters” in a community of farmers, where to work is perforce to have something to show for one's work. The women can appreciate his erudition, “for he had read several books quite through,” though he was “thought, by all who understood nothing of the labour of headwork, to have a wonderfully easy life of it” (p. 276). It is a moral comment on Ichabod that a variety of his traits, including his problematic relationship to the world of work, divides a fundamentally coherent Dutch community along gender lines.

The subject of sloth appears to have been a complex and perhaps even a sensitive one for Irving, who, in the persona of Geoffrey Crayon, maintained a vested interest in the innocence of repose. The epigraph from Thomson's Castle of Indolence, a poem that successively celebrates the pleasures and indicts the decadence of indolence, contributes to the complexity of the issue by seeming to oblige the author to discriminate carefully in moral terms between the sloth he is condemning and the repose to which he is temperamentally and artistically committed. The distinction turns out, once again, to favor the Dutch, who never, throughout the course of the story, are shown at work. In the Van Tassel barn, “the flail was busily resounding … from morning to night,” but workers neither work nor appear. The repose of the Dutch is simply prelapsarian, which means that they have, as the schoolteacher does not, something vital on which they can repose. Ichabod, who is shown working, who puts in his time at the schoolroom and performs his odd job, is nevertheless constantly preoccupied with schemes for rescinding the penalty of original sin in his own personal case, which is a large part of what Yankee ingenuity comes to in Irving's satire.

This fundamental difference parallels and at the same time further explains the qualitative distinction between the Dutch imagination and Ichabod's, the one effortless, natural, and supremely located, the other artificial, self-indulgent, and frenetic. From another point of view, Irving clearly had professional reasons for raising this issue, for if he was less personally concerned than Nathaniel Hawthorne with the public's perception of the value of the writer's vocation, he nevertheless knew that literature and scholarship in America were not always held in high esteem, that, indeed, they were often associated with idleness and self-indulgence.⁹ By creating in Ichabod a slothful character at whom such charges might be levelled with perfect justice, he shows that they are most appropriately brought against the poseur, the man of self-deluding pretensions to literature, and not against the true writer (or artist) at all. And by creating in his Dutch characters an imagination rooted in innocent, even blessed repose, he affirms the value and explains the virtue of his own art.

If, in Eden, sloth is difficult, gluttony is simply ungrateful. It suggests a certain doubt as to the extent and continuance of divine providence, and, as Irving shows, leads to envy:

[Ichabod] was a kind and thankful creature, whose heart dilated in proportion as his skin was filled with good cheer, and whose spirits rose with eating, as some men's do with drink. He could not help, too, rolling his large eyes round him as he ate, and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable splendour (p. 287).

Despite the narrator's gentlemanly imputation of thankfulness, the apparent fact is that Ichabod, having found heaven, aspires to be, not thank, its “lord.” The appetite that prompts him is the sinister elaboration of the early, comic observation that “he was a huge feeder … though lank” (p. 275), while the transition from the physical fact to its spiritual implication has been prepared by Irving's intermediate use of the imagery of gluttony to describe Ichabod's mental processes. He is an intellectual gourmand: “His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary. … No tale was too gross or monstrous for his capacious swallow” (p. 277). After he is introduced to Katrina, it is, as the narrator says, “not to be wondered at, that so tempting a morsel soon found favour in his eyes” (p. 278), or that “his devouring mind's eye” could transform at a glance all the farm's life to food (p. 279). If Ichabod's imagination is thwarted and traversed by his sloth, it operates ineluctably in service to his belly. Even as he goes for his last interview with Katrina, he is “feeding his mind with many sweet thoughts and sugared suppositions” (p. 286).

There are three moments in the story that shed light on Ichabod's tendency to the sin of anger, and they appear to form, as in the case of his gluttony, a pattern of deepening seriousness. His willingness to flog his students, and particularly the stronger, more threatening children, is consistent with his personal insecurity and impatience with “inferiors.” Beneath the artfully dispassionate surface of his behavior (“this he called ‘doing his duty by their parents’” [p. 275]), the anger is, though visible, well submerged and controlled, so much so that Irving is content merely to hint at it and at the same time to warn his readers against concluding too quickly that Ichabod is “one of those cruel potentates of the school, who joy in the smart of their subjects” (p. 275). That Ichabod takes no “joy” in it is sufficiently easy to believe. The second moment occurs at the Van Tassel farm where Ichabod, flush with food, contemplates the possibility of being “lord of all this scene.” Here the surface parts to reveal how he contends emotionally with the prospect of success: “Then, he thought, how soon he'd turn his back upon the old school house, snap his fingers in the face of Hans Van Ripper, and every other niggardly patron, and kick any itinerant pedagogue out of doors that should dare to call him comrade!” (p. 287). With perfect ironic aptness, his idea of success involves becoming the niggardly patron he despises, but the more important point is that his greatest wrath is reserved for his own alter ego. This mounting sense of anger when he ought to be most satisfied and placid is concisely indicated in the succession of verbs, which points ultimately to the self-hatred at the heart of the sin of anger. In the third and final moment, Ichabod's social controls, along with his great expectations, collapse at the end of the party in his private interview with Katrina. Here the surface parts in a different way: “Without looking to the right or left to notice the scene of rural wealth, on which he had so often gloated, he went straight to the stable, and with several hearty cuffs and kicks, roused his steed most uncourteously from the comfortable quarters in which he was soundly sleeping, dreaming of mountains of corn and oats, and whole valleys of timothy and clover” (p. 291). The horse, sharing Ichabod's physical traits and innermost dreams, is another alter ego, though now the kicking has become actual.

In the sentence describing this outburst of passion, much of the humor centers on the word “uncourteously,” which signals the whole issue of the ill-starred lover's chivalric self-image. The narrator's sarcastic allusion is to the ruins of what had been, from the start, the preposterous vehicle of Ichabod's conscious pride: his assumption that he was a bit too good for a community of bumpkins. In point of pride, he is the opposite of Baltus Van Tassel, who is “satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it” (p. 279). Unlike the man he seeks to supplant, he is eager to misapply the social leverage of his prospective good fortune by—class-consciously—kicking itinerant pedagogues out of doors.¹⁰ But in perhaps the most telling revelation of all, Ichabod's pride appears at odds not with individuals but with sacred and communal values: “It was a matter of no little vanity to him to take his station in front of the church gallery, with a band of chosen singers; where, in his own mind, he completely carried away the palm from the parson” (p. 276). Appropriately, the profane Ichabod, the supercilious critic of the churchyard epitaphs, is avowedly the parson's self-anointed antagonist.

The treatment of lechery in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is understandably circumspect, and yet it is very close to the effective center of the satire. The fact that Ichabod is a portrait of perverse and misdirected sexuality is arguably the author's final comment on his representative Yankee. Here Irving supplies two general contexts for Ichabod's behavior: one is the fertile feminine land that the schoolmaster threateningly lusts after, and the other is the prevailing sexuality of the Dutch, which is, for the most part, no sexuality at all. These are “general contexts” mainly in the sense that while they are rather inertly present all the while, they take on a heightened significance in conjunction with more particular details. For example, the first of these contexts is quickened when, on several occasions, Irving intimates that nothing is easier for Ichabod than to divert his sexual appetite into an appetite for food. After school he would sometimes follow students home “who happened to have pretty sisters, or good housewives for mothers, noted for the comforts of the cupboard” (p. 275). The change in the direction of this sentence, as the rest of the story goes to show, suggests a transformation rather than a competition of motives. By constantly pairing women and food in this metonymic way as objects of Ichabod's atention, Irving seems to imply that the gluttony is merely displaced lechery, and not, because food seems always to take precedence, that he is without lust.¹¹

Irving's favorite phallic symbols—on which so much of his early bawdy humor centers—are guns, swords, and noses. In “Rip Van Winkle” there is the “clean well oiled fowling piece” that in twenty years of disuse became rusty and dysfunctional (p. 35); there is, too, among the men of Hendrick Hudson's crew playing at the masculine game of nine-pins, one whose face “seemed to consist entirely of nose, … surmounted by a white sugarloaf hat, set off with a little red cock's tail.” This individual is singled out by the narrator from a group who carried “long knives in their belts” and of whom “most … had enormous breeches.” The commander of this crew is further distinguished by having a “broad belt and hanger” (p. 34).¹² In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the “long snipe nose … that … looked like a weathercock” belongs to Ichabod (p. 274), and Irving is even prepared to suggest, more directly than he ordinarily does, that this nose is a kind of reproductive organ: “There are peculiar quavers still to be heard in that church, and which may even be heard half a mile off, quite to the opposite side of the mill pond, of a still Sunday morning, which are said to be legitimately descended from the nose of Ichabod Crane” (p. 276). The final image in the story—that of a loitering ploughboy hearing these notes “among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow” (p. 296)—seems in turn to allude to one of the very first images, that of the narrator breaking “the sabbath stillness around” by the startling “roar of [his] own gun” (p. 272), so that the story is framed by mutually defining instances of intrusion in which the virgin stillness of this enchanted feminine ground is symbolically violated by a foreign sexuality.

Another set of three images seems to work in much the same way, though it sheds a rather different light on the theme of Ichabod's lubricity. The transformation of the schoolhouse by the Dutch into an elaborate eelpot implicitly but quite directly casts Ichabod in the role of the eel. As though to underscore this impression, Irving shortly thereafter asserts, in one of the more surprising metaphors of the story, that Ichabod “had the dilating powers of an Anaconda” (p. 275). The effect of Irving's likening his protagonist to an eel becomes fully apparent only later, at the Van Tassels' harvest festival, where “the sons [appeared] in short square coats with rows of stupendous brass buttons, and their hair generally queued in the fashion of the times, especially if they could procure an eel skin for the purpose, it being esteemed throughout the country as a potent nourisher and strengthener of the hair” (p. 286). The schoolhouse, then, is explicitly an eel-trap constructed by a community that values eels as a source of male sexual potency. Apart from this connection, it is difficult to see why either detail should be in the story. Read, thus connected, in the general context of the prevailing Dutch sexuality—that is, in the division of the Dutch characters into menopausal and pre-pubescent groups—it becomes necessary to look upon Ichabod as, in a manner of speaking, the serpentine source of sex in paradise or as the necessarily extrinsic agent, procured by Yost Van Houten in the name of Dutch folk wisdom, to help Brom Bones over the portal of maturity. In this event, Katrina's coquettishness takes its place as a single element in a much larger ritual, one that manages to include the whole community.

The husband-to-be is near to the point of escaping the socially useless boy-culture of “Brom Bones and his gang,” but so long as his “amorous toyings” continue to be “like the caresses and endearments of a bear” (p. 282) he will clearly never pass muster with the blooming Katrina. His rite of passage, as it turns out, involves more than the simple conquest of a rival. It involves him in the first socially useful act of his life, his first act as a member of the whole community. The expulsion of Ichabod simply is the defense of that whole community from moral taint and eventual destruction, while, considered in relation to the marriage that ensues—the marriage that, indeed, it makes possible—it is the rejection or expulsion of “Yankee sexuality,” of the perverse and aggressive lust of one who “in form and spirit [was] 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” (p. 282). It is to break this, once and for all, that the “Headless Hessian” at long last carries his head high, and, in the event, so frightens the hard-riding Ichabod as nearly to bring off the latter's castration “on the high ridge of his horse's back bone” (p. 294). Irving, though, is mercifully content with the symbolic castration of a blow to the “cranium,” which is, appropriately yet problematically, the real seat of Crane's lechery.¹³

To read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in this way is to see its formal relation to an important sub-genre of American fiction that Roy Male, in defining it, called “the Mysterious Stranger story.”¹⁴ This form is

an inside narrative with an enclosed structure; its plot and characterization consist of the effect of a semi-supernatural and usually ambiguous stranger upon a crowd, a family, or an individual; its theme tends to center around faith and the contagiousness of good, or distrust and the contagiousness of evil and violence. … The trickster-god appears unexpectedly, usually in disguise, tests or transforms a mortal, and disappears.¹⁵

In Irving's Mysterious Stranger story all the elements are present, and yet, perhaps because he was more interested in the conflict than in its resolution and sequel, perhaps because he lacked the deeper ironic intelligence—certainly, in any event, because he made his devil too much the fool—Irving evades some central implications of the form, or, more particularly, has no use for the issue of “the contagiousness of evil and violence” that the structure of such a story raises. So far as the community is concerned, Ichabod is simply absorbed into the local mythology as the morally neutralized spectre that haunts the decaying schoolhouse. Death is absorbed into life. In a realm of such enchantment, there is no clear sign that Ichabod will have a lasting subversive effect on Sleepy Hollow or that anything serious will follow from the necessity that he himself created of expelling him by devious and forceful means. And if in the end there is no lurking worm of guilt, no paradise quite lost, yet it is to be remembered that Irving is attacking, not defending, the Puritan possibilities. Were he to insist that the expulsion of Ichabod is reflexively corrupting, it would be tantamount to giving the demonic mythology of New England precedence over the benign mythology of the Dutch. By refusing to give the devil his due, Irving in effect chooses to stress the preserving innocence which the recollection of home, safe from betrayal or violation, inveterately has in the memory.

Still, fictional forms have a force and a meaning of their own, built up of the uses to which they have previously been put by other writers. For this reason at least, Irving cannot quite escape the implication that Ichabod has forever changed Sleepy Hollow. Of the sorts of falls that such an agent as he might induce, consistent with Irving's fondness for his Dutch characters, there is the sort of pillow-soft, post-Miltonic fall of Brom, who, encountering evil without accepting it, passes from innocence to a knowledge of virtuous action and in the process gains his manhood. All that is shown of his life after marriage is that he would “look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related,” and that some were led to “suspect that he knew more about the matter than he chose to tell” (p. 296), a sort of deviousness which, harmless enough in appearance, is certainly no longer an Arcadian simplicity.

Another kind of fall is suggested by the whole retrospective, memorial tone of the narration, augmented, perhaps, by a knowledge of the historic fate of these Dutch communities. The story is set in the past, but the wistfully receding perspective in which it is presented is a function mainly of the layered narration, a device which, as Irving handles it, tells its own story of declining prosperity and increasing sophistication. The first narrator is “a pleasant, shabby, gentlemanly old fellow … with a sadly humourous face; and one whom I [Dietrich Knickerbocker, the second narrator] strongly suspected of being poor” (p. 297). He tells his story—orally—in the same spirit in which the supernatural tales are given at the Van Tassel party, neither as “literature” nor as veritable history, claiming in the end not to “believe one half of it myself” (p. 297). Knickerbocker, who writes it all down, has literary aspirations and a sense of wider audiences, though as the History indicates, he is ultimately defeated by poverty. He figures at last as a deadbeat fleeing from a hotel, a wandering solitary man survived only by his papers. With the emergence of Geoffrey Crayon as the executor of this literary estate, the tradition has passed from the Dutch altogether, and the fall seems complete.

Notes

1. Robert A. Bone, “Irving's Headless Hessian: Prosperity and the Inner Life,” AQ, 15 (1963), 171, and William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), p. 142.

2. In Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Norton, 1973), Daniel Hoffman sees Ichabod as the comic Yankee who poses a threat to the Dutch, whose “magic is the power of self-reliance, not of Satan” (p. 88). Donald Ringe, in “New York and New England: Irving's Criticism of American Society,” AL, 38 (1967), 455-67, presents perhaps the harshest view of Ichabod, but his brief treatment of the tale is mainly concerned with “the serious social implications” of Ichabod as a regional type. Martin Roth, in Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1976), pp. 161-68, challenges the views of Bone and Hedges, though I believe he unduly diminishes the character of Ichabod by finding him little more than a “petty capitalist and speculator” (p. 164). Annette Kolodny, in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 68-70, sees Ichabod as the sexually aggressive male antagonist to the maternal pastoral. Specifically, he “threatens to intrude conscious thought and the feeble beginnings of art and learning” (p. 68).

3. Ringe, p. 463.

4. Hoffman, p. 89.

5. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Haskell Springer (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 274. Hereafter page references to this edition will appear in the text.

6. In Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), passim. Because The Sketch Book predates the intrusion of technology, Marx does not discuss this tale; however, its special relevance to the issues he raises is suggested by the epigraph to Chapter One, “Sleepy Hollow, 1844,” an allusion, ready to hand, in the name of a wooded area in Concord, later a cemetery.

7. Ichabod Crane's mother was presumably another satirist: see I Samuel 4:21: “And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel.”

8. There is a strong analogy here to the character and situation of Simon Legree, another superstitious Yankee, another displaced flogger of the defenseless. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 411, Stowe remarks that “no one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man. The Christian is composed by the belief of a wise, all-ruling Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order; but to the man who has dethroned God, the spirit-land is, indeed, in the words of the Hebrew poet, ‘a land of darkness and the shadow of death,’ without any order, where the light is as darkness. Life and death to him are haunted grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.”

9. A good and instructive example of this prejudice may be found in John L. Blake's Geographical, Chronological, and Historical Atlas (New York: Cooke and Co., 1826), p. 165: “There are none of those splendid establishments in America such as Oxford and Cambridge in which immense salaries maintain the professors of literature in monastic idleness. … The People of this country have not yet inclined to make much literary display—They have rather aimed at works of general utility.”

10. Possibly Ichabod is smarting under the coincidence that the musician at the ball is yet another alter ego, “an old gray-headed negro, who had been the itinerant orchestra of the neighborhood for more than half a century” (p. 287).

11. Another instance would be Ichabod's entry at the Van Tassel party: “Fain would I pause to dwell upon the world of charms that burst upon the enraptured gaze of my hero, as he entered the state parlour of Van Tassel's mansion. Not of those of the bevy of buxom lasses, with their luxurious display of red and white: but the ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea table, in the sumptuous time of autumn” (p. 287).

12. On this subject see William P. Dawson, “‘Rip Van Winkle’ as Bawdy Satire,” ESQ, 27 (1981), 198-206.

13. Kolodny, in The Lay of the Land, p. 69, is surely correct in seeing a headless figure as the appropriate avatar of an anti-intellectual Sleepy Hollow, and equally correct in identifying Brom Bones' “removal and throwing away of the pumpkin-head” as a rejection of Ichabod's perverse blend of intellection and sexuality. She errs, I believe, in regarding the act as “a kind of symbolic castration” of Brom, whose marriage follows this victory, rather than of Ichabod, whose dark purposes are permanently thwarted in this moment of physical wounding.

14. “The Story of the Mysterious Stranger in American Fiction,” Criticism, 3 (1961), 281-94. The examples that Male treats include Hawthorne's “Gray Champion,” Melville's “Lightning-Rod Man” and The Confidence-Man, Harte's “Luck of Roaring Camp,” Howells' Traveller From Altruria, Twain's Mysterious Stranger and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” as well as Porter's “Noon Wine” and Warren's “Blackberry Winter.”

15. Male, p. 290.