SOURCE: “Post Mortem Effects,” in Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving, Kennikat Press, 1976, pp. 155-69.

[In the following excerpt, Roth examines the conflict between “the active and the imaginative life” in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”]

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is Irving's last attempt to preserve a festive America. Like The History and “Rip Van Winkle,” it is a tale of a Yankee invasion, but in it the Yankee is temporarily defeated, and his defeat is due primarily to the Yankee-American inability to assign any value to the world of dreams and imaginings. There is a hint of this theme toward the end of “Rip Van Winkle”: the villagers who doubt the reality of Rip's tale and insist “that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he always remained flighty” (Washington Irving: Representative Selections, 1934; Hereafter RS, 95) are the new Yankees who have conquered the sleepy community of Hudson, New York, and converted it into a secular logocracy. They can only identify imaginative vision as madness (which, in a positive sense, it is).

The identification of the American Cockaigne as the proper field for imaginative activity had been implicit in The History and “Rip Van Winkle,” but in this tale it is manifest:

A drowsy, dreamy atmosphere seems to hang over the land and to pervade the very atmosphere … the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; are subject to trances and visions; and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air (RS, 143).

Like almost all of the major American writers of the nineteenth century, Irving was concerned with the question of whether the creative imagination could take root in a country of such thin traditional soil; a country, moreover, which had been devoted by Adams and Jefferson to the practical arts alone. They had reasoned that the level of economic luxury necessary to foster a class of fine artists was incompatible with the nature of a democracy. But Irving did provide a formula for art in America. And while it may be difficult to take seriously the conception of an American culture growing out of Lubberland, the location of art (especially a comic art) within the context of creatural comfort, ceremony, festivity, and play does have validity.

On the other hand, Irving's aesthetic vocabulary—the passive and self-indulgent concept of the imagination suggested by words like reverie and dream, and the folk or fairy-tale vocabulary of spells, bewitching, and entrancement (which would be taken over by Hawthorne)—introduces yet again that note of ambivalence which is always found when Irving touches this subject.¹ In other essays in The Sketch Book, particularly “Westminster Abbey,” Irving's doubts take the form of a fiction in which the imagination is unable to function at all. And in the later “Stout Gentleman” (the inner fusion of sense data and associations), it is not merely ineffectual, it is also morally reprehensible, resented by the stout gentleman, who, at the end of the tale, rebukes the artist by thumbing his ass at him without ever giving him a sight of his face:

This was the only chance I would have of knowing him. I … scrambled to the window … and just caught a glimpse of the rear of a person getting in at the coach-door. The skirts of a brown coat parted behind gave me a full view of the broad disk of a pair of drab breeches. … and that was all I ever saw of the stout gentleman!

At any rate, Sleepy Hollow is a dreamer's paradise, and the narrator sees it as “a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life” (RS, 142-43).

The Yankee of The History and “Rip Van Winkle” had consisted of a body of generic traits associated with a name; in “Sleepy Hollow,” it is a single individual, Ichabod Crane, a “native from Connecticut.” Crane has many of the qualities of Irving's earlier Yankees, and it will be useful to draw attention to these similarities, since criticism of the tale has raised questions about Irving's attitude toward Crane.

The first thing we are told of Ichabod is that he “sojourned, or, as he expressed it, ‘tarried,’ in Sleepy Hollow” (RS, 144), and the first thing that we are told of the earlier Yankee type is that he “is in a constant state of migration; tarrying occasionally here and there” (A History of New York; 1809; Hereafter HNY, 161). While Crane believes that he might one day possess Katrina Van Tassel's fortune, he dreams of investing the money “in immense tracts of wild land and shingle palaces in the wilderness”:

Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children, mounted on the top of a wagon loaded with household trumpery, with pots and kettles dangling beneath; and he beheld himself bestriding a pacing mare, with a colt at her heels, setting out for Kentucky, Tennessee, or the Lord knows where (RS, 152).

This is precisely the life story of the earlier Yankee: “His whole family, household furniture and farming utensils are hoisted into a covered cart … which done he … trudges off to the woods. … A huge palace of pine boards immediately springs up in the midst of the wilderness … ”

… He soon grows tired of a spot, where there is no longer any room for improvement—sells his farm, air castle, petticoat windows and all, reloads his cart, shoulders his axe, puts himself at the head of his family, and wanders away in search of new lands—again to fell trees—again to clear corn-fields—again to build a shingle palace, and again to sell off, and wander (HNY, 163).²

In The History there is even a specific anticipation of Ichabod Crane in the “long sided Connecticut schoolmaster” who kidnapped and severely flogged Knickerbocker's grandfather when he was a boy (HNY, 263).

It has been argued by several critics that Sleepy Hollow dramatizes the conflict between the active and the imaginative life, and that Ichabod, despite the ridiculous figure he is made to cut, is a Quixotic projection of the artist—deliberately ridiculous as an emblem of the slightly comic position of the artist in America.³ If, after fifteen years of trying, Irving finally managed to paint his enemy in rich colors, this can hardly be taken as evidence of an awakened sympathy for the type. For Ichabod Crane is definitely the enemy. Crane is not only a Yankee of Franklin's stamp, he also possesses many of the qualities of his earlier Puritan ancestors. Both attitudes involve a manipulation of nature, one for the purpose of accumulating material wealth and the other for the purpose of arousing piety through terror.

Irving's comic feud with schoolmasters and natives of Connecticut can be seen as early as The Corrector, and it was sustained throughout his subsequent works. The treatment of neither in “Sleepy Hollow” suggests any grounds for sympathy. Ichabod also corresponds to several other negative types in Irving's work. He is, for example, the sophisticated foreigner who debauches the tastes of the simple country girls (RS, 147), the homegrown equivalent of the French émigré in Salmagundi.

Ichabod Crane simply cannot be identified with the artistic imagination; there is too much sound evidence against this association. We are told “in fact” that Ichabod was “an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity” (RS, 148); these qualities are not imaginative, but they do relate directly to the Yankee-Puritan coupling referred to above.

Three times in the tale, Ichabod is seen engaged in “artistic” pursuits: he would amuse the maidens on Sunday by “reciting … all the epitaphs on the tombstones” (RS, 147), and a sheet of paper is found, “scribbled and blotted in several fruitless attempts to make a copy of verses in honor of the heiress of Van Tassel” (RS, 171). The third instance plays with the terms of creativity:

As the enraptured Ichabod fancied all this, and as he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit … his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested (RS, 151-52; italics mine).

Ichabod Crane is a petty capitalist and speculator.

Arguments linking Crane and the imagination generally hinge on his capacity for swallowing tales of the marvelous. Old Dutch wives tell him “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.”

He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft, and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air, which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut; and would frighten them wofully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars; and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round (RS, 149).

Ichabod's voracious appetite for the supernatural is both “gross” and “monstrous.” It is associated with his insatiable physical hunger which, as we shall see, is essentially sterile, an absorption which does not nourish.

There is a sense in which Crane does “create,” however; he works at night, transforming nature into a place of terror:

What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path. … How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! … and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token (RS, 149, 148).

This is comparable to the world of Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”; Crane is not imagining; he is projecting the terror of his isolation (the spiritual isolation of the mobile and manipulative Yankee) upon the neutral darkness of nature. By transforming nature into a place of terror he expresses his fear of the natural and his own body, just as the transformation of the abundance of the Van Tassel farm into the neutral sterility of money expresses a similar fear. And the images that are evoked by his “excited imagination” terrify him in turn: “His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought, or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes” (RS, 148). True creativity in “Sleepy Hollow” is represented by the Van Tassel farm and by Brom Bones.

Brom Bones, Ichabod's opponent, is Irving's final version of the traditional buck of The Spectator. He is a sympathetic character: “with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good-humor at bottom” (RS, 154). Although Ichabod Crane is not an artist, a case could be made for Bones—an artist, moreover, whose productions suggest Irving's own. After all, Brom Bones creates the legend of Sleepy Hollow out of the rumors of the community; its plot is the defeat of a Yankee, and its form is a hoax. Bones is a parodist—he “had a scoundrel dog whom he taught to whine in the most ludicrous manner, and introduced as a rival of Ichabod's … in psalmody”—and a burlesque artist—he “broke into the school-house at night … and turned everything topsy-turvy” (RS, 156).

Although the conflict at the center of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is comparable to that of The History, Irving uses the symbolism of the earlier work in a contrapuntal way to express the conflict. It is Ichabod who is given the classical vision of Cockaigne—“ … he pictured to himself every roasting pig running about with a pudding in his belly, and an apple in his mouth” (RS, 151)—but it is here contrasted unfavorably with the natural abundance of Sleepy Hollow and becomes simply a sign of Ichabod's avarice. Ichabod, like Pantagruel, is a huge gullet; not only does he eat enormous quantities of food, but he eats superstition as well, with a “capacious swallow” (RS, 148). He is a “huge feeder” (RS, 146), and Katrina Van Tassel is “plump as a partridge; ripe and melting and rosy cheeked as one of her father's peaches” (RS, 150). But although he eats voraciously, he remains as lean and skeletal as ever. The eating of Crane is likened to the devastations of a plague: he is compared to the grasshopper (RS, 158); and “to see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth” (RS, 145).

Ichabod Crane is literally defeated and expelled from Paradise as a result of a prank played on him by Brom Bones. The essential cause of his defeat, however, is his fear of the powers of the imagination, his fear of art—common to both the Puritan and the Yankee. This is reinforced in the contrast between his aversion and Brom Bones's easy entrance into the very legend that sends Crane flying:

[Brom Bones] made light of the galloping Hessian. … He affirmed that, on returning one night from the neighbouring village of Sing Sing, he had been overtaken by this midnight trooper; that he had offered to race with him for a bowl of punch, and should have won it too, for Daredevil beat the goblin horse all hollow (RS, 164-65).

The defeat of Ichabod Crane is the most glorious moment of Irving's career, artistically and, perhaps, psychologically as well; for it fuses into one image the various meanings that made up Irving's American period. Within the context of The History, Ichabod is defeated by his own conquest: the pumpkin was the Yankee emblem in that work, and it signaled the Yankee conquest of Fort Goed Hoop, where it “was hoisted on the end of a pole, as a standard—liberty caps not having as yet come into fashion” (HNY, 193).

Ichabod Crane is also defeated by his historical conquest. Irving has finally succeeded in undoing for a moment the American revolution by identifying the Dutch protagonist of his tale with the two historical enemies of Yankee America, the Hessians and the British in the person of Major André.⁴ In the third place, the Yankee is defeated by that value to which he had devoted his existence, and that is mind to the exclusion of body. The Horseman throws his head at Ichabod as if to say that he does not much need it, that he is quite comfortable in his subsequent untroubled state. Finally, Ichabod is defeated by American art, Dutch art; for the legend is a creation of the Dutch community generally and Brom Bones particularly.

Ichabod Crane, however, is not defeated for long. The qualities that keep him thin in Sleepy Hollow allow him to grow and prosper in the outside world of American history, where his path is that of the democratic toadeater as defined in The Corrector and Salmagundi: after his dismissal by Katrina he had “studied law … been admitted to the bar, turned politician, electioneered, written for the newspapers, and finally … been made a justice of the Ten Pound Court” (RS, 172). The qualities represented by Ichabod Crane must overwhelm Sleepy Hollow as they did Hudson. This has already happened at the time the story is told: the tale is set “in a remote period of American history, that is to say some thirty years since … ” (RS, 144). In the story itself, the abundance, which had been growing throughout Irving's early work, is an autumnal feast; it is a farewell banquet (RS, 158-59).

Like “Rip Van Winkle,” “Sleepy Hollow” is provided with a framework which seems to produce the tensions that we associate with the literary hoax. The tale is related at a meeting of the New York Corporation. And when doubts are raised as to the historical veracity of the tale, the story-teller ends the postscript by admitting, “Faith, sir … as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself.”

The story-teller is a “pleasant, shabby, gentlemanly old fellow, in pepper-and-salt clothes, with a sadly humorous face,” and Knickerbocker strongly suspects him of being poor. His identity as a defeated Dutchman is conveyed by a device that Irving had used in “Rip Van Winkle”: the tale is approved and laughed at only by two or three deputy aldermen who are clearly Dutch, since they “had been asleep the greater part of the time.”

The postscript is a reprise of the conflict between Dutch and Yankee, and this time overtly on the level of the imagination, since it is the value of the tale itself that is in contention. The story-teller's opponent is the artist's traditional foe, the Shandean man of gravity: a “tall, dry-looking old gentleman, with beetling eyebrows … [and] a grave and rather severe face.” I suspect that Irving meant us to entertain the possibility that he is Ichabod Crane. At any rate he demands to know “what was the moral of the story, and what it went to prove.” In one sense, he is withholding both laughter and approval until he can be convinced that the tale is either socially useful or true. In a deeper sense he is asking what the world of Dutch abundance (and Irving's literary efforts) mean to an America of politics and business.

The major proportions of the postscript are the reverse of the tale. Here, the Yankee and his values are triumphant; the shabby Dutchman in that world can only recreate the past as an idle diversion and one whose meaning is not comprehended. And yet within the postscript the Yankee is defeated once again, for the Dutchman responds to his questioner with a triumphant leer and overwhelms him with a weapon which has a comfortable place in the work of at least one writer of burlesque comedy—a nonsense syllogism.

How shall we finally read the final line—“Faith, sir … as to that matter, I don't believe one-half of it myself” (RS, 385)? It would be tempting to hear Irving defending his Dutch American vision as American imagining, made up in defiance of American fact but still meaningful, still valuable. It is more likely, however, that in this statement Irving is gently bidding farewell to his career as an American writer and a writer of burlesque comedy.

Notes

1. The tag to this tale associates American dreaming with the activity of the inhabitants of James Thomson's “Castle of Indolence.”

2. By not having The History in mind, Hedges reads the passage from “Sleepy Hollow” as the expression of Crane's desire for a home of his own (Washington Irving, p. 142). On the contrary, it expresses the Yankee's “rambling propensity.”

3. Hedges, Washington Irving, pp. 141-42. Because Robert A. Bone interprets Crane as a serious “symbol of man's higher aspirations”—“Irving's Headless Hessian,” American Quarterly, XV (Summer, 1963), 167-75—he is forced to see Brom Bones, who frolics through the tale, as “the embodiment … of mercenary values which threaten to engulf the imagination.”

4. The choice of the Hessian may have been an unfortunate one on Irving's part, if it reminds us of Paine's ravishers in Common Sense, although Franklin took a more sympathetic view toward these mercenaries. The choice of André strikes deeper chords of ambivalence. It must be significant that our first important Revolutionary drama, William Dunlap's André, should celebrate the death of a noble and virtuous, and innocent, British spy.