[In the following essay, Benoit explores Ichabod's loss of the imaginative bond between man and the world in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”]

“There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone … all the lonely summer night's become but fact” (19). These lines from Howard Nemerov's poem “The Companions” could have served as an epigraph for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for that legend is ultimately concerned with the loss of wonder and of a sense of life-as-mystery in the slow unraveling of imaginative attachment between man and things with the rise of human consciousness. Freud's words describe the process, for which Irving's fiction is in many respects an “objective correlative,” that culminates when Ichabod, on his way home after Katrina's rejection has left him “with an air quite desolate and chopfallen” (290), reaches Major André's tree. Freud said: “Originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue to a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” (15). Until the evening at Van Tassel's, Ichabod's feeling is indeed an “all-embracing” experience, like the poet's experience described by Northrop Frye, “where the mind behind the subject and the world behind the objects are united, where nature and personality are one, as they formerly were in the sea-gods and sky-gods of ancient mythologies” (151)—and in the tree-gods of American mythology:

What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path, amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night!—With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window!—How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which like a sheeted specter beset his very path!—How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet; and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him!—and how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast, howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings. (Irving 278)

At Major André's tree, though, this imaginative and intimate bond slowly weakens and then breaks as Ichabod, “heavy hearted and crest fallen” (291), withdraws into himself in the distancing and analytic mood of subject to object, which develops as his thought becomes increasingly focused—“it was but a blast”; “a little nearer, he thought”; “but on looking more narrowly”; “it was but the rubbing”:

As Ichabod approached this fearful tree, he began to whistle; he thought his whistle was answered: it was but a blast sweeping sharply through the dry branches. As he approached a little nearer, he thought he saw something white, hanging in the midst of the tree: he paused and ceased whistling; but on looking more narrowly, perceived that it was a place where the tree had been scathed by lightning, and the white wood laid bare. Suddenly he heard a groan—his teeth chattered, and his knees smote against the saddle: it was but the rubbing of one huge bough upon another, as they were swayed about by the breeze. He passed the tree in safety, but new perils lay before him. (292)

The phrase, “it was but” functions like cock-crows to deny acquaintance with the larger one-life now in the process of splitting apart. For as Martin Buber wrote in I and Thou, “once the sentence ‘I see the tree’ has been pronounced in such a way that it no longer relates a relation between a human I and a tree You but the perception of the tree object by the human consciousness, it has erected the crucial barrier between subject and object; the basic work I-it, the word of separation, has been spoken” (74-75).

A new peril may lie ahead, but after the drama at Major André's tree, the ensuing confrontation with the headless horseman is anticlimactic; the crucial barrier has already been erected between Ichabod and Sleepy Hollow, the basic word of separation having been spoken by Ichabod himself.¹

The postscript to the story is significantly an afterthought, an abstraction out of the whole, which ironically re-enacts the psychological drama of the short story epitomized in the episode at Major André's tree. The storyteller in the postscript, who has just concluded relating his “legend” at a corporation meeting in Manhattoes, diminishes his imaginative art into a shrunken syllogistic residue in response to a “dry-looking old gentleman” who demands to know “the moral of the story, and what it went to prove” (297). The storyteller mockingly obliges:

“That there is no situation in life but has its advantages and pleasures, providing we will but take a joke as we find it:

“That, therefore, he that runs races with goblin troopers, is likely to have rough riding of it:

“Ergo, for a country schoolmaster to be refused the hand of a Dutch heiress, is a certain step to high preferment in the state.” (297)

In contrast to the imaginative garden of the all-embracing narrative, these reductive words of reason are all that is left, and appropriately, as a “post-script,” the real pieces of the broken pumpkin.

Notes

1. Cf. the biblical account in I Sam. 21-23: “She named the boy Ichabod, saying, ‘The glory has gone from Israel,’ thinking of her father-in-law and husband and of the capture of the ark of God. She said, ‘The glory has gone from Israel, because the ark of God has been captured.’”

Works Cited

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Scribner's, 1970.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.

Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random, 1968.

Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Haskell Springer. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Nemerov, Howard. The Blue Swallows. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.