Student Question
What classifies "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as American literature?
Quick answer:
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is classified as American literature due to its unique setting in the American landscape and its focus on themes relevant to the early American colonies, such as the contrast between urban and rural life and adaptation to new challenges. Washington Irving's story reflects American identity through its multiethnic characters and historical context, emphasizing rapid change and a sense of a vanished past, which are distinctly American themes.
Washington Irving drew heavily upon the characteristics, attitudes, and actions of the Dutch colonists who settled in the Hudson River valley as he developed the characters in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He also made use of the stereotypical Yankee personality as he created Ichabod Crane.
Irving was writing a new kind of literature. It was set in the American landscape, not in Europe, and featured fictional individuals dealing with situations and themes that were relevant to the American colonies - the contrast between the city dweller and the country settler, the struggle to acclimate to new environments and challenges. He was one of the first to write literature that was uniquely American in subject and style.
How does "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" fit into American history?
Irving's famous story is significant partly because of its expression of ideas typical of the American psyche, and its description of the special qualities of the United States, as they were at that...
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The multiethnic identity of America is apparent from the early pages of the story. The inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow are descended from the Dutch settlers who were the first European immigrants to what became New York State. But it was perhaps a German doctor (a "high German," Irving states, probably to distinguish him from the Dutch in a time when Americans often used "Dutch" to mean "German") who "bewitched" Sleepy Hollow, or perhaps it was an "old Indian chief." The Headless Horseman is rumored to be the ghost of a "Hessian trooper" from the Revolutionary War. ("Hessians" were the German mercenaries employed by the British in the war.) And Ichabod Crane is evidently Anglo-Saxon, of English descent. So we see a melange of ethnicities or nationalities peopling the tale and interacting with each other.
The story takes place "in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since." In other words, the setting is around the year 1790. Irving's mentioning this as a "remote period" has several implications. His main point is that huge changes have taken place since the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The same idea is expressed in "Rip van Winkle," in which Rip awakens after twenty years to enter a new world. But it also establishes or describes something about the US that is still true today.
In America, things always seem to change quickly. In a new country there is little sense of tradition, of longevity—unlike in the European countries, for instance, where the roots go back several thousand years. Even today, things we remember about life just twenty years ago can seem extraordinarily dated, though this is partly because technology is now changing so rapidly.
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, America was first developing a consciousness as a new people. The emphasis in Irving's story on the Dutch Americans as a unique ethnicity within America is probably intended as a sign of what was already felt as "olden times" by 1820, when the story was published. And this enhances the Gothic atmosphere.
One notices that in similar stories of this period (as well as those slightly after), authors usually will emphasize a past setting or create a deliberate sense of vagueness about the time period. But in the case of Sleepy Hollow, the focus upon a previous or superseded era relates to the specifically American themes of rapid change and a vanished past.