SOURCE: ‘Girls can take care of themselves’: Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving's ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 175-84.

[In the following essay, Plummer and Nelson explore gender ideology in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” arguing that the story reflects Irving's misogynist beliefs.]

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.¹ “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 (Sketch Book 272), the valley is “embosomed in the great state of New York” (274), and the vegetating families of Sleepy Hollow are rooted in its “sheltered bosom” (274). 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.² For as he observes, in this tale of a Dutch Eden even the adamic act of naming falls to women. “The good house-wives 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” (272); 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.

(272)

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.³

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,⁴ 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” (273)—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” (280), 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” (273).⁵ 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.⁶ 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.

(282)

The pedagogue's “pliability and perseverance”—Ichabod is elsewhere accredited with possessing “the dilating powers of an Anaconda” (275)—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” (288). 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 topsy-turvy!” (277). 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” (276). 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 (276, 274). 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 (273):

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.

(277)

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 (295); 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.

(278)

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 tête-à-tête after the frolic: “What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know” (290). 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.⁷ 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” (291). 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” (292), 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” (293). 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” (294).

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 grâce 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 (281).⁸ 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” (281), 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” (282), 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 (281). 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.

(296)

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.

(295-96)

This version translates the jerky young man into the self-reliant American jack-of-all-trades and self-made success.⁹ 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” (295). 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.

(296)

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” (272). 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” (297). 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” (296). 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.

Notes

1. Leslie Fiedler and Judith Fetterley have provided the most influential readings of “Rip Van Winkle” that concentrate on gender: both see the tale as an instance of male flight from female influence and control. Lloyd M. Daigrepont summarizes and contributes to the extensive discussion of conflict in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” interpreted “in terms of the special concerns of the man of letters or the artist versus those of a practical-minded, progressive society” (68).

2. Several narratives make up “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker's manuscript recording the tale proper, related by an unnamed narrator to Knickerbocker and others at a meeting of burghers in New York; a postscript written by Knickerbocker explaining the setting in which the preceding tale was told, as well as its reception; and, within the unnamed narrator's story, numerous yarns told by the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow and adjacent areas.

3. Annette Kolodny, one writer who does discuss gender in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” assesses both male escapism and the presence of a maternal landscape in “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: “in escaping the traumas of history and progress, Rip Van Winkle and Brom Bones demonstrated the alternative commitment to a psychological adolescence through which, only, the ambience of the Mother might be maintained” (68). Our narrator shares this impulse.

4. The epigraph to the story is from James Thomson's “Castle of Indolence”:

   A pleasing land of drowsy head it was
   Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
   And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
   Forever flushing round a summer sky.

   (272)

5. As John Seelye observes, the presence of “Andre's Tree,” and stories told by locals about this British major who conspired with Benedict Arnold to betray American forces, point to “still another alien intruder into the Hudson Valley” (420).

6. William P. Dawson notes that “In Irving's day, ‘squirrel’ was slang for harlot,” and discusses the sexual suggestiveness of guns and hunting imagery in “Rip Van Winkle” (201).

7. In keeping with this dynamic, the narrator punctuates his opening enumeration of the female characteristics of Sleepy Hollow with the suggestion that the region's dreamy nature is the result of male actions: “Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powows there …” (273).

8. Having lost his head to become a harmless spirit inhabitant of the region now governed by his former enemies, and trapped geographically and temporally—since he cannot venture beyond the Hollow and must return to his grave by sunup—the Horseman is an apt symbol of emasculated male potency.

9. Daniel Hoffman discusses Irving's use of character types drawn from American folklore.

Works Cited

Daigrepont, Lloyd M. “Ichabod Crane: Inglorious Man of Letters.” Early American Literature 19 (1984): 68-81.

Dawson, William P. “‘Rip Van Winkle’ as Bawdy Satire.” ESQ 27 (1981): 198-206.

Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966.

Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1961.

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

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

Seelye, John. “Root and Branch: Washington Irving and American Humor.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38 (1984): 415-25.