"You Can't Reason With a Headless Man:" Sleepy Hollow and American Myth
In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” describing the prevalent dreamlike and romantic atmosphere of the narrative’s namesake village, Washington Irving takes care to set the stage for the queer and uncanny. “The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.” The peculiar is firmly established early in the tale, evoking a seemingly pastoral picture of the Hudson River Valley with an undercurrent of the supernatural. A story about the bewitching powers of this region might have been affective on its own, perhaps akin to “Rip Van Winkle” as a sort of allegorical fairytale. But Irving then introduces a defining element of ghastliness when calling to mind “the dominant spirit…that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air…the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.”
Thus is presented the headless horseman, a spectral entity that has left a lasting impression on the mythological consciousness of America. Adapted and re-adapted into various forms of media, Irving’s legend has been perpetuated in various forms and carried into the modern day, often with such emphasis on this ghost that even those with a passing knowledge of the original work have some idea of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. And while Irving’s story is recognized for a multitude of reasons and his work considered some of America’s finest early literature, it is the horseman in particular that has become a macabre icon, a mythic figure often associated with Halloween festivities and American ghost stories. It can be argued that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is Irving’s most well-known work based on the horseman alone, but to presuppose such would blatantly disregard the breadth of craftsmanship Irving uses; as Daniel G. Hoffman states, "when one compares 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' to the bulk of Irving's work it seems anomalous that he could have mustered the imaginative power to enrich us so greatly, for most of Irving's writing betrays a lack of creative energy, a paucity of invention" (434).
With that in mind, the intention of this essay is to examine the cultural impact and interpretation of Irving’s legend with particular attention paid to the figure of the horseman. To do so, it is first important to explore what elements of folklore may have influenced Irving – from the oral heritage of the Dutch settlers of the region to mythologies from other countries – and to do so from a mimetic critical angle. Then, using reader-response theory, the story’s reception and various adaptations will be analyzed to understand why certain renditions of the story have remained popular.
Why this particular critical mode to begin? First, a mimetic angle of study attempts to discover the meaning of a text with the real world as context, based on the notion that art imitates life. Drawing from experience and knowledge of the world the author lives in, “the author is simply reporting the facts of life,” which could likewise include the mythic reality of that time; “the artist’s vision can penetrate the ideal realm, and the artist’s skill can translate that vision into the artistic symbol” (Keesey 205, 207). In other words, to understand a text is to understand the reality that text mirrors, and from there extract meaning.
In Irving’s case, it is apparent that his text reflects both the historic reality of the Hudson River Valley and the region’s lore. "Wherever Irving went he collected popular sayings and beliefs; he was prepossessed by a sense of the past, and recognizing the power - and the usefulness to a creative artist - of popular antiquities" (Hoffman 428). In the legend, Sleepy Hollow’s storied past is given sufficient attention, detailing not only how life was lived in the village but how the village folk related to the past. The Revolutionary War is still within living memory, and at the Van Tassel quilting frolic stories are shared about experiences of battle in the region. “The British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding, and infested with refugees, cow-boys, and all kinds of border chivalry” (Irving). As noted by Robert Hughes, "the late night storytelling at the Van Tassels' also serves to remind us that Sleepy Hollow is in fact a real place and had a very particular history during the Revolution" (22).
But, as is made apparent, “all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded” (Irving). Indeed, Irving does not allow his reader to forget that an aura of the supernatural hangs over his narrative, and that haunts lurk in the shared imagination of Sleepy Hollow. "There were revenants aplenty in Catskills” (Hoffmann 428), and it is apparent that Irving took a great deal of his ghosts and goblins from the local lore. There is a sense of place to the apparitions in the text that makes them tied to the locale and its history, such as the specter of Major Andre haunting the tree where he was hanged, or the Woman in White who shadows Raven Rock. Irving was likewise aware of the supernatural element in other parts of the country as well, illustrated in Ichabod Crane’s knowledge of witchcraft tales. "Ichabod devoutly believed in all the remarkable prodigies retailed in Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft,” notes Hoffman. “There he found spectral ships manned by ghostly women, heretics giving birth to monsters, revenants pursuing the innocent with invisible instruments of torture" (429). Perhaps, like Ichabod, Irving took some part in the storytelling sessions of the region he eloquently describes in the text, contrasting the comfort and warmth of a hearthside with the frightful pleasures that come with ghost stories; “to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman” (Irving).
It is, oddly enough, the horseman that is influenced by outside sources, for despite being the most prominent haunt of the valley in the narrative, he is neither apparently related to Catskill lore nor an original invention of Irving’s. Headless entities have long existed in myth; Marjorie W. Burner states that “"Egyptian mythology depicts Isis as a headless goddess who personifies the dead,” and that “like Ichabod's headless horseman who supposedly lost his head in battle, she lost her head during a battle between Seth and Horus" (281-82); the medieval Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has the decapitation of the unearthly-seeming Green Knight at the hands of Gawain – taking place on a day of feasting in Camelot, not unlike the quilting frolic at the Van Tassel farm – only to have the knight survive, headless, afterward. However, the biggest parallel to the Horseman is probably the dullahan of Irish folklore. Said to be some manner of unseelie fey – that is, a malicious fairy – the dullahan is often depicted as a headless horseman, who carries his severed head under his arm and rides about the countryside as a herald of death. According to legend, the dullahan has an aversion to gold, and can be driven away by the presence of a gold coin – much in the same way that, according to Sleepy Hollow’s resident storytellers, the headless horseman will vanish upon reaching the bridge to the churchyard. It is within the realm of possibility that Irving was inspired these stories of the dullahan; one article asserts that “Irving’s family came from Scotland, so he would have heard of those tales of Celtic faeries and ghouls. His father, William, came to the colonies from the island of Shapinsay in the Orkney Islands” (Witt). Alternatively, Irving may have learned of the dullahan from his Irish servants while he lived in his homestead, Sunnyside (Andrews 21).
Regardless of where Irving gleaned his inspiration, he firmly grounds his own headless horseman in the lore of the county by connecting the ghost with the Revolution. As the narrative goes, the ghost is that of a Hessian trooper “whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war” (Irving). This alone makes the horseman relevant to the people of the Hollow, a ghoul that is close to home and recalls the area’s own traumatic past. "The headless horseman arrives not as some anonymous goblin imported unchanged from the Germanic folk tales of the local tradition,” writes Hughes. “He was a man, a Hessian mercenary, in the service of the British in the recent War of American Independence" (20). In a similar vein, Hoffman states that "the mythology of war blends with that of the otherworld, lending credence to the supernatural” (431). Indeed, the unfortunate Hessian could have hypothetically crossed paths with any of the old soldiers present at Van Tassel’s party, making him a much more tangible phantom than an apparition dredged up from ancient lore.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has, to an extent, become just that in America: a legend. It had been reprinted countless times, adapted to multiple films, television and stage plays. Sleepy Hollow, New York, celebrates Legend Weekend on the last weekend of October, where celebrations of the area’s folklore take place and costumed actors are cast as characters from Irving’s most famous tale, as well as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” (Andrews 18-20). Greg Smith asserts that “the continued popular appeal of Irving's ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ which, like his ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ has transcended its status as American short-story to become a part of our cultural mythology” (174). What is it, then, that makes the tale so compelling to such a wide audience?
As stated before, reader-response theory is meant to examine a text from the angle of the audience, to see how the reader responds or makes meaning of the text. “For reader-response critics are most often concerned with the present audience,” explains Donald Keesey. “Most reader-response critics have little interest in authors or intended meanings. The poem” – or any artistic text, for that matter – “exists now. It affects us now. These, they claim, are the crucial facts, and any relevant criticism should be built around them” (129). Thus, to better understand the way Irving’s story has been received and responded today, it is important to understand what it means to a present audience, as opposed to readers of the past.
Of note in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is the ambiguity of the ending – was Ichabod merely the victim of a prank by his erstwhile rival, Brom Bones? Or was he truly carried off by the headless horseman, never to be seen again? Smith notes, “that the reader is invited to come to this conclusion for him or herself is fairly obvious, but it is of paramount importance to the story's overall effect that Irving's narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker does not” (175). He states furthermore that “it is precisely this ambiguous aspect of ghost stories which would provide American imaginations with such fulfilling release” (178). The reader is left with a hint of doubt, even if he or she has chosen one possibility over the other, and while most scholarly responses tend to be in favor of the former interpretation – Brom as the horseman – the endearing response has been with the horseman as a legitimate specter. “While it may have in fact been a disguised Brom Bones who ran Ichabod Crane out of Sleepy Hollow, the call to run the alternate possibility that the ghost of the headless horseman was responsible for the incident out of our imaginations is perhaps unnecessarily limiting” (Smith 183).
Popular culture, and the media associated with it, has often gone with the more dramatic supernatural possibility teased at in the story’s end. It presents a more fantastic scenario, and from this angle the story has been presented in various ways; for example, it is logically more dramatic, more cinematically appealing, to have the headless horseman exist as a terrifying entity rather than Brom’s practical joke, in the realm of film. Many films play up the horrific aspects of the horseman, mainly drawing from the climactic chase near the end of Irving’s tale. But many adaptations handle subject matter differently, as demonstrated by two well-recognized versions of the narrative: Walt Disney’s 1949 animated adaptation of the legend, featured in the film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and Tim Burton’s gothic re-imagined Sleepy Hollow.
In Disney’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the film “gives a pastoral romance with a playfully comic tone (and the concluding fright)” (Hughes 18). It more-or-less faithfully follows the basic plot of Irving’s story, with small embellishments given here and there to the antagonistic and often slapstick rivalry between Ichabod and Brom. The film, cheerful in tone through the first half, suddenly takes a dark turn when the headless horseman is finally mentioned, and here deviates slightly from Irving’s narrative: Brom, in recounting his story of the horseman (done so in as a song, “You Can’t Reason With a Headless Man”), does not mention the ghost’s Hessian identity nor his death by cannonball, but instead recounts that the phantom rides one night each year, Halloween, and seeks any head he can come across. And when Ichabod finally meets the horseman, the headless figure has been armed with a sword that he constantly swipes at Ichabod with during their chase.
While Irving’s ghost was never described as being overtly threatening, save for being a frightful specter that possesses all manner of supernatural power, the Disney horseman is given a clear and dangerous reason to be avoided. No longer does the horseman ride out to the forgotten battlefield seeking his own missing head: any head will do, regardless if it is still on one’s shoulders or not. It allows for the horseman to seem more unambiguously threatening, making him visually terrifying. Yet at the same time, this helps maintain the ambiguity of his identity, as it was only Brom that divulged this detail. Similarly, the end of the film maintains the unresolved mystery of Ichabod’s disappearance, though it is still implied, much like in Irving’s narrative, that Ichabod was “spirited away” by the horseman.
The popularity of Disney’s film, with its sword-wielding head-hunting horseman, has likely had some influence on the American consciousness, for a significant number of adaptations since then have featured a similar specter. Such is the case with Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, which takes major liberties with Irving’s narrative. As noted by Martin Kevorkian, “Sleepy Hollow reinscribes a supernatural dimension that the tale had teasingly proposed but ultimately rejected” (28). The film’s art direction, pace, cinematography and special effects create a vision that heavily emphasizes the gothic and the paranormal, often forgoing the pastoral moments of Irving’s story in favor of a perpetually haunting or unsettling atmosphere.
The horseman takes center-stage in this telling, where there is hardly any doubt the Hessian is a proper revenant, a major antagonist and overpowering force of evil. The ghost once again possesses a blade, and throughout the film decapitates his share of victims. Only by returning the horseman’s missing head can he be put to rest, and “at the moment of utmost crisis, Ichabod recovers the actual Horseman’s actual skull and restores it to its rightful owner” (Kevorkian 30). Any and all ambiguity in the story’s end has been stripped away, and the film instead offers an altogether different and didactically-paranormal product only loosely connected with Irving’s tale, but one nevertheless enjoyed by certain audiences for its visual appeal, its thrills and chills, and intimidating representation of the horseman, Hughes expresses that “Tim Burton's beautiful film presents a gothic horror with an unambiguously menacing ghost and with the occasional touch of romance and light comedy" (18). But Kevorkian argues that “by burying [Irving’s tale] in the midst of a minutely realized spectacle of the supernatural, they have aggressively subjected the tale to a diametrically opposed presentation of a world” (27).
No matter how the tale is presented, it is the readers who ultimately benefit from the legend; an American ghost story, retold in much that same way Irving himself embellished aspects of his own bank of lore. It is not terribly surprising that the appeal of Irving’s text has lasted as long as it has, with characters like Ichabod and Brom embodying the archetypical Yankee and outdoorsman in literature as no one else had before, and the headless horseman that has become an American myth. "Among all of Irving's characters only Rip Van Winkle has as great a power to move us” muses Hoffman; “and Rip, too, is what the highly developed but narrow gift of a storyteller whose milieu was the fabulous has made of a character from folklore" (435).
It is potentially fitting that Diedrich Knickerbocker notes “it is remarkable 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” (Irving); indeed, those who have partaken of Irving’s legend in some form or another have mentally resided in that haunted valley, “to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions” (Irving).
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Works Cited
Andrews, Jeanmarie. "Ghosts In Sleepy Hollow Country." Early American Life 32.5 (2001): 18-21. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 Dec. 2011.
Bruner, Marjorie W. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: A Mythological Parody.” College English 25.4 (1964): 274, 279-83. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 Dec. 2011.
Hoffman, Daniel G. “Irving's Use of American Folklore in 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'.” PMLA 68.3 (1953): 425-35. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Hughes, Robert. “Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History.” Arizona Quarterly 61.3 (2005): 1-26. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Vol. X, Part 2.” Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1917; Bartleby.com 2000. Web. 1 December 2011. <www.bartleby.com/310/2/>
Keesey, Donald. “Reader-Response Criticism: Audience as Context.” Contexts for Criticism 4th ed. New York: McGraw, 2003. 129-39. Print.
---. “Mimetic Criticism: Reality as Context.” 205-14. Print.
Kevorkian, Martin. “'You Must Never Move the Body!': Burying Irving's Text in Sleepy Hollow.” Literature Film Quarterly 31.1 (2003): 27-32. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Sleepy Hollow. Dir. Time Burton. Paramount, 1999. DVD.
Smith, Greg. “Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.” Midwest Quarterly 42.2 (2001): 174-83. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Dir. James Algar, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney. Disney, 1949. DVD.
Witt, Brian. “The Dullahan, the Irish Headless Horseman.” Emerald Reflections. Shamrock Club of Wisconsin, Oct. 2008. Web. 10 December 2011.
In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” describing the prevalent dreamlike and romantic atmosphere of the narrative’s namesake village, Washington Irving takes care to set the stage for the queer and uncanny. “The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole nine fold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.” The peculiar is firmly established early in the tale, evoking a seemingly pastoral picture of the Hudson River Valley with an undercurrent of the supernatural. A story about the bewitching powers of this region might have been affective on its own, perhaps akin to “Rip Van Winkle” as a sort of allegorical fairytale. But Irving then introduces a defining element of ghastliness when calling to mind “the dominant spirit…that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air…the apparition of a figure on horseback without a head.”
Thus is presented the headless horseman, a spectral entity that has left a lasting impression on the mythological consciousness of America. Adapted and re-adapted into various forms of media, Irving’s legend has been perpetuated in various forms and carried into the modern day, often with such emphasis on this ghost that even those with a passing knowledge of the original work have some idea of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. And while Irving’s story is recognized for a multitude of reasons and his work considered some of America’s finest early literature, it is the horseman in particular that has become a macabre icon, a mythic figure often associated with Halloween festivities and American ghost stories. It can be argued that “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is Irving’s most well-known work based on the horseman alone, but to presuppose such would blatantly disregard the breadth of craftsmanship Irving uses; as Daniel G. Hoffman states, "when one compares 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' to the bulk of Irving's work it seems anomalous that he could have mustered the imaginative power to enrich us so greatly, for most of Irving's writing betrays a lack of creative energy, a paucity of invention" (434).
With that in mind, the intention of this essay is to examine the cultural impact and interpretation of Irving’s legend with particular attention paid to the figure of the horseman. To do so, it is first important to explore what elements of folklore may have influenced Irving – from the oral heritage of the Dutch settlers of the region to mythologies from other countries – and to do so from a mimetic critical angle. Then, using reader-response theory, the story’s reception and various adaptations will be analyzed to understand why certain renditions of the story have remained popular.
Why this particular critical mode to begin? First, a mimetic angle of study attempts to discover the meaning of a text with the real world as context, based on the notion that art imitates life. Drawing from experience and knowledge of the world the author lives in, “the author is simply reporting the facts of life,” which could likewise include the mythic reality of that time; “the artist’s vision can penetrate the ideal realm, and the artist’s skill can translate that vision into the artistic symbol” (Keesey 205, 207). In other words, to understand a text is to understand the reality that text mirrors, and from there extract meaning.
In Irving’s case, it is apparent that his text reflects both the historic reality of the Hudson River Valley and the region’s lore. "Wherever Irving went he collected popular sayings and beliefs; he was prepossessed by a sense of the past, and recognizing the power - and the usefulness to a creative artist - of popular antiquities" (Hoffman 428). In the legend, Sleepy Hollow’s storied past is given sufficient attention, detailing not only how life was lived in the village but how the village folk related to the past. The Revolutionary War is still within living memory, and at the Van Tassel quilting frolic stories are shared about experiences of battle in the region. “The British and American line had run near it during the war; it had, therefore, been the scene of marauding, and infested with refugees, cow-boys, and all kinds of border chivalry” (Irving). As noted by Robert Hughes, "the late night storytelling at the Van Tassels' also serves to remind us that Sleepy Hollow is in fact a real place and had a very particular history during the Revolution" (22).
But, as is made apparent, “all these were nothing to the tales of ghosts and apparitions that succeeded” (Irving). Indeed, Irving does not allow his reader to forget that an aura of the supernatural hangs over his narrative, and that haunts lurk in the shared imagination of Sleepy Hollow. "There were revenants aplenty in Catskills” (Hoffmann 428), and it is apparent that Irving took a great deal of his ghosts and goblins from the local lore. There is a sense of place to the apparitions in the text that makes them tied to the locale and its history, such as the specter of Major Andre haunting the tree where he was hanged, or the Woman in White who shadows Raven Rock. Irving was likewise aware of the supernatural element in other parts of the country as well, illustrated in Ichabod Crane’s knowledge of witchcraft tales. "Ichabod devoutly believed in all the remarkable prodigies retailed in Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft,” notes Hoffman. “There he found spectral ships manned by ghostly women, heretics giving birth to monsters, revenants pursuing the innocent with invisible instruments of torture" (429). Perhaps, like Ichabod, Irving took some part in the storytelling sessions of the region he eloquently describes in the text, contrasting the comfort and warmth of a hearthside with the frightful pleasures that come with ghost stories; “to pass long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth, and listen to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman” (Irving).
It is, oddly enough, the horseman that is influenced by outside sources, for despite being the most prominent haunt of the valley in the narrative, he is neither apparently related to Catskill lore nor an original invention of Irving’s. Headless entities have long existed in myth; Marjorie W. Burner states that “"Egyptian mythology depicts Isis as a headless goddess who personifies the dead,” and that “like Ichabod's headless horseman who supposedly lost his head in battle, she lost her head during a battle between Seth and Horus" (281-82); the medieval Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has the decapitation of the unearthly-seeming Green Knight at the hands of Gawain – taking place on a day of feasting in Camelot, not unlike the quilting frolic at the Van Tassel farm – only to have the knight survive, headless, afterward. However, the biggest parallel to the Horseman is probably the dullahan of Irish folklore. Said to be some manner of unseelie fey – that is, a malicious fairy – the dullahan is often depicted as a headless horseman, who carries his severed head under his arm and rides about the countryside as a herald of death. According to legend, the dullahan has an aversion to gold, and can be driven away by the presence of a gold coin – much in the same way that, according to Sleepy Hollow’s resident storytellers, the headless horseman will vanish upon reaching the bridge to the churchyard. It is within the realm of possibility that Irving was inspired these stories of the dullahan; one article asserts that “Irving’s family came from Scotland, so he would have heard of those tales of Celtic faeries and ghouls. His father, William, came to the colonies from the island of Shapinsay in the Orkney Islands” (Witt). Alternatively, Irving may have learned of the dullahan from his Irish servants while he lived in his homestead, Sunnyside (Andrews 21).
Regardless of where Irving gleaned his inspiration, he firmly grounds his own headless horseman in the lore of the county by connecting the ghost with the Revolution. As the narrative goes, the ghost is that of a Hessian trooper “whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the revolutionary war” (Irving). This alone makes the horseman relevant to the people of the Hollow, a ghoul that is close to home and recalls the area’s own traumatic past. "The headless horseman arrives not as some anonymous goblin imported unchanged from the Germanic folk tales of the local tradition,” writes Hughes. “He was a man, a Hessian mercenary, in the service of the British in the recent War of American Independence" (20). In a similar vein, Hoffman states that "the mythology of war blends with that of the otherworld, lending credence to the supernatural” (431). Indeed, the unfortunate Hessian could have hypothetically crossed paths with any of the old soldiers present at Van Tassel’s party, making him a much more tangible phantom than an apparition dredged up from ancient lore.
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” has, to an extent, become just that in America: a legend. It had been reprinted countless times, adapted to multiple films, television and stage plays. Sleepy Hollow, New York, celebrates Legend Weekend on the last weekend of October, where celebrations of the area’s folklore take place and costumed actors are cast as characters from Irving’s most famous tale, as well as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker” (Andrews 18-20). Greg Smith asserts that “the continued popular appeal of Irving's ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ which, like his ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ has transcended its status as American short-story to become a part of our cultural mythology” (174). What is it, then, that makes the tale so compelling to such a wide audience?
As stated before, reader-response theory is meant to examine a text from the angle of the audience, to see how the reader responds or makes meaning of the text. “For reader-response critics are most often concerned with the present audience,” explains Donald Keesey. “Most reader-response critics have little interest in authors or intended meanings. The poem” – or any artistic text, for that matter – “exists now. It affects us now. These, they claim, are the crucial facts, and any relevant criticism should be built around them” (129). Thus, to better understand the way Irving’s story has been received and responded today, it is important to understand what it means to a present audience, as opposed to readers of the past.
Of note in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is the ambiguity of the ending – was Ichabod merely the victim of a prank by his erstwhile rival, Brom Bones? Or was he truly carried off by the headless horseman, never to be seen again? Smith notes, “that the reader is invited to come to this conclusion for him or herself is fairly obvious, but it is of paramount importance to the story's overall effect that Irving's narrator Diedrich Knickerbocker does not” (175). He states furthermore that “it is precisely this ambiguous aspect of ghost stories which would provide American imaginations with such fulfilling release” (178). The reader is left with a hint of doubt, even if he or she has chosen one possibility over the other, and while most scholarly responses tend to be in favor of the former interpretation – Brom as the horseman – the endearing response has been with the horseman as a legitimate specter. “While it may have in fact been a disguised Brom Bones who ran Ichabod Crane out of Sleepy Hollow, the call to run the alternate possibility that the ghost of the headless horseman was responsible for the incident out of our imaginations is perhaps unnecessarily limiting” (Smith 183).
Popular culture, and the media associated with it, has often gone with the more dramatic supernatural possibility teased at in the story’s end. It presents a more fantastic scenario, and from this angle the story has been presented in various ways; for example, it is logically more dramatic, more cinematically appealing, to have the headless horseman exist as a terrifying entity rather than Brom’s practical joke, in the realm of film. Many films play up the horrific aspects of the horseman, mainly drawing from the climactic chase near the end of Irving’s tale. But many adaptations handle subject matter differently, as demonstrated by two well-recognized versions of the narrative: Walt Disney’s 1949 animated adaptation of the legend, featured in the film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and Tim Burton’s gothic re-imagined Sleepy Hollow.
In Disney’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the film “gives a pastoral romance with a playfully comic tone (and the concluding fright)” (Hughes 18). It more-or-less faithfully follows the basic plot of Irving’s story, with small embellishments given here and there to the antagonistic and often slapstick rivalry between Ichabod and Brom. The film, cheerful in tone through the first half, suddenly takes a dark turn when the headless horseman is finally mentioned, and here deviates slightly from Irving’s narrative: Brom, in recounting his story of the horseman (done so in as a song, “You Can’t Reason With a Headless Man”), does not mention the ghost’s Hessian identity nor his death by cannonball, but instead recounts that the phantom rides one night each year, Halloween, and seeks any head he can come across. And when Ichabod finally meets the horseman, the headless figure has been armed with a sword that he constantly swipes at Ichabod with during their chase.
While Irving’s ghost was never described as being overtly threatening, save for being a frightful specter that possesses all manner of supernatural power, the Disney horseman is given a clear and dangerous reason to be avoided. No longer does the horseman ride out to the forgotten battlefield seeking his own missing head: any head will do, regardless if it is still on one’s shoulders or not. It allows for the horseman to seem more unambiguously threatening, making him visually terrifying. Yet at the same time, this helps maintain the ambiguity of his identity, as it was only Brom that divulged this detail. Similarly, the end of the film maintains the unresolved mystery of Ichabod’s disappearance, though it is still implied, much like in Irving’s narrative, that Ichabod was “spirited away” by the horseman.
The popularity of Disney’s film, with its sword-wielding head-hunting horseman, has likely had some influence on the American consciousness, for a significant number of adaptations since then have featured a similar specter. Such is the case with Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, which takes major liberties with Irving’s narrative. As noted by Martin Kevorkian, “Sleepy Hollow reinscribes a supernatural dimension that the tale had teasingly proposed but ultimately rejected” (28). The film’s art direction, pace, cinematography and special effects create a vision that heavily emphasizes the gothic and the paranormal, often forgoing the pastoral moments of Irving’s story in favor of a perpetually haunting or unsettling atmosphere.
The horseman takes center-stage in this telling, where there is hardly any doubt the Hessian is a proper revenant, a major antagonist and overpowering force of evil. The ghost once again possesses a blade, and throughout the film decapitates his share of victims. Only by returning the horseman’s missing head can he be put to rest, and “at the moment of utmost crisis, Ichabod recovers the actual Horseman’s actual skull and restores it to its rightful owner” (Kevorkian 30). Any and all ambiguity in the story’s end has been stripped away, and the film instead offers an altogether different and didactically-paranormal product only loosely connected with Irving’s tale, but one nevertheless enjoyed by certain audiences for its visual appeal, its thrills and chills, and intimidating representation of the horseman, Hughes expresses that “Tim Burton's beautiful film presents a gothic horror with an unambiguously menacing ghost and with the occasional touch of romance and light comedy" (18). But Kevorkian argues that “by burying [Irving’s tale] in the midst of a minutely realized spectacle of the supernatural, they have aggressively subjected the tale to a diametrically opposed presentation of a world” (27).
No matter how the tale is presented, it is the readers who ultimately benefit from the legend; an American ghost story, retold in much that same way Irving himself embellished aspects of his own bank of lore. It is not terribly surprising that the appeal of Irving’s text has lasted as long as it has, with characters like Ichabod and Brom embodying the archetypical Yankee and outdoorsman in literature as no one else had before, and the headless horseman that has become an American myth. "Among all of Irving's characters only Rip Van Winkle has as great a power to move us” muses Hoffman; “and Rip, too, is what the highly developed but narrow gift of a storyteller whose milieu was the fabulous has made of a character from folklore" (435).
It is potentially fitting that Diedrich Knickerbocker notes “it is remarkable 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” (Irving); indeed, those who have partaken of Irving’s legend in some form or another have mentally resided in that haunted valley, “to inhale the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative—to dream dreams, and see apparitions” (Irving).
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Works Cited
Andrews, Jeanmarie. "Ghosts In Sleepy Hollow Country." Early American Life 32.5 (2001): 18-21. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 Dec. 2011.
Bruner, Marjorie W. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: A Mythological Parody.” College English 25.4 (1964): 274, 279-83. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 Dec. 2011.
Hoffman, Daniel G. “Irving's Use of American Folklore in 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'.” PMLA 68.3 (1953): 425-35. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Hughes, Robert. “Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History.” Arizona Quarterly 61.3 (2005): 1-26. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Vol. X, Part 2.” Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1917; Bartleby.com 2000. Web. 1 December 2011. <www.bartleby.com/310/2/>
Keesey, Donald. “Reader-Response Criticism: Audience as Context.” Contexts for Criticism 4th ed. New York: McGraw, 2003. 129-39. Print.
---. “Mimetic Criticism: Reality as Context.” 205-14. Print.
Kevorkian, Martin. “'You Must Never Move the Body!': Burying Irving's Text in Sleepy Hollow.” Literature Film Quarterly 31.1 (2003): 27-32. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
Sleepy Hollow. Dir. Time Burton. Paramount, 1999. DVD.
Smith, Greg. “Supernatural Ambiguity and Possibility in Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.” Midwest Quarterly 42.2 (2001): 174-83. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 December 2011.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Dir. James Algar, Clyde Geronimi, Jack Kinney. Disney, 1949. DVD.
Witt, Brian. “The Dullahan, the Irish Headless Horseman.” Emerald Reflections. Shamrock Club of Wisconsin, Oct. 2008. Web. 10 December 2011.