American Gothic

My personal favorite cinematic adaptation, and quite possibly Burton's best film.

   

SLEEPY HOLLOW: AMERICAN GOTHIC

A Christian Education Presentation

Washington Irving
April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859. One of the first and greatest writers in the American Republic, Irving was the youngest of 11 children born to an Orcadian father and Cornish mother. Eight survived to adulthood. The family settled in Manhattan as merchants in 1763, and Irving was born the same week that New York City learned of the British ceasefire ending the Revolution. He met his namesake, George Washington, when he was six years old.

Sleepy Hollow
A yellow fever outbreak in 1798 prompted his family to send him to stay with friends upstate in the Dutch settlement of Tarrytown. The area was known locally as Sleeper’s Haven. Here he learned much of Dutch customs and ghost stories. Having fallen in love with the Hudson Valley, he made several other trips, including an extended stay in Johnstown, NY (the later setting of “Rip Van Winkle”). “The Kaatskill Mountains,” he wrote, “had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination.”

Jonathan Oldstyle
Irving began publishing in 1802, when he was 19 years old, commenting pseudonymously on the city’s cultural and social scene, and revealing his Federalist leanings. Aaron Burr enjoyed Oldstyle so much that he sent articles to his daughter Theodosia. His brothers sent Irving on a tour of Europe, where he eschewed tourist traps and became quite the social butterfly.

Home Again, Home Again
Irving returned to New York, where he barely passed the bar in 1806, and focused instead on an 1807 parody publication, Salmagundi. Here he lampooned the Big Apple as “Gotham,” from the Anglo-Saxon “Goat’s Town.” The nickname stuck. In 1809, utilizing a brilliant viral ad campaign in the local newspapers, he published Knickerbocker's History of New York. The most far-reaching cultural impact of this bestseller was the invention of the American Santa Claus.

Old World, New Problems
Merchants in New England and New York opposed the War of 1812, but Irving enlisted after the British sacking of Washington, DC in 1814. The conflict resulted in ruin for his family, and he returned to Europe to salvage what he could of their businesses. Alas, his mission soon ended in bankruptcy, yet he remained in England to publish The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon. This collection of short stories proved enormously successful, released in seven installments in New York and two volumes in London.

Geoffrey Crayon
This was the big one: 34 short stories and essays, including “Rip Van Winkle,” “Old Christmas,” and “The Legend of Sleepy-Hollow.”  He effectively established American literature upon the world stage; only Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales came close to selling so well in Europe. While largely forgotten today, the “Old Christmas” tales, along with Moore’s “A Visit from St Nicholas” and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, created Christmas as we know it. He went on to have a successful literary and diplomatic career, but Sketch-Book would prove to be his masterpiece.

Return to the Hollow
Irving died of a heart-attack at 76 years of age, eight months after having published the final volume of his biography of George Washington. He was buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery (Tarrytown officially changed its name in 1996) and Longfellow commemorated him with:

In the Churchyard at Tarrytown, 1876

How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death! / Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours,

Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer; / Dying, to leave a memory like the breath

Of summers full of sunshine and of showers, / A grief and gladness in the atmosphere.

The Legend
Of all Irving’s sketches, “The Legend of Sleepy-Hollow” remains his most popular and enduring. Tales of headless horsemen are found throughout European folklore, notably the Dullahan. An anonymous Hessian grenadier indeed had lost his head to a cannonball, and was buried by the Van Tassel family in the Old Dutch Burial Ground. He was identified in 2019 as Heinrich Range. Truth, it would appear, is stranger than fiction. (I’m something of a Hessian myself.)

Themes
Trauma would be a big one. The Wars of Independence, both of them, have passed, but the psychic scars remain, and refuse to stay buried. Scary stories are a way for folks to cope. Ichabod is an optimistic underdog, clever yet superstitious, ambitious but gluttonous, game for adventure but lacking maturity—like America as a whole. He seeks the hand of Katrina, but for personal gain. Thus he loses out in a contest of imagination to the prankster Bram Bones. Ah, but don’t fret yet: he appears to find success in another town. Or so they say.

Super Natural
Irving writes that even “good people … are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs; subject to trances and visions … There was a contagion in the very air that blew from the haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.” His supernatural is rooted in the natural. Irving has a foot in both worlds, that of the skeptic and the believer. While his Headless Horseman may be mundane mischief, the otherworldly haunts Irving’s tales. Like the settlers themselves, his stories place Old World folk belief in solid American scenery.

These Woods Are Haunted
Irving doesn’t dismiss the spiritual. Rather, he plays with it. Sure, it might be bunk, but it might not. The woods of New England were held to be haunted from the time of our Pilgrim forebears. Irving’s America is brash, bold, a bit ridiculous, willing to laugh at herself, winking at shadows whilst still telling the old and wondrous tales. Is this yet our character? Have we grown or merely aged?