[Following up
the weekend’s great Guest Post, for this year’s Halloween series I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of scary stories and their contexts. Hope you all have
a boo-tiful holiday!]
On the original American scary story that’s also an ironic American origin
story.
I never got the chance to watch any episodes of the recent Sleepy Hollow TV show—if you did, please feel
free to share your thoughts in comments!—but it’s certainly further proof of
the lasting influence of one of America’s earliest professional writers, Washington Irving. Certainly much of Irving’s extensive body of work, including the History of New York about which I wrote
in that hyperlinked post, has largely vanished from our collective national consciousness;
but two of the stories in his first collection of fiction, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), have
endured across those nearly two hundred years about as fully as any American
literary works (from any century) have. I’m referring of course to that
hen-pecked sleeper Rip Van Winkle and to the focus
of today’s post, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
“Sleepy Hollow” has endured because at its heart, as the TV show seemed (from
the previews and clips I saw anyway) to understand, it is about a simple conflict
that is at the heart of many scary stories: between an extremely ordinary
everyman (awkward and shy schoolteacher Ichabod Crane) and an equally
extraordinary supernatural foe (the terrifying Headless Horseman). Like many
scary story protagonists, Ichabod has an idealized love interest, the buxon Katrina
Von Tassel; and finds himself competing for her affections with a far more
popular and confident rival, Brom Bones. The culminating intersection between
the two plotlines—between Ichabod’s supernatural and romantic
encounters—engages the audience on multiple emotional levels simultaneously,
just as so many contemporary horror films strive to do. Indeed, the only
significant divergence from the now well-established formula is that the
everyman hero loses—the Horseman scares Ichabod Crane away, Brom Bones escorts
Katrina Von Tassel to the altar, and Ichabod’s story becomes the stuff of local
legend.
That resolution lessens the story’s scariness factor (it seems clear that
Brom was masquerading as the Headless Horseman), but at the same time amplifies
its status as an originating American folktale. For one thing, Irving’s fictional narrator and historian Diedrich Knickerbocker presents Ichabod’s story, like Rip Van Winkle’s, as
precisely such a folktale, a part of the collective memory of his turn of the
19th century Dutch New York and thus of Early Republic America more
broadly. And for another, it’s possible to read Brom Bones’ triumph, and his
resulting union with the town’s powerful Von Tassel family, as an ironic
reminder—much like Rip’s concluding images—that the more things seem to have
changed in this post-Revolutionary America, the more in at least some ways they
have stayed the same. America’s landed elites maintain their power,
manipulating our folk legends (even our scary stories) to do so—and our overly
ambitious schoolteachers flee in terror before that social force, remembered
simply as a funny and telling part of those stories.
October Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other scary stories you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment