The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you first of all thank each of the Copyright Office were giving us this room at the last minute we were going to have it in the law library but the space was a little small so thank you Copyright Office for coming through and I'm so glad you're here for this lunchtime discussion of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow I clearly have been under a rock because until Janine Cali our communications person and Law Library alerted me that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is trending right now because of the TV series and so I am glad to be brought up to date but I first heard about professor Grossman's presentation at American University through the books that shaped America series and nancy davenport he used to work at the Library of Congress he's now university librarian at american university said oh this professor Grossman is so engaging we really enjoyed his presentations so click-click-click we have a great relationship with the Washington College of Law at AU so that's why he's here today because of our wonderful relationship and we're just so glad you're here Louis Grossman teaches and specializes in American legal history Civil Procedure and food and drug law at American universities Washington College of Law and he is formerly an associate at the DC firm of Covington and Burling our own law librarian of Congress David Mao is also an alumni Covington and Roberta Schaffer Roberta Schaffer and so we're we're glad to have the you know more Covington and Burling staff here so professors Grossman's latest work includes Food and Drug law cases and materials now in its third edition and he is writing a book and I love this title tentatively titled you can choose your medicine freedom of therapeutic choice in American law and history so we'll be anxious to hear about that maybe maybe for a return presentation so I'm now going to turn it over to Professor Grossman and thank you so much thank you this is truly one of the more exciting invitations I received in recent years thank you so much my parents are even more excited than I am and I'm going to send an email later today to David Brian Davis the great historian at Yale University for whom I I was taking his American intellectual cultural and history class in 1984 and wrote a paper on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and have always loved the story and thought that it was the best thing I'd ever done actually that paper that little undergrad paper and so when I saw the opportunity to speak about this at American University I just jumped right on it and then when this invitation came I didn't hesitate even a moment to to accept the invitation I should explain a little bit more context what is this lawyer guy doing talking about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow I have a PhD in American history as well as a law degree and in addition to that I focus on intellectual and cultural history as well as legal history as reflected in the title of my new book and finally I should say that my worlds intersect a little bit with this talk because you'll see that I talk a fair amount about food in this talk because Washington Irving's story is infused with images of food and I'll even for purposes of the law librarians here and lawyers I will also even make a gesture toward law and literature and talk about Washington Irving's vision of law in this piece and you may think what position of law in the legend Sleepy Hollow it's there now let me just ask how many of you have ever read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow how many of you have read it recently okay so okay so yeah so so I will do some pretty close textual analysis but it's helpful for me to know how familiar the audience is with this story this is a great new function by the way on the web called Prezi which you can do the equivalent of powerpoints on so the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is installment six of Washington Irving's sketchbook written under the pseudonym Jeffery crayon gentlemen let me give you a little bit of background on Washington Irving there's a picture of him as a young man some twenty seven years old and this is the year before his death looks like a hardly age at all although his nose seems to have changed haven't exactly figured that out so Washington Irving was born on April 3rd 1783 in New York City about five months before the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War he was named after George Washington by his federalist parents he was the youngest of eleven children of a middle class merchant with a family import business one of my favorite stories about Washington Irving is that in 1789 he was walking when he was six years old he was walking down the streets of New York City which of course were at that time contained completely below Bleecker Street and he was walking with his nurse and they ran into none other than the new President of the United States George Washington his namesake who blessed him so he was blessed by George Washington he was a rambunctious and restless child and always of somewhat poor health and his parents were always very worried about that and one of the great health issues of the time was yellow fever epidemics which hit major US cities sequentially and there was a major yellow fever epidemic in 1798 here's a map of the yellow fever cases in that epidemic and Washington Irving's parents and his older siblings were worried enough about him that they sent him out of town to live outside the epidemic and where did they send him but to Tarrytown New York up the Hudson River he stayed with a friend in Tarrytown New York and at this point in remember he's around 15 years old and he wandered around the environs with his with his family friend with whom he's staying and encountered the small village of Sleepy Hollow near Tarrytown and the old Dutch church erected in 1685 in Sleepy Hollow still exists this graveyard is where the Headless Horseman is buried although that's just a legend we're not sure if that's actually true so so he continued his his growth and I want to mention about by the way about Sleepy Hollow and I say that Sleepy Hollow his population was made up largely of the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of New York and apparently Washington Irving was very mesmerized by the place and took additional trips there as a youth he always had the desire to go into the world of literature but he also felt this competing pole to go into law which was the respectable profession that was most obvious to him two of his brothers were graduates of Columbia Law School and the pull is irresistible and in 1789 he started work at a law office in 1880 oh one he transferred to the law office of Henry Brock holes Livingston which some of you may have heard who some of you may have heard of he's the author of the dissenting opinion in Pearson V Post the famous foxhunting case and later an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court so after working with Livingston he then clerked and read law with this man in on the screen Josiah Hagen Hoffman a prominent federalist lawyer who had been the Attorney General of New York State so he started reading law with with Hoffman but then he took ill again and he was sent off to Europe the idea being it would be good for his health and indeed he got better on the ship in between 1804 and 1806 he traveled around Europe not taking the conventional grand tour of Europe but a rather unconventional path through the continent through Spain and France and Italy at one point his ship was taken by Italian pirates and he also became very very worldly and sociable through this trip so he came back in 1806 and felt the pull of law again or the force of law maybe from the direction of his family and so he swen to study and read again with with judge Hoffman Hoffman and in 1806 he was admitted to the bar apparently he did terribly in his bar exam everyone acknowledges that he was admitted to the bar a quote more through courtesy than dessert Washington Irving hated the law he complained in letters about quote this wrangling driving unmerciful profession he saw the legal profession as both spiritually and practically diametrically opposed to his preferred life as a writer and he hated the pedantic ism of lawyers he hated the books he hated everything about law so you might have thought okay off he goes and never to see log n but there was a certain attraction to staying in law and there she is Sara Mathilda Hoffman the daughter of Judge Hoffman this is washington irving's Katrina Van Tassel Hoffman judge Hoffman offered Washington Irving Matilda's hand and a full partnership in his law practice so this is what he put before him but a condition of this deal was that Washington Irving had to prove himself as a capable attorney and it's interesting to think about how the portrayal of romance in a Legend of Sleepy Hollow is probably colored by this relationship because as I'll talk about more for Ichabod Crane the attraction of Katrina is all about acquisition of wealth and status there's there's no love Washington Irving was certainly consumed by love for Matilda Hoffman but at the same time his draw toward her was clearly mixed in with this offer by judge Hoffman for a life of comfort and and and wealth as a lawyer so Washington Irving he was totally in love but he was also miserable about this bargain that he was offered by Hoffman he said quote I could study anything else rather than law and I had a fatal propensity to bail that I can never say that Bob bell letters in 1809 the conundrum that he is facing is resolved in the most tragic romantic way Matilda dies suddenly of consumption Washington Irving never picks up a law book again and he lives his life oh he lives his life out as a bachelor so while he was battling with himself about whether to pursue law or literature he'd been working on a book that became his first very well-known book a history of New York published in 1809 a history of New York is a satirical history of New York in the Dutch period it was written under a pseudonym Dietrich Nick Nick Walker a Dutch historian invented by Washington Irving and this was a wildly popular book and of course the name Knickerbocker ends up becoming part of New York cultural and lore and legend even to the point of the basketball team the Knicks being ultimately owing their name to Washington Irving who also by the way invented the term Gotham before for New York City so in 1809 he writes this book and he sees a path ahead as a life as a as an author but business calls again his family's merchant business is having a lot of financial difficulties so his brother sent him to Europe to try to save the business and so off he goes to Europe again the war of 1812 had taken place it was a total disaster for the Irving family trading company so Washington Irving goes and stays in Europe until 1832 while in Europe he travels to Scotland and for the first time encounters this gentleman Sir Walter Scott the author of Ivanhoe and Rob Roy and and other wildly popular books of the time like Washington Irving Walter Scott was first of all the most popular author in his land second of all a representative of the prevailing Romantic movement in literature and third a lawyer who had chosen to abandon the law and pursue romantic literature so he became Sir Walter Scott's dear friend and Walter Scott remained a lifelong friend and influence on Washington Irving so while Washington Irving is speaking with so Sir Walter Scott Sir Walter Scott introduces him to German and Scottish folklore and legend Sir Walter Scott was fascinated by oral tradition and folklore and he urged Washington Irving to become familiar with these traditions and amongst the traditions Washington Irving becomes familiar with our the legends in both German and Scottish folklore and legend of headless horseman and so first of all there are a couple of German folk legends later published by the Grimm brothers concerning headless horseman and in addition in Scotland there was a legend of Ewan the Headless this on the right is you in the headless if you look carefully you can see that he's actually wearing tartan he is a headless plan when you say clansmen and I don't mean Klansmen I mean like Scottish clan has been who who's supposedly haunted haunted Scotland and so this obviously had a lot of influence on on Washington Irving going forward the business goes under the Washington Irving says I'm going to stay in Europe and dedicate my life to a life of literature and his production first major production written in Europe is called the sketchbook of Jeffrey crayon this is a collection of 34 essays and short stories that Irving wrote under the pseudonym Jeffrey crayon the pieces were mostly about England and set in England not in America they weren't only fiction there were a lot of nonfiction essays in the tradition of Addison and Steele but the two most famous pieces in the sketchbook are the two most atypical in certain ways stories in the sketchbook they are written Winkle which was published in the first installment in 1819 and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which appeared in the sixth installment in 1820 interestingly these two stories within the sketchbook of Jeffrey crayon were written under the Knickerbocker pseudonym so the fake Jeffrey crayon says that he found these stories in the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker when Diedrich Knickerbocker passed away The Sketchbook became a huge sensation both in the United States and in Britain due largely to these two stories some scholars identify these stories as the progenitors of the american short-story form so here's where I introduce you to some of my independent research on Google's Ngram function are you guys familiar with the Engram function on some day when you don't have much to do take a look at it because it is addictive the Google Ngram function analyzes the frequency with which words are used as a total percentage as a percentage of the total number of words appearing in the books published in that year so in other words it's a measure not of of absolute number of times the word is used but the times the number of times a word is used as a as a as a relative matter over time and you can search American you can search British literature and it's great fun you can enter spider-man Batman and Superman and and look at their rises and falls in American culture so I used this function to examine just how popular Washington Irving was in in England because it's often said that he was extremely popular in England and so I compared Charles Dickens to Washington Irving and with both of these men you can't simply enter their name you have to enter their pseudonyms as well and so I have the blue line is Charles Dickens and bahs bahs was Dickon pseudonym the red line is Washington Irving and Geoffrey crayon and Diedrich Knickerbocker and as you can see Washington Irving was actually more popular than Charles Dickens until about 1865 or mentioned more frequently at least in 1865 was after Charles Dickens had already published every single one of his books that you're aware of except for Edwin Drood so Washington Irving truly was a very popular figure in in England I compared him to a bunch of other people that you know the only one who is more popular with Sir Walter Scott himself he was respected by the European intelligentsia he was a celebrity in the salons of Paris and London none less than Thakur a referred to Irving as quote the ambassador whom the new world of letters sent to the old so Washington Irving truly was the first American man of letters accepted by by Europe so of course in the interesting question about the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is its persistence in the American imagination so I wanted to figure out just how popular this story is over time and so Library of Congress put together a list of the 88 books that changed America and I wanted to compare the frequency with which Ichabod Crane is mentioned compared to leading male characters in other books in the 88 books that changed America and he does quite well thank you so the blue line that starts the earliest and as you can see cuts a path steady path right you know it was number one for a very long time and then as the other character is starting to emerge its steady blue line right through the right side of the graph there that is Ichabod Crane give you a sense of who the other characters in case you can't read them are that I'm comparing him to he is a little bit less popular today although that may have changed since the Fox series started this only goes till 2000 a little bit less popular than a hab Rhett Butler Holden Caulfield but mentioned more frequently in 2000 than Jay Gatsby Atticus Finch Simon Legree and Stanley Kowalski so he's doing very well for himself as recently as two thousand I was also interested in the persistence in the American imagination of the Headless Horseman so I wanted to figure out who are the most popular ghosts in the American imagination this one was fun so here are America's favorite ghosts and the the Headless Horseman is the one that ends up in first place on the very right of the screen so as of 2000 he was the most popular ghost in in American in American books at least and you can tell that he's had a good long run he's never really faded just in case you're curious that ghost that he's beating handily by 2000 include Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol Banquo's ghost Shakespeare's bancos ghost miss Jessel from turn of the screw who makes a really good run in the early 1960s because of the movie the innocence starring Deborah Kerr so you can see that this really is reflecting cultural trends and so I can imagine with the Fox series now you would see if the Google database went to the present you'd see a soaring slope for for the headless horseman he also handily very easily beats Casper the Friendly goes to one on the bottom and he destroys Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street who just never really makes more than a blip in in the American literature and indeed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has a very persistent presence in American popular culture and literature you can walk over to the Smithsonian American Art Museum just a few blocks from here and see this painting which I love by John Couey door at the illustrator of early American literature he also for example he did a bed this this is okay he wasn't he was an illustrator of American literature including for example lasted Mohicans and and this is his his painting hanging today of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow made an early presence in visual or movie media there was a movie called the Headless Horseman starring Will Rogers in 1922 like I can't say that I have seen it it is apparently quite loyal or faithful to the text the popular version that probably inserted itself into the brains of more Americans than any other is Disney's 1949 version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow how many of you have seen Disney's Legend of Sleepy Hollow so it's it is narrated by Bing Crosby with a couple of songs about Katrina and about Ichabod and it is it's absolutely wonderful and much more faithful to the text than any of the subsequent versions that that I'll mention in a moment it actually captures in some ways the spirit of Washington Irving better than the more recent iterations and so I think this is the vision of the Headless Horseman that was inserted into the brains of American children for an entire generation when I was a little kid I was a stamp collector and this was my favorite stamp I think it's just beautiful Washington is Legend of Sleepy Hollow and so it made the US Postal Service and then comes this dreadful dreadful dreadful version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow which I watched just a few weeks ago Tim Burton's Legend of Sleepy Hollow a movie in 1999 in this version Ichabod Crane is a late 18th century New York City detective sent to Sleepy Hollow to try to solve a spate of beheading beheadings murders using modern crime solving techniques so they turn Ichabod Crane bizarrely into a scientistic New York City detective don't know why so I recommend that you not waste time on that movie if you if you haven't seen already and then of course we get to the modern TV series how many of you have watched any episodes of this it is only the only the left side of the room what is that it is actually one of the big hits of this TV season running against Monday Night Football yet it has incredibly high ratings it has almost nothing to do with alleged to Sleepy Hollow except for the names of the characters and the name of the town Sleepy Hollow Ichabod Crane is an Oxford professor who emigrated to the United States so that archetypal Yankee Ichabod Crane has turned into an Oxford professor and in the series Ichabod Crane the the Englishman was fighting in the American Revolution on the side of the Americans and beheaded the Hessian who became the Headless Horseman and then he is transported Ichabod Crane to the present where he joins forces with a Sleepy Hollow police officer in a town that is identified as having like a hundred and eighty thousand people in it so it says Sleepy Hollow under an 80,000 in the town as I said to the Washington Post yesterday that seems more like Yonkers than than Sleepy Hollow and he does battle against the Headless Horseman in modern-day Sleepy Hollow / Yonkers and the Sleepy Hollow the Headless Horseman is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelations so it has this whole religious thing going which is completely foreign to to Washington Irving's version so nonetheless it reflects the fact that the Sleepy Hollow maintains some kind of hold on the American imagination and I think it's worth considering what it is about the book that maintains that hold I want to now turn to the text itself and talk about and I don't have any other illustrations I'm sad to say so let's just to stay in the mood let's go back to the stamp how about that there we go okay so now just remember this this this vision why I talked to you about the book first of all I want to talk about what the book says or the the tale says about Washington Irving's vision of the United States of his time versus Europe the whole tale which remember Washington Irving wrote in England is infused with Irving's critical contemplations on the distinctions between the old world and the new so Sleepy Hollow is inhabited by the Dutch community there's constant references to their Dutch origins and to their old world customs herbing portrays a placid and completely insular community very similar to the way that de Tocqueville describes certain towns he encountered in remote corners of the old world he said Tocqueville in certain remote corners of the old world you may still sometimes stumble upon a small district which seems to have been forgotten amid the general tumult and to have remained stationary while everything around it was in motion well that is Sleepy Hollow it is a sanctuary which has remained stationary while everything around it is in motion so there's something very European about it Sleepy Hollow every single character has van in front of their name their customs their houses their clothes all harken back to the old world now let's contrast that with the intruder into Sleepy Hollow Ichabod Crane Ichabod is a native of Connecticut the most Yankee of states and indeed I think Ichabod sorry Legend Sleepy Hollow can be seen in certain ways as a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court parallel Ichabod Crane is unambiguously anglo-saxon apparently the only soul in the village without a van in front of his name in a society of simple farmers he is the only one who performs the quote-unquote labor of head work for a living and after he leaves Sleepy Hollow he leads a life almost stereotypically characteristic of a 19th century American the author reports that he changed his quarters to a distant part of the country he had studied law had been admitted to the bar turned politician electioneered and written for the newspapers and finally had been made a justice of the 10-pound Court in New York City so that is for those of you who don't believe that Ichabod Crane was spirited away by Headless Horseman some people report that that's what happened Ichabod Crane the majority of the population of Sleepy Hollow rejects this story and thinks that he was actually spirited away by by the Headless Horseman so this story is a study in contrast between mobility and stability between new world mobility and old world stability and therefore The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is an implicit criticism of the Restless Roose Restless rootless ambition of 19th century Americans so Irving describes Sleepy Hollow as a valley whose quote populations manners and customs remain fixed while the great torrent of migration and improvement which is making such incessant change in other parts of this restless country sweeps by them unobserved very similar to Tok Abele's Tocqueville description of a isolated European village and it's clear that Washington Irving likes this aspect of Sleepy Hollow the narrator mentioned Sleepy Hollow and these characteristics quote with all possible laud la UD he loves it the narrator of the story says though many years have elapsed since I trod The Drowsy shades of Sleepy Hollow yet I question whether I should not still find the same trees and the same families vegetating in its sheltered bosom complete stability and he also notes that local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered long-settled retreats but they are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our places so this is very much a tale of its place its imaginary place Sleepy Hollow now contrast that vision of stability to Ichabod Crane himself whereas Sleepy Hollow slumbers unchanging through the passage of time Ichabod stands for the shifting unsettled quality of nineteenth-century American society he is repeatedly described as an itinerant bachelor he lives with a different family each week he carries all of his worldly possessions in a bundle made from a handkerchief he makes the point of saying that he does not sojourn in Sleepy Hollow but Terry is there suggesting that he's going to be up and off somewhere else before long when he dances quote not a limb about him and sorry not a limb not a fibre about him his idle he is all motion all action a fidgety presence in this drowsy community he thus symbolizes the excessive restlessness of the American people in general indeed Ichabod is Restless and his threatens to subvert the familial and communal order of Sleepy Hollow itself Washington Irving describes Ichabod Crane as such he says his busy fancy already went this is when he sees Katrina for the first time his busy fancy already realized his hopes and presented to him the blooming katrina with the whole family of children mounted on top of a wagon setting out for kentucky tennessee or the lord knows where so much for families vegetating in the same place for years Ichabod Crane presents a direct threat to that and this is also echoed in in Tocqueville Tocqueville notes quote in the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on he plants a garden and lets it and lets it just as the trees were coming into bearing he settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere so I think that Washington Irving and Tocqueville were sensing the same characteristic in in the American character of that time and of course another very important aspect of that character is the pursuit of wealth the greedy pursuit of wealth The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is also a criticism of the dominance of the capitalist ethos in antebellum America the way that Washington Irving structures this story Sleepy Hollow is actually at a two-layer remove from market capitalism at the center of market capitalism of course is New York City itself always present in the background of any Washington Irving's story about the Hudson area then there's Tarrytown Tarrytown is described as a small market town where some tarrying is done Sleepy Hollow is outside of Tarrytown and so you see this diminishment of market forces as you go from New York City to Tarrytown to Sleepy Hollow and he describes the economy of Sleepy Hollow in a very sort of pre capitalist way the Dutch New Yorkers are merged as a community with the land which Foster's them the same land originally settled by their immigrant ancestors to them land is not a mere commodity it's the basis for communal stability and generational continuity listen to her Vings description of old Baltus Van Tassel between his father he seldom it is true sent either his eyes or his thoughts beyond the boundaries of his own farm but within those everything was snug happy and well-conditioned he was satisfied with his wealth but not proud of it in contrast to this Ichabod is a greedy Yankee capital he is a land speculator to be who views land as simply a commodity a Washington Irving describes Ichabod as follows his heart yearned after the damsel Katrina who was to inherit these domains and his imagination expanded with the idea of how they might be readily turned into cash and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land this acquisitive venturesome an outward looking posture contrasts sharply with the Dutch characters and Ichabod's drive for material success threatens not only his soul but also the stability of the entire community as I mentioned before when I talked about him carting Katrina off to Lord knows where so this is where food comes into it and I'm a food and drug specialist so I guess that I am interested in food more than I know so the food imagery in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is is fascinating the difference between the way that Ichabod and the Dutch villagers consider the abundance of food around them corresponds to the contrast between the new world and old world spirit so start with the Dutch the Dutch are never actually distraught described consuming or even thinking about the copious comestibles all around them that's a herbing turn of phrase copious comestibles they are however obviously well nourished he describes him as buxom lasses herculean Brom bones plump Katrina round in jolly old Van Tassel Van Tassel was quote a perfect picture of a thriving contented liberal hearted farmer the Dutch New York society represents satisfaction without rapacity again contrast this a Chabad crane Ichabod in the story is frequently pictured contemplating possessing and consuming the delicious bounty around him almost everything in Sleepy Hollow appears to him as something he can eat the autumnal scene of an tassles fields and orchards a delightful picture of pastoral magnificence melts and his vision into visions of sumptuous meals his quote unquote devouring mind's eye is quote ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance he is quote the genius of famine descending upon the earth and his appetite for food parallels his appetite for wealth Irving says Ichabod could not help rolling his large eyes around him as he ate so he's sitting and chuckling with the possibility that he might one day be Lord of all this scene of almost unimaginable luxury and splendor yet despite the fact he's constantly shown eating unlike the townfolk Ichabod as you know is exceedingly strong that's part of his archetype he would herbing says quote he was a huge feeder and though lank had the dilating powers of an anaconda no amount of food will satisfy Ichabod he appears permanently malnourished even in the midst of plenitude he thus stands for the insatiable order the new insatiable order in America and I like to think of the pumpkin at the end of the story as actually being laden with significance that it's not often given because we don't eat pumpkin that much these days we do around this time of year obviously but the pumpkin appears earlier in the story as food on a couple of occasions so when he sees the yellow pumpkins turning up they're fair round bellies to the Sun in the field his mind turns immediately to the most luxurious of pies so the pumpkin pumpkin also appears on the the Dutch table at the big party at Van Tassel's on mansion and so the shattered pumpkin lying on the ground at the end of the story to me seems somewhat of a symbol of Ichabod's war gluttony in general the the anxious spirit of gain described by Washington Irving he suggests is not healthy for the soul in this story Ichabod is ravenous quest for a huge meal merges with his compulsion to get rich and both cause a much restless unease so Irving says quote from the moment Ichabod laid his eyes upon these regions of delight the piece of his mind was at an end and his only study was how to gain the affections of the peerless daughter of Van Tassel contrast that with Van Tassel's quiet contentedness with his circumstances and again Tocqueville has something to say about the American character at this time which parallels Urban's observation Tocqueville in in his great work asserts that the United States has the happiest circumstances which the world affords but it is strange to see with what feverish ardour the Americans pursue their own welfare and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it a native of the United States is hasty and grasping at all within his reach at first sight that are something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men Restless in the midst of abundant abundance that is a Chabad crane restlessness in the midst of abundance another theme that I've noticed in this story is a curious anti-intellectualism on Irving Sparta he manifests a curious and striking ambivalence about Burkle book learning and school a mocking rejection of intellectual pretension Ichabod is described as inferior and learning only to the parson in Sleepy Hollow but does Washington Irving really respect this well he also says that Ichabod Crane was esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition for he had read several books quite through he describes connecticut as quote a state which supplies the union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest he does not favor the pioneers of the mind and it's fairly obvious as you read the story what's the Dutch view of such things and of course Ichabod Crane is a schoolmaster and Irving describes the quote appalling sound of the birch as he urged some tardy loiterer along the flowery path of knowledge the Dutch men at least the women like Ichabod the Dutch men at least are apt to consider the cost of schooling a grievous burden and schoolmasters as mere drones after crane is expelled from the town by the Headless Horseman Hans van Ripper who was his his landlord determined to send his children no more to school observing that he never knew any good come of this same reading and writing after Ichabod leaves they can sign his books to the flames there is a book burning at the end of Sleepy Hollow not a big scene and in fact Nancy Davenport an American spoke this week in the next in the series on Fahrenheit 451 and I said to her what does four-45 451 have to do have in common with with the legend Sleepy Hollow and its book burning the the Dutch consigned Ichabod's books to the flames this schoolhouse is deserted and falls into decay and Ichabod the entire symbol of intellectualism or false intellectualism that he presented disappears so I'd like to talk about a Chabad sorry Washington Irving's vision of the role of storytelling Irving suggests that the traditional oral culture of the Dutch is superior to the Yankee book based intellectualism that I was just describing and it's superior artistically but it's also superior in serving an important function which is resisting the negative influences of modernity the mobile and individualistic Yankee Ichabod Crane carries on his solitude solitary wanderings cotton Mathers history of witchcraft a pretend book but it's a pretend book of individual scholarship from Puritan New England Ichabod Crane dust if eyes a literary order that individualistically reads and writes books rather than shares tales he represents a breakdown of the collective Fulk imagination by contrast the Dutch in this story have a thriving oral culture Irving notes ruefully the following local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered long-settled retreats Sleepy Hollow but are trampled under foot by the shifting throng that forms the population of our most country of most of our country places this is the line I like besides there's no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds they have no acquaintance left to call upon what deserving see as oral cultures unique value well sleepy howl apollo's timeless order is threatened by historical intrusions it's threatened by the American Revolution then it's threatened by Ichabod cranes arrival what ultimately saves sleepy Hollow's timeless existence is its collective folk imagination in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow tale telling is a method for resisting historical intrusions into the villages unchanging natural rhythms the Dutch residents spin legends and superstitions around historical intrusions into Sleepy Hollow thus major Andre a British spy during the revolution who was in fact by the way captured in tarry town or around Tarrytown major Andre is thus said to haunt the tree where he was captured so they turned major Andre into a ghost likewise a decapitated hessian trooper becomes the specter of the Headless Horseman in this way historical intrusions become part of the villages sleepy timeless enchanted experience as opposed to historical facts the Sleepy Hollow residents do the same thing in the story to the memory of Ichabod cranes disruptive presence they spin a web of fetch fiction around it in the story so literally Ichabod Crane is chased out of the community by the local folklore in the sense that he flees what he perceives to be the Headless Horseman a the favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow on another level he is evicted from Sleepy Hollow by being absorbed as a legend into the folk imagination itself Ichabod Crane by the end of the book becomes a frightening but harmless apparition the old country wives talk of how he was spirited away by supernatural means his psalm singing voice haunts the old schoolhouse and spooks boys walking alone at night in Sleepy Hollow Ichabod becomes just another neighborhood ghost along with major Andre and a Headless Horseman but now I want to talk about storytelling at another level I want to talk about and this may start to touch on why The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is such a timeless tale in the American imagination Irving turns The Legend of Sleepy Hollow itself a product of his pen in England written at a particular time he turns it into an oral tale with deep roots from an undetermined past look what he does so the book was written by Washington Irving in 1820 less than 40 years after the end of the Revolutionary War but the Astoria the story appears in this sketchbook written under a pseudonym Jeffrey crayon but this particular story was found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker so now think think of all these letters have removed from Washington Irving in a postscript to the story Diedrich Knickerbocker says he relates the story quote in almost the precise words in which he heard it related at a New York City meeting by quote a pleasant shabby gentlemanly old fellow so this this person related it orally to Diedrich Knickerbocker who of course doesn't actually exist so when you're reading the book the source of the narrator's voice is unclear who's talking is it Knickerbocker is it this old fellow who knows but whichever of them is talking is relating a tale of a remote period of American history that is to say some 30 years since thirty years thirty years before when before 1820 when Irving wrote the story before the date that Knickerbocker wrote his narrative before the date that the old fellow Whirley reported the narrative to the New York corporation it's completely unclear all we know is that Ichabod arrives in town sometime after the American Revolution meanwhile this narrator whoever he is in turn relates within the story of Sleepy Hollow numerous oral tales shared amongst the town folk of Sleepy Hollow the end result is an artificially created deep-rooted American folklore or fairy tale and that's how the story lives today he created in a his literary imagination a folkloric tradition that of course did not exist in reality it worked it worked because Ichabod Crane in the headless horseman are now our fairy tales in 1905 a commentator noted that Washington Irving SketchBook quote has made his name as much a household word here as Grimm's name is in Germany that became Washington Irving's legacy to American literature in certain respects creating out of whole cloth a deep-rooted folkloric tradition it's interesting also to see other ways that Irving tries to reach back into an imagined past another way is his repeated allusions to chivalry and knighthood in the book but chivalry knighthood with an American spin obviously he was inspired here at least somewhat by the author of Ivanhoe Sir Walter Scott Ichabod the the word knight-errant of yore the phrase appears three different times in the book Ichabod is explicitly distinguished from the knight-errant of yore at one point another time he's compared to a knight-errant of yore but this is ingest because listen to what herbing then says in in an image perhaps borrowed from Don Quixote he says but it is meat I should in the true spirit of romantic story give some account of the looks and equipments of my hero and his steed the animal he beast rode was a broken-down plowhorse that had outlived almost everything but its viciousness Ichabod was a suitable figure for such a steed he rode with short stirrups which brought his knees nearly up to the pommel of the saddle his sharp elbow stuck out like a grasshoppers he carried his whip perpendicularly in his hand like a sceptre and as his horse jogged on the motion of his arms was not unlike the flapping of a pair of wings so this is not true chivalry not true knighthood but Americanized and for a hat perhaps Don Quixote eyes vision of it Brom bones by contrast is described as having a rough ship to him and he would quote fain have settled their pretensions to Katrina according to the mode of knights-errant of your by single combat so Brom bones is the true romantic hero in a sense but Ichabod makes a Ivanhoe like confrontation impossible because it Chabad recognized that to have taken the field openly against his rival would have been madness Ichabod therefore made his advances in a quiet and gently insinuating manner so Ichabod approached leaves Brom with no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery and so Brom bones truly becomes an Americanized Knight who who uses rustic tactics in order to achieve his goals I want to close and leave a little bit of time for discussion bye bye since this is the law of Congress I want to talk about law and lawyers in in the legend of the Sleepy Hollow I think it is significant that Ichabod becomes a lawyer and a judge after he leaves Sleepy Hollow indeed he's presented as a legal figure various ways throughout the story and in an almost uniformly negative way first take Cotton Mather Cotton Mather any reader would have recognized was the the force behind the Salem witch trials that that was really his legacy to America and yet Ichabod is described as a perfect master of cotton Mathers history of New England witchcraft in which by the way he most firmly and potently believed second he's often described as a a figure of justice within his schoolhouse in a negative way so Washington Irving describes Ichabod Crane in the schoolhouse like this he says he administered justice with discrimination rather than severity taking the burden off the backs of the weak and laying it on those of the strong your pure meat your mere puny sapling was passed by with indulgence but the claims of justice were satisfied by inflicting a double portion on some little tough dutch urchin now that is not fair justice is it in his hand he swayed a ferule which is an old word for a ruler that sceptre of despotic power the birch of justice reposed on three nails behind the throne a constant terror to evil doers he's described as the flogger of urchins and this man after leaving Sleepy Hollow becomes a lawyer and a judge which I think reflects to some degree on Washington Irving's vision of the legal profession and American law in general Brom bones by contrast is a attractive sort of judicial figure Washington Irving says with the ascendancy which bodily strength always acquires in rustic life he was the umpire in all disputes setting his hat on one side and giving his decisions with an air and tone admitting of no gainsay or appeal and based on this function enrolled the neighbors looked upon him with a mixture of awe admiration and goodwill so I haven't really figured out exactly what the role of of law is in legend Sleepy Hollow but once I learned about Washington Irving's biography about his relationship to law I think that but the references to law and lawyers are are not accidental one final thought I want to leave you with is a curious parallelism within the story that I can't figure out at all between Ichabod Crane on the one hand and the african-american characters on the other hand you probably don't think of there being african-american characters in Ichabod in the legend in Sleepy Hollow but they are there and by the way they were also in the Hudson Valley as slaves for a long time the african-american characters in the book are the characters were most like Ichabod Crane himself so there's a black messenger who brings the invitation to the Van Tassel party and Washington Irving uses very similar language in describing him that he uses to describe Ichabod Crane he says that he assumed an air of importance and made a quote effort at fine language and that he hurried away the same way Ichabod Crane was always in a hurry there's also a black musician at the party who had quote been the itinerant Orchestra in the neighborhood so he was the he's the other one in the story who's described as an itinerant and when a kebab is dancing in what today is certainly a racist image Ichabod sorry Washington Irving describes the african-americans in the neighborhood gazing with the light at the scene so I haven't quite figured that out and I'd be interested in any impressions you might have about that those of you have read the book recently the other thing I can't exactly figure out is the importance of psalmody PSAL mo dua in the book he is a psalm master at the church and it is mentioned again and again and again now Washington Irving rejected his father's ultra developed Presbyterianism and embraced a much more casual Anglicanism and there does seem to be some sort of subtle anti-clerical strain running through this story a criticism of cotton mather's religious extremism but also a criticism of Ichabod's false piety Ichabod's role as an instructor of Samedi is presented mainly as a path to a few shillings and to an opportunity to woo Katrina it's completely a path to riches basically for him and one of the last sounds were left with in the entire story is the ghostly sound of of Ichabod Crane singing Psalms and I haven't quite figured out what what's going on there so so with those thoughts I'd like to just sort of ask your impressions of various questions those of you who have read the book recently those of you who haven't and one of the things I really want to hear your reactions to is why do you think The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still so deeply woven into our national consciousness two centuries after it was written thanks for listening and what what do you think it is like what what what about it do you think led the drafters of the 88 books that changed America to include this little tale that nobody views as you know great literature in in the traditional sense why do they include that on the list any thoughts you're you're at the Library of Congress I thought you're supposed to know the answer and what is it you know of course elements of fear and bravery are common in fiction what do you think is about their embodiment in this story that makes this such an enduring other thoughts yeah I also think really yeah although of course most of the people who saw and reacted to this stamp had never or had not necessarily least read the book itself so I agree that it endures as a beautifully beautifully written work there's no there's no doubt about that not at all flawed enough to flip over into antihero do you think yeah almost though there's very little appealing about him very little appealing yeah right right although what's interesting about this is that normally a story has a protagonist it's unclear who the protagonist of this story is except for a Sleepy Hollow the village of Sleepy Hollow itself is probably the protagonist right yeah it was interesting to me when I was doing that Engram search it was interesting how hard it was to think of as ghosts in the American canon right so I thought of turn of the screw I thought of this but there's very little else but nonetheless of course there's always been maybe below the level of the Canon a real fascination with the haunted and ghosts yes so I mean so not just the fact that it is itself a story well told but that it's a book about storytelling to some degree yeah yeah so it is interesting the degree to which even though the Hudson River School really came after the sketchbook to some degree they combined I think in the American artistic consciousness and I can never not think about Durant and people like that when I read Washington Irving's description of the Hudson Valley did you wear that in honor of the story he's wearing a pumpkin tie for the few yes well let me say that um I did not even know the Disney movie existed until I started preparing for this talk I read and this is apocryphal because the guy don't have a footnote for this that it was pulled out of circulation by Disney because it showed people drinking and things like that so therefore it hasn't been in the cycle of replayed Disney movies so certainly the current generation has never seen it or heard it Bing Crosby by the way so it's so like that I think for an older generation is definitely not to put you in an older generation is part of it yeah so I can't speak in detail about that but I do know that it became an enormous hit in seven volumes in the United States pirated copies of it started pirated may be the wrong word just ripped off copies of it started to appear in England and so Washington Irving in order to protect his financial interest in it convinced an English publisher to publish The Sketchbook in in a 2-volume set and I have also heard allusions to the fact then he used the British copyright law as it then existed to try to shut down the violators but I really don't know much more about that I don't know whether the people who work in the Copyright Office view Washington Irving as a as a you know forefather to their work yeah me too yeah right right any other thoughts well thank you have you read the story recently it is just soaked with autumnal imagery it is you just feel yourself amongst the kaleidoscopic changing leaves and the fall harvest and then when you add to that the the ghost and the pumpkin to the point by the way were a lot of images the pumpkin he's holding has like a jack-o'-lantern face carved in it I don't know where when that started but but I think that that's why so I think and I do think that the fact that's just like Jacob Marley will always live as a ghost of Christmas I think that the Headless Horseman will always live as ghost of Halloween and in American culture I really want to go back and read it now thank you so much well thank you for having me just everybody our last law library program of the year Tuesday December 10th at 1 o'clock we're hosting our annual Human Rights Day program in the Mumford room this year's topic is refugee rights and we all have three great speakers so I hope you'll join us thank you again so much thanks this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress 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Channel: Library of Congress

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Keywords: Library of Congress, The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow (Book)

Id: FGMKQ8De_xo

Length: 75min 33sec (4533 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 03 2014