More on the Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a literary fairy tale, which means the story wasn't a folktale until someone wrote it down.  This means this story--unlike most legends and folklore--can be attributed to a single person: Washington Irving.  It's about 40 pages long and in the public domain, so you can easily check it out for yourself. 

This is one of those stories that has seeped into cultural consciousnesses.  I'd seen some of the movies.  I watched a season of the Sleepy Hollow TV show.  But I don't think I'd read the original short story until recently.

Here's how it goes:

Ichabod Crane is the school teacher in a little town called Sleepy Hollow.  He's read "several books quite through."  He decides he's going to marry Katrina Van Tassel, the richest girl in town and one of his music students.  It's telling that there is a two page meditation on all the ways Ichabod will cook up and eat all of the livestock once he owns the Van Tassel farm, but there is no description of Katrina except that she's "blooming," "ripe," and "plump." Ichabod is big on food, which I appreciate, but there's a time and a place, bro.  However!  Katrina is already dating a guy named Brom Bones, who's the leader of his rowdy posse, and beloved by the whole town for his boys-will-be-rowdy ways.  Ichabod goes to a party at Katrina's house, where he eats all the food, dances, tells a ghost story, and then asks Katrina to marry him.  (There's this weird racist bit while he's dancing, where all the black people look in through the windows to watch him dance, but the dance is described in such a way to make it sound like he's flailing around, and the black people's reactions are written so you could read it as them being blown away by how great it is, or by them being in awe of how much of a fool he looks.  I choose to read it as the later, even though that's still not a great look, Washington Irving.)  Apparently, Katrina turns Ichabod down.  I say "apparently" because:

"What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen. Oh, these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I!"

Katrina showing personality and agency does not get screen time.  I wish it had, because it sounds like it was a pretty epic take-down.  So Ichabod leaves, heading home on the scrawniest of borrowed horses, when the Headless Horseman rides out of the dark and chases him!  That's right, the Headless Horseman, although described earlier, doesn't appear until the very end.  The saddle falls off Ichabod's horse, then Ichabod falls off Ichabod's horse.  The Horseman throws its disembodied head at Ichabod, and he takes off into the night, never to be seen again.  The next day, when the borrowed horse returns to its person without a saddle or Ichabod, they go out looking for him and find the trampled saddle near a smushed pumpkin and Ichabod's hat.  Katrina and Brom Bones get married, and it's heavily implied that Brom Bones impersonated the Headless Horseman to scare Ichabod out of town.

The things that struck me the most in this story were how much Ichabod is a Nice Guy™.  He thinks Katrina should marry him just because he's there and not rowdy like her boyfriend.  This ties into the other part that struck me: how much of a non-entity Katrina is.  There's this trope called the sexy lamp, where if you can replace the female love interest with a desirable lamp that the hero will fight for, your story is flawed.  Ichabod wants that lamp.  Someone might have to stop him from eating the lamp.  And she's shown this way even though she expresses herself and turns down Ichabod's proposal.  Clearly she had a personality and agency, but Ichabod or the narrator didn't care enough about it to talk about it.  I wanted to write a story where she was given her time to shine.

Sexy Lamp

 

I was also struck by Brom Bones pretending to be the Headless Horseman.  I knew that was part of the story, but what interested me was that he does that AFTER Katrina has turned down Ichabod.  In the logic of the story, Brom Bones has already "won."  It's a different situation than if he had scared Ichabod off while Katrina was making up her mind or before Ichabod asked or after she had said yes.  My 2019 understanding of this is that Ichabod upset Katrina with his unwanted marriage proposal and his storming out after being rejected, and Brom Bones decided that kind of behavior couldn't stand.  It's kind of sweet.  But it's still Bones taking vengeance on Katrina's behalf.  Did she know?  Did she approve?  Did she wish she's done it herself?

My desire to rewrite this story was the driving force behind this season, and I started to look for other stories from folklore where women weren't given their chance to shine.