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Irving's Use of American Folklore in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

Daniel G. Hoffman
Daniel G. Hoffman*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York 27, N. Y.
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Extract

In this essay I hope to restore to Washington Irving a small measure of his fame as the first significant author of American fiction. Irving has been acclaimed as our literary mediator with England, where he was the first American to win critical praise. He is valued, too, as a pioneer, introducing Continental romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing. But I wish to praise him on other grounds: as the first important American author to put to literary use the comic mythology and popular traditions of American character which, by the early nineteenth century, bad proliferated widely in oral tradition. The case for Irving's achievement in this direction rests primarily upon the personalities of Ichabod Crane and Brom Bones in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” There he gave our literature its first important statement of the clash of regional characters—the Yankee vs. the backwoodsman— who had already emerged as the dominant types in our regional folk traditions. The conflict between them was soon to become a major theme in our literature, as well as a continuing motif in a century and a half of folktales, and in our national history.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , June 1953 , pp. 425 - 435
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 425 note 1 The Yankee first appears in the annals of formai litereture as a comic character in Royall Tyler's play, The Contrast (1787). Richard M. Dorson finds at least eleven examples of stock Yankee characters in American plays before Irvings Sketch Book. Since all these stage Yankees conform to a single type rather than exhibit individual characteristics, Dorson concludes that “it is more probable that a permanent Yankee folk type existed apart from [Tyler's] dramatic imagination and was adopted, and not created, by the playwrights.” In 1825 the first actor to be a professional Yankee performer appears; “a more convincing argument for the existence of a Yankee folk hero could scarcely be ad-duced than this attempted reproduction of the mythical Yankee by flash and blood repre-sentatives” (“The Yankee an the Stage,” NEQ, XIII [Sept 19401, 467-495, esp. pp. 468, n. 3; 472, n. 23; 480, n. 48; 480-482). Elsewhere than on the stage the schoolmaster evolved early as a Yankee type (see G L. Kittredge, The Old Farmer and His Almanac, Cambridge, 1904, pp. 216-233). In the early plays the Yankee is characterised by his rusticity, boastful-ness, inquisitiveness, independence, and the playing off of these characteristics against the mores of a more highly polished society (Dorson, pp. 468-472). Irving's Ichabod develops this early folk type in the direction of the succeeding popular literature, such as Hali-burton's Sam Slick. When the Yankee meets the frontiersman Instead of English fops or New York dandies, his role is reversed and he now becomes the representative of culture facing the unfettered natural man of the frontier.

The backwoodsman took over the early Yankee's boastfulness and independence, and added infusions of energy reflecting his physical prowess and the psychological stresses of living in a hostile wilderness. (See Constance Rourke, American Humor, New York, 1931, pp. 33-76.) Although the mythologizing of the frontiersman did not gather full momentum until after the war of 1812 (ibid., pp. 35-36), by mid-eighteenth century the pioneers, Indian fighters, and hunters of backwoods New England and New York were being cele-brated locally in oral tradition. Tom Quick, Tun Murphy, Nat Faster, and Nick Stoner were four York Stan frontiersmen, extant between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812, about whom folktale motifs, later found in the stories of Fink Crockett, and other ring-tailed roarers wen told (H.W.Thompson, Body Boots & Britches, Philadelphia, 1939, pp. 48-79). Daniel Boone was more widely known- in 1818 he found amusing a published fable of his own hunting prowess (Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America, Ne YORK, 1941, p. 186). The eye-gouging, ear-tearing fights at which Mike Fink became so adept were already an established tradition with their own barbarous code when Thomas Ashe visited Virginia in 1806 (Travels in America. . . ., London, 1808, I, 225-231); the boasting rhetoric accompanying such fights was common enough for Paulding to have reproduced in Letters from the South (1817) a specimen later imitated in the 1833 Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel Crockett. (See F. C. Watkins, “James Kirke Paulding's Early Ring-Tailed Roarer,” SFQ, XV [Sept. 1951] 183-187.) The famed frontiersmen of the Jacksonian era combined that several attributes. Irving's Brom Bones, an earlier amalgam of many of these qualities, anticipates the folktale and fiction of the 1830's

But even more important is Irving', anticipation of the conflict between the two re-gional types. Irving reflects the traditional anti-Puritan feeling among the Hudson Valley Dutch, a sentiment soon to be widely shared as New Englanders left home to settle or trade on the frontier.

page 426 note 2 Irving's use of folk traditions of piracy is noted by W. H. Bonner, Pirate, Laureate: The Life & Legends, of Captain Kidd (New Brunswick, N.J, 1947), pp. 151-165. Leonard Beach discusses Irving's use of American themes and recognises Ichabod as “Irving's judgment of Puritanism”: “Washington Irving,” UKCR, XIV (1948), 259-266.

page 426 note 3 “Irving's. German Sources in The Sketch Book,” SP, XXVII (July 1580), 477-507; see also “Irving's German Tour and Its Influence on His Tales,” PMLA, XLV (Dec. 1930), 1150-87. Pochmann shows, with parallel texts, that in “Rip Van Winkle” Irving trans-leted and expanded the story of Peter Klaus, a German goatherd who fell aslep for years which he found in the Volkssagen of Othmar. And in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Pochmann demonstrates Irving', indebtedness to the Rübezahl legends in Volksmärchen der Deutschem, by Musaeus.

page 426 note 4 The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), I, 177-186.

page 426 note 5 Native American HUMORr (1800-1900) (New York, 1937), p. 16, n. 3. Basing his judg-ment of Irving as s native humorist on the Knickerbocker's History of Now York, Blair considers Irving as primarily “a disciple of neoclassicism,” and concludes (p. 14) that “he employed a technique which, admirable though it was, differed from that of typical American humor.”

page 427 note 6 American Humor, p. 77.

page 427 note 7 Thomas A. Janvier, The Dutch Founding of New York (New York, 1903), p. 4. Janvier takes issue with Irving's characterization of the Dutch on pp. 1-3, 9, 14, 46, 105, and 131-132.

page 428 note 8 Pochmann, “Irving's German Tour,” PMLA, XLV, 1153-54.

page 428 note 9 Brom Bones was identified by Pierre M. Irving as a wag of Tarrytown who “boasted of once having met the devil... and run a race with him for a bowl of milk” (Lift and Letters of Washington Irving, London, 1892, I, 282). See Williams, Lift, I, 429, n. 90, for a similar account; on p. 430, n. 91, he names Brom Van Allatyne of Kinderhook as the original of Irving's character. Ichabod Crane, Williams finds (p. 109), was modelled upon “Jesse Merwin, the homespun wit” and village schoolmaster, as well as upon Fielding's Partridge and the schoolmaster in Goldsmith's Deserted Village.

page 428 note 10 “Sleepy Hollow,” in Biographies, and Miscellanies, ed. Pierre It. Irving (New York, 1866), pp. 514-516.

page 428 note 11 Body Boots & Britches, pp. 119-121.

page 428 note 12 Carl Canner, The Hudson (New York and Toronto, 1939), p. 35, lists some typical pranks.

page 429 note 13 The House of the Seven Gables (Boston, 1883), p. 212.

page 429 note 14 See R. M. Dorson, Jonathan Draws the Long Bow (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 25-68, for supernatural tales from 19th-century New England as reported in contemporary news papers and other popular sources

page 430 note 15 Thomas Chandler Haliburton. “Natur”,“ in The Attaché-, or Sam Slick in England (Philadelphia, 1843), reprinted in Blair, Native American Humor, p. 236.

page 430 note 16 The best account of Fink (1770-1823) is the biography by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Maine, Mike Fink, King of Mississippi Keelboatmen (New York, 1933).

page 431 note 17 Sam Patch was a Rhode Island factory hand who achieved notoriety by leaping water-falls in the northeastern states in the early 19th century; R. M. Dorson, “Sam Patch, Jumping Hero,” NYFQ, I (Aug. 1945), 133-151. Patch has most recently come to light again as an aspect of the composite hero in William Carlos Williams' epic poem, Paterson.

page 432 note 18 The perfection of Irving's “Legend” becomes even more apparent by comparison with “Cobus Yerks,” Paulding's imitation of “Sleepy Hollow.” Instead of Yankee vs. back-woodsman, we find a stupid, superstitious Dutchman frightened by a ghostly dog, otherwise Tim Canty, a merry Englishman. Now the story is reduced to its supernatural motif only; the richness which Irving's “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” holds for us, its reverberations on the themes of national and regional character, are entirely lacking in Paulding's caricature. Tales of The Good Woman, ed. W. I. Paulding (New York, 1867), pp. 285-299.

page 433 note 19 Mark Twain's first newspaper sketch was a version of this motif, called “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” reprinted in Tall Tales of the Southwest, ed. F. J. Meine (New York, 1930), pp. 447-448; discussed by Bernard DeVoto in Mark Twain's Amarica (Boston, 1932), pp. 90-91.

page 434 note 20 Much later Irving was to return to the frontier materials he used for Brom Bones in The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood,“ a fictionalized biography of Governor Duval of Florida (Wolfert's Roost, New York, 1865, pp. 294-341) Some of the supernatural lore from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” turns up here too, notably an apparition of a horse as a devil (pp. 298-299). Of his late frontier sketches Beach notes, “Strange that Irving should have come so dote to Longstreet's and Craddock's property! Strange too that he should not have known what to make of it” (“Washington Irving,” UKCR, XIV, 266). Per-haps the key to this puzzle is that Ralph Ringwood, a Kentuckian, meets only Westerners and hence then is no opportunity for Irving to give this sketch the dramatic power which the conflict of regional characters made possible in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.“ In view of the popularity, as well at the artistic success, of the earlier sketch, it is indeed surprising that Irving should have followed it with to poor an effort.

page 435 note 21 “Paul Banyan and Rip Van Winkle,” Yale Rev., XXXVI (Autumn 1946), 66-76.