How I loved The Legend of Sleepy Hollow when I was a kid! Of course, my initial introduction was to the Walt Disney version, which most of my cohort saw in movie theaters. Who can forget poor, terrified Icabod Crane on his broken down mount, fleeing from the "headless horseman" as the Specter thundered after him in that pell-mell race to the bridge beyond which it was said that the apparition could not pass! Maybe I missed the point, but if memory serves, my sympathies lay with the skinny school-teacher, who'd dared to court the local heiress. Or maybe, Disney spun the story that way. Darned if I know at this late date, 70 years later.
In yellow and green, Major General Philip Schuyler's drawing room;
The fireplace before which Alexander Hamilton married Elizabeth Schuyler
As an adult, about 30 years back, while doing research for several novels set in the Hudson Valley at the time of the Revolution, I had occasion to finally read Washington Irving's original story. Unsurprisingly, the Disney version which I remembered was not exactly what Irving (1783-1850), one who grew up in that storied valley, originally penned. Irving was a famous wit of his day, a writer in post-Revolutionary America, whose fame today rests on two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Irving certainly knew these little valleys, filled back then with descendants of the Dutch original settlers. In a few of these rural backwaters, the inhabitants still spoke Dutch and practiced their ancestral folkways. Old Dutchmen still gazed with disapproval at their "feckless" and "acquisitive" British neighbors, just as the Amish do "the English" today, right here in my neck of Pennsylvania.
In the elaborate language of Irving's day, when people often readstories aloud beside the fire, we learn that Icabod Crane, the lanky, threadbare schoolmaster, is Connecticut born and raised, which makes him an outsider in this rural valley. In those days, the people of Connecticut. unlike their next-door neighbors, the New York Dutch, had been founded by dour fundamentalist Calvinists, who arrived in that "savage-filled wilderness" with strong beliefs and many superstitions. Their Sundays were filled with morning to evening Church services, at which attendance was definitely not optional.
The Blue Laws, "no business conducted on Sunday," were strictly enforced. Sunday dinner was cooked on Saturday and served cold. You couldn't even move a chair across the dining room to accommodate a new guest without violating their version of scriptural law. They firmly believed in witches and The Devilish Supernatural. It is mentioned in the story that Icabod often read his copy of Cotton Mather's History of New England Witchcraft, "in which he most fervently and potently believed."
The New York Dutch had their superstitions as well and Icabod just naturally loved these scary stories, too. The old women in whatever house the schoolmaster was lodged each week--most of his pay for teaching the children of the town was room and board--were only too happy to share their own local goblin-filled tales with him. At one of these firesides he was introduced to the "Galloping Hessian," a hooded figure on a black horse who haunted a stretch of road which ran along a creek and passed the local churchyard. This spectre was reputed to be, as you probably know, a cavalry-man from the Revolutionary times whose head had been "carried away by a cannon ball," for which he was doomed to perpetually search.
Major General Philip Schuyler's Home Today
(Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton's childhood Home)
This, information, to my mind, removes some of Disney's whitewashing of Icabod as the hapless victim of -- as he is drawn -- Big Brute Brom Bones. Now, Brom doesn't have book learning, but he "had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and...there was a strong dash of waggish humor at the bottom." The original of Brom was certainly not "Bluto," but your standard, garden-variety Alpha Male. He'd expected to win Katrina sooner or later, as she was the finest marital prize available in their valley. in his mind, Icabod, was an unexpected, ridiculous interloper, to be disposed of as soon as possible. This he proceeds--after some earlier, clumsy attempts--to to do, by cleverly playing on the schoolteacher's biggest weakness, his well-known belief in the supernatural.
We may also surmise, as we read the original tale, that Katrina herself decided to move things along by pretending to be charmed by Icabod. Brom, after all, is described as enjoying his bachelor life a great deal, out with his "boon companions," riding around on fast horses half the night and generally not showing a willingness to get serious and settle down.
Not to overly bash Disney, whose goal was to entertain kids, I'll stop there, but reading Irving's original story, written for adults to enjoy as well as children, was a real treat.
~~Juliet Waldron
