Thursday, 19 January: Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (handouts)

Web-highlighter: Melissa S. Jones

Introduction:  I wanted to find excerpts that showcased how both The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle expressed a gothic and sublime form.  I also wanted to research the link between European gothic and Americanized gothic.

Midterm Sample Answer 2004

          One of the first American writers, Washington Irving, had his stories teeming with the romantic part of nature, both the sublime and the gothic.  Both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow dealt with nature in contrasting ways.  In Rip Van Winkle, the mountains surrounding his town were writ in a sublime fashion.  These precipices were majestic and beautiful, but could bring bad weather at any point.  These mountains were structured and elegant, but were the source of Rip’s twenty year slumber.  These mountains brought both pleasure and pain to those who surround it. 

In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, however, nature became a very gothic force.  The forest was dark, and full of evil.  The main antagonist is a creature who dwells in these forests itself.  So, it becomes haven for evil and darkness, even more espouses its gothic ways.  When Ichabod Crane takes his fateful journey through the forest, he encounters “gnarled, fantastic trees,” a stream that had “a cavernous gloom thrown over it,” and other dark features that the forest displayed.  This gothic forest was the main antagonist in this book, and became one for many American writers after Irving.  Nature, to Irving, was sublime and gothic, and romanticizes both aspects well.  The eventual “Americanized” romance is starting to spread.

Sample Midterm Answer

About "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving: The haunting story is set in a “valley” know as Sleep Hollow; it is not a “plane”, or a “mountain side”, nor a “prairie”, it is a “valley” the constricting ideal that the valley represents is typical of the gothic style. This constricting nature of the setting allows for it to be haunted. Something must be confiding to contain something such as a “witching influence of the air,” which this valley does (2095). You can see Irving has replaced the “haunted house” with a haunted wilderness.

Michael Luna’s Research Project 2002

Washington Irving turns the forest into the typical gothic castle. An aspect of the English gothic that Irving keeps is the use of ghosts and superstition.  In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow he makes the forest seem alive and makes the shadows play all sorts of tricks to Ichabod's superstition filled mind.

Sample Final Exam Answers 2002

In Sleepy Hollow, Irving shows Ichabod Crane riding home through the woods one evening.  He constantly is showing the shifting shadows and the interplay of light and dark in the trees.  Anyone who has been outside at night in the woods knows that feeling that Irving describes Ichabod as having.  His senses become heightened and his mind begins to impose lifelike qualities onto his surroundings.  The whole story is based on belief in ghosts and supernatural beings – even when it is shown that the culprit is a human, this belief of supernatural beings remains.  Irving uses gothic to set the mood in this story and leads the reader to question what is lurking behind the trees.  By shifting the setting to one that his reader is familiar with, he begins to adapt the traditional ideas of the gothic to a more modern, Americanized version of itself.

Sample Answers 2003

In Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, (2093-2112) Ichabod Crane’s nightmarish ride through the shadowy forest is an example of the gothic style. As “the night grew darker and darker,” he encounters a tulip-tree, connected with a tragic story that seems to harbor unpleasant memories: it “towered like a giant,” the limbs “gnarled, and fantastic,” and the branches rubbing together produced a groaning sound bringing human-like life to a plant. Confronted by a “ huge, misshapen, black and towering” figure, Ichabod races to reach the safety of a white washed church, “dimly glaring under the trees beyond.” This juxtaposition of dark (black), frightening and evil with light (white), safety and sanctity combined with the pairing of ordinary objects to extraordinary sights and sounds serves to formulate paranormal ideas with images creating an unsettling tone in the book and in the reader’s mind.

Sample Answer 2003

Washington Irving uses the gothic to transmit his stories of mystery and suspense.  Since America is quite young and there are no castles or dark alleyways about which to write, Irving relies on wooded areas and the colors and sounds of nature.  Irving paints a picture of the archways created by the trees and the darkness of the woods as Ichabod is trotting through the haunted forest to confront the Hessian trooper:

In the center of the road stood an enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above all the other trees of the neighborhood, and formed a kind of landmark.  Its limbs were gnarled, and fantastic, large enough to form trunks for ordinary trees, twisting down almost to the earth, and rising again into the air. (2108)

With the gothic result of the “gnarled” limbs, readers feel fear as Ichabod gallops along the road through the dark dell.  Without the elaborate descriptions of the gangly character’s surroundings, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” would be dull and difficult to imagine.

Sample Answer 2003

The most obvious characteristic that defines gothic is the use of colors.  Red, black, and white are all colors associated with the gothic.  Light and dark are also interplayed with each other often, used as symbols mostly for good and evil.  The past is usually revisited, by either a hidden secret coming out or a remembrance of evil doings of the past and the affect it is having on the characters in the story. 

Irving uses the American wilderness in his writings – for example, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Irving shows us just how scary the wilderness can really be when he has Ichabod Crane ride through the woods late one night.  The colors of the night are the first visuals we get when seeing Ichabod riding on his horse through the woods.  Irving uses the light/dark interplay a lot, with the blackness of the night, and the moon shining through the trees.  It gives a sort of scary evanescence thinking about being alone out there and what it must be like, with just the light of the moon scraping through the gaps in the trees.  The setting heightens the senses, making the audience and Ichabod wonder, “What’s out there?” 

Midterm Sample 2003

Gothic and sublime elements are present throughout Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  The passage that I am focusing on is where Ichabod is riding by Major Andre’s Tree.  The gothic and sublime nature of this passage works to depict a scene that horrifies as well as creates beautiful imagery.  The description of Major Andre’s Tree brings to light the gothic element of nature telling the story and having a morbid past.  The idea is that superstition brings the tree to life and gives spiritual significance to nature.  This passage converts the natural beauty of the forest into a scary, dark and mysterious layer.  The sublime aspects of this passage are presented when describing the tree.  “Its limbs were gnarled and fantastic…twisting down almost to the earth, and arising again into the air.” By pairing the adjective gnarled (which means deformed and grotesque) with the word fantastic the image of the tree becomes a strange awe-inspiring piece of nature. The rising of the limbs from the ground alludes to the idea of the tree co-existing between two worlds: one, which is “earthy” and natural and the other eerie, and supernatural. The mystery and intrigue surrounding this tree alludes to the idea that the tree itself may be alive or dangerous in some way.  [JN]

Conclusion:  Most of the excerpts used the same examples from the short stories.  I had hoped to find different examples throughout the text; however, each excerpt did bring a different view to the same passage.  I think the preceding students did an excellent job in explaining both how American gothic came to be, and why these two stories are examples of gothic and sublime form.  Overall, I have learned that the contrast of dark and light are the most profound indicator that these stories are written in gothic form.  Also, the woods can be seen as an American castle – with the tree tops as the pointed arches that are so often seen in gothic architecture.