A post that I had to contribute to for my American Literature 1800s course over The Sleepy Hollow author Washington Ivring in which I discuss the use of setting and the time period.
Ivring was a writer who wanted to bring folklore and fairytale to the real world. He wanted us to feel as if this was a legend that had truly happened in some forgotten little town full of sleepwalking people. It is in this tiny town that a ghost lurks at night, riding on a horse down dirt roads and past new churches into the unknown wilderness that lie before the residents of Sleepy Hollow.
Ivring wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow when the war and Independence were still fresh in Americans' minds, still learning how to be our own people and how to set up this new government and thrive in a time when everyone else had expected us to fall. Sleepy Hollow (the town and the story) are set in a small town on the edge of the unknown. America still being the new country that it was had massive amounts of land still unexplored and filled with unknown dangers and threats. I feel that this is alluded to when the horseman rides out into the edge, almost as if he is daring someone to follow him, asking if the are--for lack of a better term-- "man enough" to brave the wilderness that lays beyond confines of their safe haven.
One of the many things that I found interesting about this piece was the fact that while it was intended to be a pork for entertainment, a scary ghost story to tell kids around a campfire is the atmosphere. On the first page of the story (page 2520) it states "A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his pow-wows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson." It talks of a witching atmosphere and hints a magic before the Americans claimed state, Ivring is mimicking the tone and atmosphere in the story, making goosebumps scurry along arms and twist the howling of the winds into the screams on beast. Ivring gave birth to a new genre, to a genre that if used correctly can play with your psyche and doubt what you know to be true.
