Troubling our heads about Ichabod: "The legend of sleepy hollow," classic American literature, and the sexual politics of homosocial brotherhood

American Quarterly

Volumn 56, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 83-110

  Greven, David ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950212913     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2004.0006     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. Although Andrew Jackson synthesizes some of the major trends and tensions endemic to national fantasies of gender in antebellum America, it is important to view the national imperative of Jacksonian manhood as only one of several discrete forces that determined and shaped manhood in what has been called the "postheroic age," the years in which the early promise and cohesiveness of the new republic waned and new forms of civic, gendered, and sexual identity proliferated. For a discussion of postheroic America and authorship, see Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky's Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1-31
2. This very fluidity was intransigent, given the various programs on the part of the sexual reformers of the 1830s onward (among others) aimed at turning antebellum men into "self-interpellating subjects of sexual ideology . . . oriented towards a socially stablizing sexuality" which precluded "the transgressive triple threat of masturbation, whoremongering, and that nameless horror - homosexual sex" (708-9). Michael Warner has also written recently on Irving and the bachelor; see "Irving's Posterity," English Literary History 67, no. 3 (2000): 773-99
3. See Warner, "Irving's Posterity," 786. By "repronarrative, " Warner refers to the cultural narrativization of the compulsory reproductivity of capitalist citizens
4. Feminist thinkers like Lora Romero, Robyn Wiegman, and others have provided salutary correctives to the fetishization of homoaffectionalism. See Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997)
5. Robyn Wiegman, "Melville's Geography of Gender," in Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Myra Jehlen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994), 187-99
6. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000). 24-25
7. For a critique of the rise of masculinity studies generally, particularly of treatments that establish parity between modes of manhood through the commonality of gendered anxiety regardless of the differences in social power and equity among them, see Bryce Traister, "Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies," American Quarterly 52 (June 2000): 274-304
8. Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 13
9. Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift, 110,118
10. Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in The Sketch Book (New York: Penguin, 1981), 329-60; hereafter cited in text
11. In his depiction of Ichabod's relations with Brom and his gang, Irving refuses the Fiedlerian view of a mythic male bonding that allows the protagonist to escape "the gentle tyranny of home and woman," in that he is estranged from normative heterosexuality and thus "a man apart from men." See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Dell, 1966), 179-214
12. René Girard and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick privilege the triangle as the graphic schema for erotic competition between men - two men warring over the same woman. See Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1965), 1-52, for his elaboration of "triangulated desire."
13. Anne Billson, The Thing (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 75
14. Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift, 214
15. William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 143
16. In a fine study of classical education in England and manliness, Carolyn D. Williams tracks the homoerotic tradition of Achilles-Patroclus and its permutations over time: "Homer's silence" has historically been interpreted as "an invitation for the initiated to read between the lines." Aeschylus based his tragedy The Myrmidons on the assumption of a homosexual bond between the two warriors; Plato in the Symposium argues that Achilles must have been the passive partner, given his beauty and youth, though Achilles come to be seen as the active partner in later thought. If I am correct to view Brom as a violent Patroclus wishing to ravish - in unclearly defined ways - the quarry Ichabod, then Irving reverts to the Platonic reading of the story. See Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (New York: Routledge, 1993), 99-109
17. The overall vigor of the tale telling would seem to ally itself with the lusty, vigorous Brom rather than the emaciated, spindly Ichabod. Irving appears to have found Brom irresistible even in the inchoate form of his brother-in-law's narrative. The story's outline was provided by Irving's brother-in-law Van Wart, "who had been dwelling upon some recollections of his early years at Tarrytown, and had touched upon a waggish fiction of one Brom Bones, who professed to fear nothing, and boasted of his having once met the devil on a return from a nocturnal frolic and run a race with him for a bowl of milk punch." The imagination of the author suddenly kindled over the recital, and in a few hours he had scribbled off the framework of his renowned story and was reading it to his sister and her husband. See Pierre M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1862), 448-49. The particulars within this semiotic banquet - wagging, racing the devil at night, milk punch - are irresistible in terms of a homoerotic reading of the story; an ominousness also attaches itself to "nocturnal frolics," if one reads Brom's actions as bashing. I find it interesting too that the solitary Irving read the story back to the heterosexual couple who conceived it for him
18. James V. Catano, Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel, and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 9
19. See Hélène Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" (1976), in Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis and Robert Scheifler (New York: Longman, 1989). 488-90
20. See Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 429-30, n91. There are distinct plot valences between The Sketch Book's suggestively titled "The Spectre Bridegroom" and "Sleepy Hollow." Irving's 1824 Tales of a Traveller contains stories that reimagine "Sleepy Hollow" themes, especially "The Bold Dragoon," which charts the failures of another interloper; "The Adventure of the German Student," in which a young bibliophile - shades of Hawthorne's Fanshawe - literally meets the woman of his dreams only to discover that she is dead; and "The Story of the Young Robber," which involves murdered bridegrooms and ferocious male groups
21. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; New York: Norton, 1988), 143
22. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826; New York: Penguin Classics, 1986), 229
23. Mark E. Kahn, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1
24. See Jonathan Rauch, "For Better or Worse," in Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader, ed. Andrew Sullivan (New York: Vintage, 1997), 177, for a discussion of institutionalized marriage as a means of "civilizing" young, fraternalized males
25. Quoted in Kahn, A Republic of Men, 6
26. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 2, The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215
27. D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Chicago: Illinois University Press, 1996), 69, 107, 3
28. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 620
29. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 2-3, 14-15
30. Calvin Tomas, "Reenfleshing the Bright Boys: or, How Male Bodies Matter to Feminism," in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, ed. Judith Keegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 61
31. Richard Mohr, Gay Ideas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 140-41
32. Eric Rofes, Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 1998), 28
33. Robin Hardy with David Groff, The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); hereafter cited in text
34. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 2
35. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999), 35-36
36. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Doubleday, 1951), 73
37. A thoroughgoing feminist critique of such individualistic figures can be found in Joyce W. Warren, The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984)
38. Nelson, National Manhood, 132
39. A scathing critique of the privileging of fraternal white masculinity within queer culture can be found in "Where Has Gay Liberation Gone? An Interview with Barbara Smith," in Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life, ed. Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed (New York: Routledge, 1998), 195-207. I appreciate commentators like Bersani and Tim Dean for offering brilliant and engagingly idiosyncratic perspectives on queer issues that do not fall predictably within fraternalist guidelines