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c h a p t e r 3 A Mind for the Gothic: Common Sense and the Problem of Local Culture Perhaps the most striking feature of Washington Irving’s iconic mock-horror tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is not the headless specter of Revolutionary violence that haunts the Catskill’s byways but the rigorously defensive manner in which this drowsy little town wards off any potential threat to its autonomy. On guard against forces that threaten to disrupt its vital local culture, Sleepy Hollow is hospitable only to the point that a visitor threatening to undo the enduring ties of family and property that bind this community together finds himself quickly ridden out of town. As the tale’s narrator informs us, Sleepy Hollow thrives as a static model of community in which “population, manners, and customs, remain fixed,” placing it at odds with the “great torrent of migration and improvement” characteristic of the rest of the nation. The simultaneity of temporal experience Benedict Anderson called “imagined community” is here challenged by a paradigm in which time moves at different speeds in different parts of the country. Much like the heterogeneous network of affiliation we encountered in Brown’s gothic fiction, Irving’s larger America is characterized by unfixed borders, fluid populations, and “incessant change.” Irving challenges Brown’s model of community, however, by pitting it against Sleepy Hollow: an anachronism that nonetheless persists and flourishes by tenaciously resisting the larger organism. One of those fluid, migratory forces of change against which the town defines and defends itself enters Sleepy Hollow in the gawky frame of Ichabod Crane. Leading a “half itinerant life,” Ichabod has no fixed abode or social function, decamping from home to home and exchanging his labor as schoolteacher, singing master, babysitter, farmhand, and “travelling gazette” A Mind for the Gothic 87 for large quantities of food and stories. Ichabod’s massive capacity for consumption indicates a mind and body—much like Edgar Huntly or Clara St. Louis—in fundamental continuity with its surroundings. His variable social functions suggest that, like Mervyn or Carwin, he can be all things to all people. That is to say, he has many characteristics of the mobile, adaptive figure characteristic of Brown’s earlier gothic fiction. Indeed, his understanding of social relations rests on opportunism, exchange, and mobility: he wants to strap Katrina and other “household trumpery” to a wagon, sell the Van Tassel farm, and use the proceeds to purchase “immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness.” Should this fantasy be allowed to play out, however, the tale would transform into something resembling a captivity narrative, in which a rapacious outsider threatens to sever the ties of paternal relation from which a female derives her cultural value by dragging her into the “wilderness.” Why, we might reasonably ask, has the kind of novelistic protagonist that thrived in Brown’s fiction become a ridiculous, even phobic force in Irving’s hands? Let us think of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in much the same terms as Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman , Major Molineux” (1831) or “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), or Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), to name just a few prominent examples . Each offers a literary landscape populated by small social units whose cultural practices are inscrutable to the uninitiated. Viewed from this perspective, these fictional works address the challenge of cross-cultural understanding for a national community that thinks of itself as a cluster of disparate and discrete parts, or what in 1822 James Fennimore Cooper called a “multitude of local peculiarities.” A collection of different local cultures is evidently an altogether different political formation from Brown’s transatlantic community or Locke’s contractual state. Thus “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ” issues a challenge to Brown’s model of circulation on the grounds that it cannot account for competing interpretative strategies among local and culturally distinct communities. To fathom the implications of this difference for the American political imagination, let me begin by positing that each discrete community has its own set of cultural practices and interpretative strategies. Each community, moreover, regards its own distinctive cultural codes as normative in relation to other groups. Irving’s mock-gothic tale demonstrates these principles by staging a collision between two such communities. In this milieu, the same object means different things to different people...

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