Phantasmal ruralism: A terror of folk ecology in Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’

Abstract

This article considers Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ as a work of nineteenth-century American folk horror for how the story’s depiction of nature suggests provincial people as an especially fearful collective entity. With additional consideration of Tim Burton’s film adaptation, Sleepy Hollow (1999), this article provides an ecocritical analysis of the tale’s landscapes and objects to assert that supernatural belief is manufactured partly by the idea of rural existence as physically and culturally separate from urban areas. Moreover, the article illustrates how reading the story’s phantasmal terrors as sourced by environmental catalysts can diminish hierarchies that are rooted in rural and urban dichotomies.