Ichabod Crane, an Evidence of Puritan Morality Immerse in the American Literature, the Legent of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane, an Evidence of Puritan Morality Immerse in the American Literature

Identity, a traditional theme of American Literature, renders evidence of the potent impact of Puritan morality after colonial times. In the year 1630, the Puritans came from England to establish a perfect community in the new land of the American continent. They brought with them iron like religious beliefs, which they wanted to keep pure, as a model, not like the flexible Church of England that was going through changes. They also came with a moral behavior code to be followed strictly by all new settlers, in the ironically new free land. The Puritans mission was to build a society and root its education upon the study of the Bible. More than one hundred years later, as manifested by Irving´s tale, one still finds those values alive in the common life experience of a rural Dutch town up Estate New York. This Puritan legacy is also present today; as evidence, descendants of the Puritans are able to trace their ancestry and their strict moral code to the fifteen to twenty thousand Puritans who migrated to New England more than 300 years ago.

The Puritans cultivated a religion based on the Bible, but their interpretation of God was as sinner sentinel god that penalizes his parishioners; therefore, it was absolutely convenient for the Puritan elite to instill in the settlers respect, approbation and obedience through the fear of the existence of evil. Lucifer was the main instrument to control the new growing society in the new land, and his most common manifestations on earth were witchcraft, bewitch creatures and ghostly apparitions. Actually, at the end of the tale, the main character disappears from one day to the other; people of the town justifies his absence simply by strongly believing that he was taken away by a phantom. This was a proper way used by Puritans to manipulate the settlers and eliminate rebels or adversaries.
Irving’s tale has abundance of this Puritan legacy; the account itself is about a headless horseman specter that rides around a Dutch town. There is evidence in the narrative that Ichabod believes in the devil: “he has seen many specters in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes…” (Irving 492). Moreover, when Brom Bones plays pranks upon Ichabod, breaking into the school house at night and turned the place into a complete chaos, Ichabod started to believe that “the witches of the country held their meeting there” (Irving, 497). The activities in which women leisure provide further proof of how penetrate this Puritan fear of evil was. The story tells how one of the fearful pleasure activities of women was to sit around the fire to roast apples and listen to demoniac bizarre tales of ghosts and haunted places. Not only were women of Sleepy Hollow targets of this Puritan heritage, but also men; one can confirm this idea based on what the gentlemen did at the October party. They sat to smoke and listen to war and supernatural stories in which hunted regions abounded and, of course, evil apparitions.

Puritans had well-built patriarchal traditions; females activities were restricted mostly to house and family care. At Sleepy Hollow, these traditions remain. At the begging of the tale, the narrator explains the location of the town where the story happens. The origin of a name of a town, he said, is based on the custom of the “husbands to linger about the village tavern on the market days” (486). Which means that men where the ones in charge of going out of their houses to run errands, and it was already socially permitted for a man to use drugs, alcohol in this case. In page 496, the text also gives an idea of the women duties, Mynheer Van Tassel, Katrina’s mother, was the one in charge of managing the poultry, roll the lane into balls, all the cooking and housekeeping: “Thus while the busy dame bustle about the house[…]honest Balt would sit smoking his evening pipe”.

The tale also shows women as objects, they are never intelligent or respect by their wisdom or knowledge. Katrina is seen as a trophy; she is esteemed not because of her own merit, but because of her father’s substantial fortune, lands and social status: “universally fame, not merely for her beauty, but her vast expectations” (492). Another attempt to discredit women is found on page 493. When the narrator is describing the abundance of the Van Tassel house, he portrays housewives as clucking bad-tempered chickens.

Puritans men, in their ambition to maintain their power over the rest of human beings in the new land, pay an assiduous attention to expose women as inferior beings, even equating them to the most fearsome concept at the time: evil. The narrator affirms about the main character that after having encounter with horrific phantoms that walk in darkness; and although he has seen many hideous specters and have been more than once torment by Satan in divers shapes; his life could have been pleasant and satisfy “if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, globins and the whole race of witches put together and that was –a woman.” (492).