SOURCE: “Irving's ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’,” in The Explicator, Vol. 55, No. 1, Fall, 1996, pp. 15-17.

In the following essay, Benoit explores Ichabod's loss of the imaginative bond between man and the world in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

“There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone … all the lonely summer night's become but fact” (19). These lines from Howard Nemerov's poem “The Companions” could have served as an epigraph for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” for that legend is ultimately concerned with the loss of wonder and of a sense of life-as-mystery in the slow unraveling of imaginative attachment between man and things with the rise of human consciousness. Freud's words describe the process, for which Irving's fiction is in many respects an “objective correlative,” that culminates when Ichabod, on his way home after Katrina's rejection has left him “with an air quite desolate and chopfallen...