Character Analysis: The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

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How The American Identity was Portrayed Through Ichabod Crane
Avid book lovers know the feeling of seeing your favorite book adapted as a movie, and being extremely disappointed. Sometimes the characters are different, the plot is not the same, and they choose the wrong actors. The list could go on. The short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, was written in 1820 by Washington Irving and adapted into a movie in 1999 by Tim Burton. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a short story about a character named Ichabod Crane, and his struggles in the town of Sleepy Hollow. He falls for a woman of higher class, and is seen as weak, antithetical foreigner to all of the townsfolk. In the two varied adaptations, he is portrayed as two different people, who …show more content…
The american identity says that you should never be distracted by superstitions or the unknown, and that you should only stay focused on working hard. In the short story the Legend of Sleepy Hollow Ichabod is represented as a very superstitious knowledgeable character. He reads many books about the supernatural and witches, for example books about the salem witch trials, and it is not very hard for him to believe the stories he reads. When he often visits the women of the town, they would sit by the fire and he listens to their stories about all kinds of superstitions. “Another of his sources of fearful pleasure was to pass long winter evenings with the old dutch wives, as they sat spinning by the fire… and listen to their marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins, haunted bridges and haunted houses, and particularly of the headless horseman.” (Irving 4) Burton’s Ichabod is very different from this, he never believes in superstitions. He believes that everything can be explained through science. This is one of the reasons the judge sends him to explain and investigate the murders in the town of Sleepy Hollow, because Ichabod believes there is no way a Headless Horseman could be responsible for all these murders. For a long portion of the movie he still doesn’t believe in the Headless Horseman, but once he sees a man’s head chopped off by the Headless Horseman right in front of him, he accepts that the horseman does exist and is killing people. Burton’s Ichabod starts off following the american identity, where he works hard and doesn’t let superstitions stop his work. Whereas, Irving’s Ichabod has always been distracted by the supernatural, even when he walks home in the night. “...it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homeward. How often did he shrink with curdling awe at some rushing blast, howling among the trees of a snowy night, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian of the Hollow!”
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