Brom Bones Meets the Count de Buffon: Race, Biopower, and Natural History in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’

ABSTRACT

In Washington Irving’s short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, animals are everywhere and almost seem interchangeable with humans. Nevertheless, the story’s pervasive animal imagery has received scant critical attention. In this paper, I consider the blurring human/animal binary in the story as a proxy for blurred lines between different ‘races’ of humans coexisting in Early America. Washington Irving uses his satirical Dutch narrator Dietrich Knickerbocker’s engagement with the Count de Buffon’s Natural History to question categorization based on the interrelated concepts of species and race, which were becoming important in an increasingly biopolitical early United States. I place Irving’s engagement with natural history in context before considering the ‘racial’ tension between the Dutch and the Yankees that Knickerbocker constructs in ‘Sleepy Hollow’. Irving marks this tension as satire in part through Knickerbocker’s deployment of bears and lions, two animal metaphors with special significance in Buffonian natural history. Close attention to the implications of these metaphors complicates our understanding of Brom Bones, a central but understudied character. I also discuss how this satirical use of race could deepen our understanding of ‘Sleepy Hollow’s’ actual racialized characters. Focusing on the animals in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ reveals Irving’s critique of using science to categorize humans into distinct racial groupings for political convenience and complicates our understanding of how early Americans grappled with the interplay between shifting scientific and political paradigms.

KEYWORDS:

• Washington Irving
• early America
• animal studies
• whiteness studies
• biopower

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2282239

Notes

1. Humans are compared to animals 14 times in ‘Sleepy Hollow’s’ 28 pages and 45 times in the 743 pages of A History, for a frequency of approximately 0.5 instances per page and 0.06 instances per page respectively.

2. Knickerbocker cites Erasmus Darwin alongside the Count de Buffon. Darwin’s writing style and conception of human-animal kinship resemble Buffon’s, so Irving probably intended his satire to target both figures. I focus on Buffon, however, because he features more prominently than Darwin in early American political discourse.

3. Geoffrey Crayon was Irving’s primary pseudonym and is, as a narrator, considered to be a stand-in for Irving himself, unlike Knickerbocker.

4. Irving later expresses a more specific opinion on the matter. After his trip to the newly created ‘Indian territory’ in 1832, Irving was concerned that western expansion would lead to widespread miscegenation and consequent racial degeneration. This opinion still differs somewhat from those of men like de Pauw, who believed the American climate would lead to the degradation of later generations of European Americans whether or not they intermarried with Native Americans. For more on Irving’s trip west, see Making the White Man’s West (Pierce 2016) by Jason Pierce.

5. Knickerbocker never labels Ichabod a Yankee, but his physical appearance and Connecticut roots mark him as such.

6. While the term race was originally used to refer to any group of people with something in common, by the end of the eighteenth century the term was beginning to carry the implication of a biological grouping related to ethnicity, making Irving’s use of it to refer to the Yankees significant. For more on the development of the term race, see Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Smedley and Smedley 2012) by Audrey Smedley and Brain D. Smedley.

7. Referencing an anaconda reinforces Knickerbocker’s engagement with natural history. The word ‘anaconda’ first appeared in English in the 1768 issue of The Scots Magazine in a letter to the editor by R. Edwin. Edwin describes an Asian snake eating an entire tiger by biting off chunks with its enormous mouth (Edwin 1768, 674). His description’s inclusion in the 1796 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica increased its reach, but the word anaconda was not yet part of general knowledge when Irving wrote ‘Sleepy Hollow’ (Yule and Coke Burnell 1903, 23a-25a).

8. Buffon was incorrect in his assumption that all male African lions had manes. For instance, the Tsavo man-eating lions, whose taxidermized bodies are on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, almost entirely lack manes.

9. For a more detailed and reclamatory reading of this line and of the female characters in ‘Sleepy Hollow’ more generally, see ‘“Girls can take care of themselves”: Gender and Storytelling in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”’ (Plummer and Nelson 1993) by Laura Plummer and Michael Nelson.

10. Knickerbocker justifies his own focus by claiming: ‘I hold all Indian conflicts to be mere barbaric brawls, unworthy of the pen which has recorded the classic war of Fort Christina’ (Irving 1809, 2:280).

11. Blazan’s argument that Native American exist only as specters in Irving’s oeuvre is arguably quite similar to Renée Bergland’s larger scale argument in National Uncanny (Bergland 2000).

12. This Black fiddler seems to reference A History. He could be the descendent of one of the Black fiddlers that Stuyvesant ‘dispatched as missionaries to every part of the province’ to entertain the Dutch at quilting bees like this one (Irving 1809, 2: 272).

13. See, for instance, ‘The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America’ (Foster 2021) by Travis Foster and ‘“Pioneers for the Mind”: Embodiment, Disability, and the De-Hallucination of American Empire’ (Puertas 2012) by Manuel Herrero Puertas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Theo Joy Campbell

Theo Campbell is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their research focuses on the interplay of literature and politics in the long nineteenth century. They are also interested in the intersections of literature and science, particularly applications of post-colonial theory to the history of healthcare systems and the ways that shifting scientific paradigms impact nineteenth century fiction.