Writing Portfolio

Scrivener Bartleby’s Dead; or
The Legend of Washington Irving’s and Herman Melville’s usages of the Unhallow

In their respective stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Bartleby the Scrivener, authors Washington Irving and Herman Melville use gothic elements to similar and varying degrees.  Each author uses said elements somewhat ironically to comment on present conditions during the time periods in which they lived. The following essay will explore how and why each writer uses the gothic and to what degree.

Of the two stories, Irving’s is more overtly gothic than Melville’s. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set in a small hamlet secluded in the woods and features spooky ghost stories and old churchyard cemeteries. The hamlet is described alternately as being “bewitched by a high German doctor” and that “an old Indian chief... held his powwows there” before it was settled by Dutch colonists. This sort of “cursed” landscape turns Sleepy Hollow into a classically gothic locale and primes readers to assume that the story will be that of horror. However, that is not entirely the case. Irving tempers the harshness of his setting with beautiful romantic language and positive portrayals of its inhabitants. The story’s outside narrator delivers lengthy encomiums on the merits of the eponymous town Sleepy Hollow, saying “If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley” (Washington 282). In this way, Sleepy Hollow is almost a gothic pastoral. Another way in which Irving subverts his story’s gothic themes lies in its comic tone, which is concentrated in mockery surrounding the story’s antagonist.

Though Sleepy Hollow is somewhat nightmarish and known for its ghost stories such as that of the imposing Headless Horseman, the true ghost haunting Sleepy Hollow is Ichabod Crane, who symbolizes the looming threat of Manifest Destiny, a force that Irving is hostile to. Crane is described as “tall, but exceedingly lank, with... hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves... with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose...” and that “one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield” (283). This description encapsulates so well the gothic-comic tone of the tale, describing Crane as pathetically gangly yet also goblin-like, that he is at once an apocalyptic horseman and a harmless scarecrow. As a schoolteacher, he “civilizes” the old ways out of his pupils and the village’s next generation with an iron fist, encapsulated in the sarcastic description of his teaching style: “...he was a conscientious man, and ever bore in mind the golden maxim, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’—Ichabod Crane’s scholars certainly were not spoiled” (284). He also is a man of appetites, described as eating more than his fair share, consuming the local’s stories, and womanizing without giving back anything in return. His description as “a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s history of New England Witchcraft” links him to the notorious Salem Witch Trials, almost painting him as a proxy witch hunter come to exercise the demons of uniqueness (285). In all of this, Irving depicts Ichabod as a regressive force of assimilation inflicted on Sleepy Hollow’s authentic inhabitants into a fundamentalist American culture akin to modern gentrification.

If Ichabod is a negative force of modernity, then the story’s folk hero Brom Van Brunt, or “Brom Bones” represents the spiritual powers of a small town fighting back against “progress”. His name is evidently Dutch, linking him to the village’s past as a Dutch settlement, which plays into gothic story elements of the past fighting back against the present. His nickname of “Bones” harkens to skeletons, another gothic trope and set piece. He is described as rough around the edges and almost barbaric; however, he is ultimately a good chap, a sort of Byronic anti-hero. Irving writes of him that he has a “Herculean frame”, that he is “famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous... as a Tartar,” and that “with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at the bottom” (289). Brunt’s assumption of the Headless Horseman’s guise and subsequent chasing of Crane from Sleepy Hollow indeed represents the triumph and revenge of the past over modernity, of spirituality vanquishing science, both common story threads that gothic tales follow.

If Irving’s story is a gothic tale with comic elements, then Melville’s story is a comic tale with gothic elements. Bartleby the Scrivener takes place primarily in an office adjacent Wall Street, a setting that is anything but scary (though offices do tend to be lugubrious liminal spaces). The story’s characters comprise an even-tempered narrator, two ridiculous and manic employees, a boy clerk, and the depressive Bartleby. The characters are almost representations of the four classical humors, with the narrator representing phlegm, the two older employees embodying choler, the boy sanguine, and Bartleby melancholy. The story is thus reminiscent of comedies such as Ben Jonson’s humor plays, setting the stage for laughs with its caricatural dramatis personæ.

Though Bartleby maintains an absurdist comic tone throughout its plot, the story mixes bits of the gothic to add emotional complexity and flavor its comedy with that of the sad clown. The main gothic element of the story is Bartleby, who is a sort of ghost. Bartleby is described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn...” and appropriately “like a very ghost...” (Melville 594, 599). Adding to his ghoulish mien his persistent presence at the office indeed does make him a sort of symbolic spirit. Additionally, he has powers of possession, commanding the narrator’s sympathy almost like hypnosis whenever he utters his iconic phrase “I would prefer not to.” The first time the narrator is rebuked by Bartleby, he is described as being paralyzed, momentarily “turned into a pillar of salt,” like Lot’s wife in the Bible after seeing the divine destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (596). This seems to be saying that Bartleby is not of this world.

But what is the point of all this hocus pocus in the boardroom? A common gothic trope is mental illness, and all of the office scriveners are manic or depressive in some way. Scrivener work is described as “... a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair” (595). It would seem that Melville’s intentions are to show the dehumanizing aspects of workplace drudgery on workers’ psyches. Bartleby is especially afflicted, as it is implied in the story’s epilogue (perhaps epitaph would be a more appropriate description) that his supposed former job at the Dead Letter Office gave him a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Bartleby’s life and death so affects the story’s narrator that the latter becomes overwhelmed with grief. He tries to do anything that he can to aid the lost soul, but it is not enough. By the story’s end, the narrator too seems to be afflicted with melancholy, uncharacteristically saying the emotional lines: “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” (614).  Just as the narrator could not exercise Bartleby from the office in life, so now he is haunted with mournful thoughts of him in death. In this, Melville perhaps is damning the bourgeoisie and managerial class, saying that they are responsible for the sorry fates of the worlds Bartlebys.

In conclusion, Washington Irving and Herman Melville used gothic tropes to varying degrees in their respective stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Bartleby the Scrivener. Irving’s story is a traditional gothic tale gently subverted with its positive portrayal of Sleepy Hollow’s antiquated townsfolk and comic tone. By using gothic set pieces, Irving’s story portrays the triumph of the past over the present. Melville’s story is not overtly gothic, yet it uses the ghostly personage of Bartleby to comment on guilt and bureaucratic dehumanization. The specter of Bartleby does nothing to defeat the forces of office tyranny. All in all, both of these stories effectively use the gothic to critique modernity.

Works Cited

Irving, Washington and Melville, Herman. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Concise Anthology of American Literature. 1974. Edited by George McMichael et al., Second Edition, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985, pp. 281–301, 590–614.