Washington Irving spins tons and tons of webs before getting to the main plot of the story. I would like to analyze the story from the point of view of romance, gothic fiction, Marxism, psychoanalysis and feminism.

As a romance, the story revolves around protagonist Ichabold Crane’s efforts to woo Katrina. Ichabold Crane comes to town to be a school teacher. Katrina, a buxom girl, has many admirers and the story establishes the conflict between Brom Bones, the rustic boy, and Ichabold, who is also her admirer. The romance follows a typical medieval pattern of courtly love. The men go out of their way to make advances on Katrina. Katrina finds it tempting to be courted by many men. This type of romantic paradigm is identified by the philosopher Kristeva as belonging to melancholy, which is a longing for something that cannot be obtained. In this romance game, the women are silenced and the romance acts as a ritual chase game for the men. Are women objects to be worshiped by the court and obtained through servile gestures? Is the ideal of romance changing for women to take a more active role? Are women, poetic hearts, to be ornaments? Are gender roles changing and becoming more feminine in today’s romance? The questions are easy to ask, but the answers are hard to guess.

The story is modeled after gothic fiction and the town is haunted with many ghost tales. The most prominent of these is the legend of the headless horseman who visits the town at night and returns to his grave before dawn. The legend of the Headless Horseman becomes the crux of the story’s plot, as we later understand at the end that after a party at Katrina’s house, while Ichabold Crane is riding the horse, he is accosted by a Headless Horseman. and lose control. from his horse and when his head is thrown at him, he becomes a complete mess. We can only imagine that the author has woven the plot as a ploy by Ichabold’s rival, Brom Bones, who is a fan of Katrina, to drive him out of town. The author has created a plot that is weak, but leaves a lot of room for fictional imagination. The postmodern genre of fiction has sounded the death knell of the gothic. New age readers may read the plot as a fictional construct and gothic plots in the postmodern era are boring. Reality is not the fantastic but the aesthetic in modern fictional terms. Ridicule, irony, and self-reflection are the devices through which the postmodern writer explores his work.

From a Marxist perspective, the story portrays the life of the bourgeois elite, rich but rustic and poorly educated. It is an irony that they do not give much importance to their children’s education. This is revealed in the shoddy construction of the school, which is actually a shack. Blackness is also portrayed in the story with the kind of awareness of disdain. The story shows the evolution of rural America and fits the paradigm of class consciousness that is snobbish, elitist, and yet muddled in the waters of unsophistication. The cultural beliefs and values ​​of rural America are primitive and deeply tinged with supernaturalism and myth. The protagonist of the work, Ichabold, is the only character who resembles the proletariat. But then again, the author clouds it with superstitious beliefs. Women are limited to the role of nice housewives or as objects for men to put their charms on.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the story revolves around haunting specters, Christianity, and witchcraft paganism. The townspeople are plagued with the confusing slang panoply of holding staunch Christian beliefs and yet being ardent admirers of witchcraft. This salmagundi is an amalgamated cauldron of irrationality. One finds it difficult to digest these myths in the postmodern age. It also reveals the author’s confusion of an emotional dialectic between entrenched Christian beliefs and paganism. On an archetypal level, the cosmos’s dualism with good and evil emerges as silhouettes that wiggle the mind into perforations of substantiation. Devil and God become allegorical attributes of a mind bewildered by arcane enigmas. The author’s unconscious manifests itself with a consciousness that mixes myth and superstition with reality.

Looking at history from a feminist point of view, we can say that men are phallic fathers in search of the oedipal feminine. Women are submissive and affectionate housewives or flirtatious damsels ready to be seduced by men. Yes, Katrina is a commanding feminist when it comes to romance. She enjoys charming all the men who seduce her. But Katrina’s role is limited to a gender stereotype and she lacks autonomy and democracy. The phallic language of the text in stereotyping the masculine and feminine needs to be strongly challenged through the lens of feminist deconstruction. Gender and language vibrate with a magnet that is a Utopian Phallic Father.