Morrell - Sleepy Hollow, Irving vs. Burton

In studying the work of Tim Burton, it has become increasingly clear that the intent of shedding light on typical outcasts of society is a crucial and frequently present theme. In the case of Sleepy Hollow, Burton takes Washington Irving's original short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published in 1820, and utilizes the prevalent theme of the outsider. In Irving's story, the main character Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher and chorus instructor in the small town of Sleepy Hollow. Here, Ichabod is an outsider seeing as how he spends a lot of his free time exchanging ghost stories with the elderly women of the town. As he tries to romantically pursue Katrina Van Tassel, he finds himself competing with Brom Van Brunt who is quite the opposite of an outsider. Ichabod avoids Brom Bones which ends up making him even more vulnerable seeing as how Brom serves as a trickster. He begins by pranking Ichabod by smoking up the schoolhouse, but that's not enough. Ichabod has an encounter with the Headless Horseman who knocks him off of his horse. After that, no one in the town of Sleepy Hollow sees Ichabod again. The story's ambiguous ending suggests that Brom may have pulled this prank on Ichabod, but the old women of the town swear that the Headless Horseman took him. Burton uses the elements of this story to contribute to his own creative interpretation. Washington Irving's Ichabod is obviously a vulnerable character. Burton further develops this in his own adaptation as he incorporates the theme of parental abandonment; a common theme in his own life and several other works. Ichabod in Burton's film is a police officer whose purpose in going to Sleepy Hollow is to solve the mystery of the multiple murder cases that occurred. As he goes about his investigation, he has flashbacks to his childhood. Each flashback demonstrates how close Ichabod was to his mother. Finally, it is revealed that his father brutally and grotesquely kills Ichabod's mother. This definitely contributes to Ichabod's weakness as a character as it is apparent that he feels that he does not belong. In New York City, he is the only one to stand up to his peers in an effort to digress from medieval ways of punishing criminals. They assign him to the Sleepy Hollow murder cases where he is, again, an outsider. Although Burton significantly changes the plot line of Irving's tale, he chooses to use it as the framework of his film because it shares themes that are rooted in his own line of work. He stays true to the underlying foundation of the story which he carefully chose because of its striking thematic similarities to his own passions.