Posted by Jim Stergios October 30, 2011 02:07 PM
http://boston.com/community/blogs/rock_the_schoolhouse/2011/10/halloween_headless_horsemen_an.html
In this season of ghosts and goblins, it seems only appropriate to think about the stories that for many generations served to frame our imagination of what Halloween should look like.
For generations, schoolchildren of all backgrounds learned about literature and life in America via Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Herman Meville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
That list is a partial trajectory of the American spirit. On Halloween a different sort of literary spirit has grown around the holiday, with very visible markers in our literary past: Our fascination with the macabre in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, the humorous, light-hearted yet richly crafted stories of Washington Irving such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and tales formulated from the stark oppositions of American Puritanism, as evident in the stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Ichabod Crane’s unlikely fascination for the beautiful Katrina has always been easy for a child to grasp, as was Crane’s obsession with terrible tales such as the one about the “Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.” The amazing thing about the story is just how rich it is, and how it grows with us into adulthood. It helps that it makes us laugh.
Hawthorne doesn’t much go for laughter. The Scarlet Letter is of course his most famous story, but on Halloween, with its night-time rituals, goblins and devils all dancing and prancing in the dark along with SpongeBobs, nerds and this year Captain America and Angry Birds, I think Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown is the story that most comes to mind.
The Puritan Young Goodman Brown, is about to leave his Faith, his lovely bride, for a trip into the woods. Odd beginning already, given that Puritans didn’t much like the woods, having settled the land and carved out a space for the Elect in the New World. Brown, though, is headed for deep into the forest. .. at night. (Hawthorne’s and the Puritans’ woods were not those of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods.) On the way, he runs into all kinds of townspeople, including the Sunday School teacher and the Deacon. Brown also meets with a presence cloaked in black carrying a snake-like staff; this man traveled from old Boston to the woods in superhuman time, so, well, you know he’s talking to the Devil.
The Devil says he knows Brown’s Puritan ancestors. And he knows Brown’s wife, too; Brown sees her transported away (and her pink ribbon). They meet and are to be baptized before a great fire and a crowd of all the townspeople, the good and the bad who are all awake and in the depths of the woods. When he resists baptism, he awakens, as if from a dream. Dream or reality? No matter. Having lost his Faith (in all senses), he can never look at anyone without feeling they were with Devil; his remaining days are those of a gloomy old man.
I share these stories to mark the holiday, but also with some sadness at changes in the state’s curriculum and how people in the K-12 world view literature. It was these foundational liberal arts readings and vocabulary in cultural literacy, along with math and science as its auxiliaries, which used to punctuate public education for democratic learning.
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