In reading over Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," it caught my attention that each of these stories is given a title that refers to the setting where the action takes place: Irving's drowsy town, Poe's brooding mansion. I noticed further that each story makes specific use of atmosphere, to affect both the reader and the characters within the tale, but in two very different ways.

Irving's Sleepy Hollow is a real place, a specific location given by the narrator in the tale's opening paragraphs, almost as if tracing the route on a map - eastern shore of the Hudson river, by the Tappan Zee, two miles from a small port called Tarrytown (948). Irving's details give the story a firm grounding in reality, before wandering into the dreamlike vicinity of the story's setting. In contrast, Poe is creating a landscape of the imagination, and the directions in his opening paragraph are much more vague: "a singularly dreary tract of country" (1508), no place-names given. From the outset we are given to understand that Poe is not trying to describe a specific place at all, and has no need for literal accuracy; every detail given is there purely for effect. This is a more important difference than one might suspect: Irving's story is set in the real world, while Poe's may not be. We'll come back to that later, after a look at the atmosphere of each place, and its effect on each story's protagonist and secondary characters.

In each of these stories, the atmosphere is not just a convenient backdrop; it is a vital component of the plot, virtually a supporting character. Irving's Sleepy Hollow is aptly named, on two levels: Firstly, this is a place where things move slowly, remain unchanged and timeless while the world advances. (To create a flavor of once-upon-a-time for the reader, perhaps?) But secondly, and more importantly, there is something of a dreamlike quality to the town:

The narrator goes on to say that the effect of this influence "is not confined to the native inhabitants of the valley, but is unconsciously imbibed by every one who resides there for a time" (950). And of course, the influence is strongest on our protagonist, Ichabod Crane: "His appetite for the marvelous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spell-bound region" (952). More than anyone else in the area, Crane enjoys hearing or telling a good ghost story, his own drawn from Cotton Mather's tales - "in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed" (952) - but our narrator continues to remind us that even the local predilection for fantastical stories is "doubtless owing to the vicinity of Sleepy Hollow. There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land" (962). And there are moments within the story that make the place, despite its firm grounding in geography, seem almost like a dream itself:

A look at the words Irving uses here - gradually, motionless, gentle, prolonged, floated, breath, lingered, loitering, slowly, hanging, still, suspended - heightens the dreamlike impression of a single endless moment, "suspended in the air."

If Irving's setting is a place sunk in a dream, Poe's is a landscape steeped in nightmare. Through the narrator's eyes, we are not even permitted to see a poetic romance surrounding the darkened House of Usher; the scene causes "an utter depression of soul ... an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime." It is striking that the narrator compares the impression to "the after-dream of the reveller upon opium" rather than to a nightmare (1508-'09). He feels that he has awakened to a dreary "real world" made more desolate by contrast to the beauty of the dream, a feeling to which any reader can relate (and in our case, only enhanced by a recent visit to the idyllic Sleepy Hollow).

The atmosphere of the House, like that of Sleepy Hollow, has a deep influence on all who reside there - not limited to the native inhabitants. "I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow," says the visiting narrator; "An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all" (1511). According to the ailing owner of the House, Roderick Usher, the influence is more profound than one might guess, and is in fact the primary cause of his own malady:

Critics of Poe have speculated for some time about just how the nature of this "atmosphere" was intended to be interpreted; are we to believe Usher, or to discount his fractured reasoning as his friend the narrator clearly does? Eric Carlson, in his Companion to Poe Studies, presents a number of angles on the concept of "atmosphere," most notably the contribution of Leo Spitzer:

If Poe is trying to explain his characters by means of their environment, then there's nothing metaphorical about the atmosphere in this tale; its effect on Usher is dramatically literal. It is quite likely that Washington Irving, writing only twenty years earlier than Poe, has a similar concept in mind when he describes the atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow. Certainly his characters, and their actions, need to be explained in the context of their environment just as Poe's do. In Poe's story, though, the influence is much more pervasive and not nearly as benign; while the atmosphere of Sleepy Hollow is mildly soporific, that of the House of Usher is toxic:

Or perhaps the surroundings are vampiric rather than poisonous, as suggested by J.O. Bailey: "atmospheric vampirism: dead vegetation around the house...as a 'psychic sponge' draining Roderick's vitality" (198).

I tend to agree with the critics who believe that we are meant to take Usher's beliefs literally, to some degree; the House's atmosphere is poisoning him, or draining him, in truth - and not just in his own fevered imagination. Although I do find it interesting that no one has offered the countering hypothesis: that the sickness is in the family, and that throughout the generations, the people who lived there have poisoned the House and the ground. Perhaps that would be a peculiarly twentieth-century conceit, unlikely to have been thought of by Poe; in the early 1800's, before "pollution" and "environmentalism" were common concepts, it would make much more sense to suppose that a man's surroundings were poisoning him, rather than the other way around. Or perhaps we are meant to understand that it works both ways: the House poisons the people, who in turn poison the House, in a recursive cycle. To speculate about the source of the infection would be to reach beyond the scope of this story; Poe does not supply any hints as to the nature of the Usher family curse, and points out that the patrimony and the name have merged "in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the 'House of Usher' - an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion" (1510). Whether the source is in the family or in the house is moot; they are now inextricably intertwined and continue to affect each other.

In any case, it seems clear to me that within Poe's story, the supernatural content of the atmosphere is real - whereas in Irving, while the atmosphere evokes belief in the supernatural, the ghosts and such seem to be fictional. This brings us to the next question: what is the author's purpose in writing this story?

Irving is being gently satirical, comical; he makes a point of telling the reader (in the postscript) that the tale isn't meant to be believed: "'Faith, sir,' replied the story-teller, 'as to that matter, I don't believe one half of it myself'" (969). The Legend of Sleepy Hollow isn't really supposed to scare us; we're supposed to be amused by how easily Crane is scared, and by the credulousness of both Crane and the locals: "The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the neighborhood round the winter evening fire" (968).

Why am I convinced, despite the spooky forest and the grim horseback chase, that the story isn't truly meant to frighten? Simple: nobody dies. Nobody even gets hurt. Crane's own fate, by far the worst, is merely that he scares himself into a panic and then leaves town in humiliation. Take a closer look at one of the story's more fearsome passages:

The terror in this passage is clearly entirely in Crane's head; he's frightening himself with thoughts of "ghosts and goblins," and sets himself up for Brom Bones's Headless Horseman prank. If anything, Irving is trying to make a point about gullibility and being too easily frightened by tales, rather than playing along with the game. (Tim Burton's recent film Sleepy Hollow, with its slew of beheadings, gives us a better idea of what the story would be like if it were intended as horror; in fact, based on some of the reviews - "The pale and eerie, wispily colorful cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki makes Burton's Sleepy Hollow a town virtually drained of vitality" (Rosen 1) - one could make a good argument that Burton's vision is the Irving story set in a Poe-inspired atmosphere. However, this speculation falls outside the scope of this paper.)

Again in contrast to Irving, Poe is dark and morbid; he deliberately keeps the reader uncertain about what's really happening until the dreadful climax and the flight of the narrator "from that chamber, and from that mansion" (1521). The Fall of the House of Usher is a Gothic horror story meant to deeply unsettle the reader, to leave us with a sense of having narrowly escaped some dreadful doom - as the narrator has.

Irving is trying to entertain, to make us laugh, and perhaps to make us think; Poe is blatantly trying to terrify. When Irving's main character is scared, we're meant to laugh, or perhaps to feel a kind of affectionate pity for the man. When Poe's main character is scared, we're meant to take our cue from him and get scared ourselves - and perhaps at times to be frustrated by his stubborn rationality in the face of something obviously supernatural.

Given the authors' goals in writing these stories, how do their respective uses of atmosphere relate to these goals? To answer that, we will need to bring back the first point we established: Irving's story is set in the real world, while Poe's may not be. But in both cases, the atmosphere is a vital component of the plot; in both stories, what happens could only have happened here.

Why does Irving need his setting? For the sake of the satire, he needed a place where the ending could be ambiguous, and therefore a place where people might believe in ghosts or might not. If Crane were the only believer in the supernatural, the joke would fall flat; he needs the townspeople (except, of course, for Brom Bones) to be unsure themselves. He needs the atmosphere that causes people to "grow imaginative, to dream dreams, and see apparitions" (950).

Like Irving, Poe needs a setting that will draw the main character to thoughts of the otherworldly; unlike Irving, his main character (the narrator) begins as a skeptic:

Perhaps Ichabod Crane could have used a healthy dose of this man's skepticism; in the real world it might have done some good. A family curse manifesting as a mystic vapour? Absurd. Unfortunately for our narrator, he is not in the real world - he is in a Gothic fantasy, and here his skepticism will come very close to getting him killed, as he ignores one otherworldly hint after another:

And he's still trying to deny that anything strange is going on right through the unearthly storm - "'These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon - or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement; - the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame....'" (1519) - and throughout the reading of the "Mad Trist", almost until the very moment that Lady Madeline bursts into the room and bears her brother down to his self-fulfilled prediction of death by fear. He struggles against the atmosphere's power to terrify for as long as he can, but in the end the panic overwhelms him and he flees - and this is what saves his life. In Irving's story, it is Crane's credulousness that proves his downfall; in Poe's, the narrator is almost lost because he refuses to believe. In his stubborn skepticism, one could easily imagine him sinking to his death in the black tarn along with the shattered House - still insisting "There must be a rational explanation for all this!" as the water closes over his head.

I believe that unlike Irving, Poe is not trying to make any point about how one ought to behave; perhaps the moral of Sleepy Hollow is "Don't believe everything you read" or "Be willing to take a joke as you find it" (cf. 969), but it would be absurd to suggest that the moral of House of Usher is "Don't bury your relatives before they're dead" or "Run away from anything spooky, or it will kill you." If Poe is making a point at all, it may be that the attempt to rationalize fear will not conquer it, and will certainly not conquer whatever it is one fears.

WORKS CITED