THE DEEP ONES: "The Spectre Bridegroom" by Washington Irving

Talk The Weird Tradition

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Spectre Bridegroom" by Washington Irving

2elenchus
Jan 3, 2022, 1:25 pm

Online for me, unless I find it one of my sundry omnibus collections.

3elenchus
Jan 8, 2022, 12:19 am

Most surprising to me here was the tone of the piece: I detected far mare Mark Twain than Poe. Curious, too, that a fairly astonishing story would be told in so glib a way, effectively robbing it of any effect it could have.

Faintly interesting as a comment upon culture and lifeways, specifically German; disappointing as supernatural fiction.

4RandyStafford
Jan 8, 2022, 2:49 pm

Well, this nomination of mine went amiss. As >3 elenchus: said, disappointing as weird fiction. As a witty take on E.T.A. Hoffmann-type tales, I liked it. I shouldn't, given the humorous last sentence of Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", have been surprised by the tone.

I'll note the daughter doesn't even get a name that I recall.

5housefulofpaper
Edited: Jan 9, 2022, 3:14 pm

I read this in the Tartarus Press collection The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories (there's no point attempting to find the Touchstone for the correct edition, is there?).

So it's over 10 years since last reading this story, and I had forgotten everything about it. I'd agree that it's not Weird. Even though the Weird genre (or is it a trope) is difficult to pin down and define, there's an "I know it when I see it" sense to it.

This story seemed, rather, to be using Gothic tropes that were already well-worn by 1819, utilising them to tell a tall tale with a rather urbane air and a wink for the audience (are those asides supposed to be Irving's, or the Swiss teller of the tale's?)

Doing my best to be as charitable as possible to the slightly burlesque names and the wry social commentary, trying to see them as relatively fresh and not ways of storytelling used over and over again in the past two centuries, I did enjoy reading this again.

I read that Irving had to look to, and appeal to, a British audience at least as much as American one; and if anything I felt there was a familiarity of tone with Dickens (the younger Dickens of Sketches by Boz) than with Mark Twain. Maybe I need to read more Twain, but doesn't he have the reputation of being a more savage wit than Dickens - or than Irving on the evidence of this story.

Whilst mentioning other authors, I don't have any clue as to how well Irving knew Hoffmsn's work, but this particular story seems to be patterned on older German Gothic authors. I noticed the explicit nod to "Lenore", by Gottfried August Bürger.

The "explained supernatural" is characteristic of the first wave of Gothic, as are Germanic/Rhineland settings (I have had the good fortune, before Covid hit, to visit the French side of the Rhine valley and there are still a number of castles among the Vosges mountains. And vineyards). Also characteristic of Gothic, of course, as are bandits in the mountains or forests (and credit to Irving for noting a real-world socio-political reason for them to be there).

I also have to give Irving credit for terrifying me when I was small, via the Disney adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".

ETA: Edited a slightly mangled sentence and corrected some punctuation.

6elenchus
Jan 8, 2022, 11:43 pm

>4 RandyStafford: Well, this nomination of mine went amiss.

I'm pleased to have read it: with a title like that, and coming from Irving, it would have an oversight not to know what kind of tale it is. Now I do.