In this edition of “post an old presentation to convince myself I can finish my dissertation” (that really needs a better title), I’m going back to Sleepy Hollow with a focus on Abbie Mills this time. The same caveats apply: I wrote this for a presentation in 2015 so the show was just finishing its second season and the tone will be a little different. I also give more background for the show this time around, in part because of the conference. I presented the last Sleepy Hollow paper at a conference where the attendees would be up-to-date with most science fiction and fantasy popular culture. They may not have watched the show, but they would be much more likely to know what I was talking about and I was on a panel with other papers discussing related fandoms. This time, I also presented at an academic conference that focused on popular culture, but my panel was not so closely connected thematically so I wanted to make sure my audience had enough background information.

Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017) is an adaptation that incorporates elements of urban fantasy to challenge the female role in horror. For those who don’t know much about the show, it is adapted from two short stories by Washington Irving (“Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”). Ichabod Crane fought a horseman during the Civil War and then woke up over two hundred years later when that same horseman (now headless) was awakened in an attempt to start the apocalypse. Ichabod and Abbie Mills are the witnesses mentioned in “Revelations” and they have taken on the role of saviours of humanity.

These two fight evil supernatural beings with the help of various characters: Frank Irving, Katrina Crane, Jenny Mills, and adding Nick Hawley in season 2. Unlike many supernatural shows currently available, the main female characters are not love interests, nor are they dependent on others. Crane, a man out of time, relies on Abbie at first to acclimatize him to the 21st century, but then they generally work together as a team. In fact, an important storyline in season two revolves around the ways in which things go wrong when Abbie and Ichabod DON’T work together. Among this cast of characters, Katrina is the weakest in some ways. Katrina is generally disliked by the fans and even the actress who plays her has suggested that her character needs development. Jenny and Abbie, and a new character, Sheriff Reyes (who has not been introduced to the supernatural elements at work in her town), are the muscle in this show — not Ichabod, Irving, or Hawley.

Sleepy Hollow is a horror drama, but it is also a contemporary fantasy television show. The genre matters here, because of the ways in which the show fits or fights its stereotypes. Horror has the tradition of the final girl, a trope identified by Carol Clover as the last girl standing at the end of horror films — particularly slasher horror.

“’She often shows more courage and level-headedness than her cringing male counterparts'” (Schoell qtd in Clover 1987, 201) and her gender “is compromised by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from other girls, sometimes her name … her unfemininity is signaled clearly by her exercise of the ‘active, investigating gaze’ normally reserved for males and hideously punished in females” (Clover 1987, 210). At first glance, Abbie Mills could fit this stereotype. She is given the “active, investigating gaze” and she is often very level-headed, even in the midst of supernatural powers she doesn’t understand or control. Abbie is powerful, not necessarily in physical strength (though she does have hand-to-hand combat training), but in intelligence and her courage in the face of danger. She also has the power of a firearm at all times given her position as police officer. She is also likely to appear to fit the traditional victim stereotype in that she is female and she is beautiful. The comparisons stop there though. Abbie, along with almost all of the female characters on the show, is a woman of colour. She is not a teenager, nor is she seemingly weak to begin with. When the series begins Abbie has established herself as a police officer and has been accepted to Quantico for training as an FBI agent. She is not meek or mild and she is not really willing to take anyone else’s crap.

We can see another stereotype for Abbie in horror/drama/contemporary fantasy television, however: Buffy. Irene Karras suggests that “Buffy would be the stereotypical last girl except that her friends are always left standing as well, and she saves not only herself at the end of each show, but all of humanity” (2002). Likewise, most of Abbie’s “Scooby gang” lives to fight another day in Sleepy Hollow. Unlike Buffy early on though, Abbie is not the only “slayer.” She has a partner in her role as witness and Abbie and Ichabod draw strength from each other. Unlike Clover’s final girl, Buffy is feminine and is generally not punished for her femininity. In general, this is also true of Abbie and most of the women on Sleepy Hollow. The first season does spend some time linking various male police officers to Abbie, but they act only as plot points. That is, their interest in Abbie works to fill a plot hole. Andy Brooks helps Abbie, Ichabod, and their team despite his servitude to the demon Moloch because of his romantic interest in Abbie and the guilt he feels for betraying her.

In this way, a great deal of important information needed to save the day is a result of a romantic connection, rather than time spent on research in a library they have yet to discover. Likewise, the character of Detective Luke Morales is jealous of Abbie’s new relationship with the mysterious Ichabod Crane and starts investigating his cover story as a professor of history at Oxford acting as a consultant. This investigative role helps to build tension by creating a non-supernatural challenge for Abbie and Ichabod, but it also offers the audience the opportunity to recognize the moment that Captain Frank Irving has decided to believe our heroes — when Morales goes to him with proof that Ichabod is not who he says he is, Irving rejects Morales’s issues and supports Ichabod wholeheartedly. So, here we have two male characters whose positions in the series were intended to push the plot along through their romantic interest in Abbie. We do not, however, have much evidence that Abbie is romantically interested in anyone. The series actually spends a great deal more time on Ichabod’s romance with Katrina. In season two we have a few moments showing that Hawley has had a previous relationship with Jenny and may be interested in Abbie (though he and Jenny seem to go back to flirting with each other by the end of the season). We can see that both women are open to relationships, but are (probably) just too busy saving the world to think too much about kissing boys — though Buffy always seemed to fit it into her day somewhere between school and slaying! Honestly though, if the writers’ idea of a woman in a romantic relationship is Katrina, then it is probably best that they avoid such entanglements for the Mills sisters.

Ok, so Abbie embodies elements of the final girl, but she is more than that. She is part of a team and a partnership. She does more than just survive and she is not a victim. This is where the genre of contemporary fantasy becomes important. Sleepy Hollow fits very strongly into the category of urban fantasy. While urban fantasy can include a number of different wide-ranging examples in literature from works by Charles deLint, where the city itself is a character as well as a setting, to Harry Dresden the magician; in terms of the marketing category, it is generally considered to include those works that have supernatural elements set in a real world setting. These works also often feature a female protagonist who starts out as human, but may become supernatural herself. In the publishing world, urban fantasy novels often feature first-person narration quite heavily allowing the reader to learn about this particular supernatural world through an inexperienced main character. There are variations on this of course, but these are the basic elements of the genre. Abbie very strongly fits into this category as we follow an inexperienced human who discovers she is special in someway as she learns about the hidden elements of the supernatural all around her and fights her way through those elements to save the day. 

Why is this important? Because Abbie very clearly fits into this genre much better than in the horror genre. Urban fantasy is full of strong female characters who must remain true and alone in order to save the day. This sounds very much like the “only virgins live” comment from the rules to surviving a horror movie, I know, but first it is important to note that most urban fantasy protagonists do not remain alone — they either become romantically linked or they “hook up” with characters and then move on. More importantly, this differs from the final girl trope in that these women more closely resemble traditional male heroes. In effect, they are female heroes, rather than heroines. And they have a counterpart male heroine — a male character who is probably an equal to the female hero (though not always the protagonist), but ultimately needs to be saved by the female hero. The male heroine often represents the domestic in these stories — sometimes quite visually represented as such — and can be a challenge for the tough female hero who cannot be compromised by a relationship. 

The female hero of urban fantasy is often given the freedom to embody both the feminine and the masculine as a character. She is not just a warrior woman, she is also a woman — beautiful and feminine when she wants to be, but dangerous when necessary. Abbie is this character — or she is becoming it in any case. We watch Abbie go from the very masculine dress of a beat cop, to clothing that better identifies her as a woman. We see her begin to flirt — particularly with Hawley, but not exclusively. Abbie becomes emotional when confronted with a rewriting of her own family history and she re-opens a very supportive relationship with her sister after years of being estranged. These are all very traditional versions of straight femininity and her character is allowed to explore them while still being given the opportunity to be the “big, damn hero,” as it were. The path of the female hero often closely mirrors the path of the traditional (male) hero as identified by Joseph Campbell or Northrop Frye in his Romance mythos and Abbie is well along this path at this point. 

Susan Bordo goes further to discuss women’s bodies as sites of cultural conditioning. She suggests that “[t]he body . . . is a medium of culture” (2362). Bordo sees the constructionist culture through women’s bodies as heavily dependent on image since the birth of film and television in the twentieth century. She states that: “With the advent of movies and television, the rules for femininity have come to be culturally transmitted more and more through standardized visual images. As a result, femininity itself has come to be largely a matter of constructing . . . the appropriate surface presentation of the self . . . we learn the rules directly through bodily discourse: through images that tell us what clothes, body shape, facial expression, movements, and behavior are required” (Bordo 2366).

Abbie, like Buffy, then offers us a new conception of femininity — one that recognizes what Judith Butler told us years ago: there is no natural gender. Abbie’s version of the female hero includes a male heroine who is not, as yet anyway, a potential love interest for her canonically he is, therefore a complete equal. They each have their strengths and they are able to take direction from each other. Ichabod’s Civil War era character is easily able to accept Abbie as an equal, despite her race and gender (this is true both in the past and in the show’s present — his future) and, coupled with her embodiment of the female hero common in urban fantasy, this acceptance allows Abbie to be a role model for viewers without setting her too far apart from other female characters on the show. That is, she is not exceptional in the way that Buffy is. Abbie is one of many strong female characters on the show and in the town of Sleepy Hollow so that her exceptional elements are hopefully normalized for viewers. Sleepy Hollow as a show, then, makes use of the audience’s familiarity with urban fantasy and its characteristics in order to incorporate the female hero into the final girl trope thereby infusing that role with power rather than forcing Abbie to save the world in drag, as it were. 

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. WW Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 2362-2376. 

Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.” Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies. Robert Dale Parker, ed. Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 327-337. 

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. 3rd ed. New World Library, 2008.

Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, no. 20 (Fall), 1987: pp. 187-228.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, 1957.

Karras, Irene. “The Third Wave’s Final Girl: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture, vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, n.p.

While I’m working away on my dissertation, I thought I’d post some of my old presentations. Partly I want to put them somewhere since I didn’t go any further with those only tangentially related to my research, but I also feel this need to remind myself that I have written some interesting things before and so I will make it through this process! So, I’m going to start with this piece that I presented at ICFA in 2015 on the show, Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017), which is no longer in production. I fell deeply in love with this show and then very quickly dropped it — as did many fans — when they dropped Abbie as the main character. What drew me to the show was the urban fantasy element — the supernatural in the everyday world, but I think this was put to the test a bit when they did a crossover episode with the show Bones (2005-2017), which was fully set in the everyday world and, in fact, built on a complete rejection of the supernatural.

I would like to mention a few other things before digging in to this old presentation. First, as mentioned, I presented this in 2015 so the show had not completed its run. Second, I haven’t changed a lot of the writing here and I tend to write my presentations the way I speak so it may read a little weird. Finally, I am Canadian, so when I discuss American history, I’m really speaking to a popular conception of that history that comes from my understanding through experiencing American cultural objects (mostly popular!), but still being in the position of other. Oh, and I’ve uploaded the slideshow at the end because I had difficulty embedding the video clips and images in with the text. It’s not necessary to view it, but there are a few videos that may be interesting to remind you of the show and characters if it’s been awhile since your last rewatch (or if you’ve never seen the show!).

While the television show Sleepy Hollow is an adaptation of the short story by Washington Irving, it is also an adaptation of American history itself (increasingly with season two) with Sleepy Hollow as its setting. This version of the short story includes those recognizable elements of the original such as the headless horseman, the town itself, and the character of Ichabod Crane, though his characterization is considerably different here, and places them in the present. For those who haven’t seen the show, Ichabod is transplanted 250 years from the middle of the Civil war to our present along with the headless horseman. He then pairs up with Lieutenant Abbie Mills as the Witnesses of the Book of Revelations in order to stop Moloch the demon. This “man out of time” narrative allows the show to comment (often comedically) on present day peculiarities such as the proliferation of Starbucks coffee shops, or skinny jeans.

As the show progresses, however, it comments more explicitly on American history — both comedically and not. This commentary works for this show for a number of reasons, from the supernatural genre to the pacing, but it is most successful because of the character of Ichabod Crane.

In Sleepy Hollow Ichabod acts as a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu if you prefer to match genders) and this allows him to comment critically on the state of America and its iconic figures. A Mary Sue character is a trope in fanfiction (though there are a number of representative characters in popular media — most commonly cited is Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation). Mary Sues are essentially perfect. They are better than everyone else in every way: knowledge, skills, innate ability, looks, etc. The original character of Ichabod Crane certainly felt himself superior to all others and was more intelligent in that he was the local teacher. Likewise, other adaptations (namely Tim Burton’s 1999 film) have shown how unusual Crane appears to the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow for his — what we consider intelligence in that he uses the scientific method — but they consider useless denial of the supernatural. Tom Mison’s portrayal of Crane, however, is so much more than earlier versions of the character. Not only is he intelligent (an Oxford scholar), he also has an eidetic memory (which is extremely useful considering maps and books keep getting destroyed around him, not to mention the multiple century gap between his past and present). He is not exactly adored by all, but he does have an uncanny knack for making people like him — even while continuing to dress as a revolutionary officer in 2015. Most Mary Sue characters are also super beautiful and … well … many fans feel the same way about Tom Mison. Finally though, the character element that makes me see Ichabod Crane as a Mary Sue is his connection to major iconic figures that obviously prove to be most relevant in terms of plot. He has been close personal friends with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin (who he did not like), Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox (of Fort Knox fame), Betsy Ross (there was a brief affair there), and he was involved in the signing of the Declaration of Independence — among other important historical events. While some of this name-dropping happens in the first season, Crane’s connection to such characters intensifies with season 2 — to the point where each episode appears to be focused on Crane’s relationship with one particular character.

Obviously there are relevant reasons the writers may choose to endow Crane with such gifts — his eidetic memory means it isn’t unusual that he can remember exactly what something looked like from 250 years ago, for example, and I have already shown how writers have used Mary Sue-like characters in profic. Given the form of adaptation here though, I’d like to consider this element in terms of its fanfiction construction. Essentially, I want to — for the moment anyway — consider Sleepy Hollow as fanfic (granted, still officially sanctioned fic). Pat Pflieger compares Mary Sues to placeholders in Romance novels: “Despite appearances … readers of romance fiction aren’t identifying with the heroine of the work; their real focus is on the hero, with the heroine holding open a spot in the novel into which the (usually female) reader can slip mentally” (2). Meanwhile, Sheenagh Pugh suggests a link to “chick lit” in that “Criticism of the genre has focused not only on its fluffiness but on the fact that it acts as a mirror rather than a window, reflecting the lives of its readers and writers rather than showing them other lives” (85). (Interesting to note that both make use of traditionally female-dominated literary genres — I would suggest that the claims about the use of first-person in urban fantasy and paranormal romance also fit here as newer Mary Sues often follow that style). While viewers of Sleepy Hollow — female anyway — are not likely to be imagining themselves directly in Ichabod Crane’s place in the same way as they may with a female placeholder in romance, I think both of these quotations highlight something that does happen with the character of Ichabod Crane. Viewers are given the opportunity to put themselves in the position of someone who has literally (within the story world) lived through history. By relaying his (mostly comedic versions of) historical figures and moments — usually through flashbacks, Crane invites viewers to join him in the moment. Likewise, because these moments and people are shown realistically (that is, with flaws), viewers can appreciate them as they would any other filmic moment. In this way, the Mary Sue character allows viewers to reflect on themselves and their own history (assuming a mostly North American audience — though I would argue that it allows for self-reflection for viewers of other nations as well). This self-reflection makes itself obviously clear in-text when Abbie and Captain Frank Irving school Crane on Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Heming.

Now, we know that period pieces regularly reflect the culture in which they were made, rather than presenting a realistic version of the period in question and, though Sleepy Hollow is set in the present (for the most part), it is no exception. Pflieger also suggests that Mary Sue is “a gauge of the times in which [the authors write]” (2) and Crane is a gauge. The commentary that I mentioned earlier regarding Starbucks and skinny jeans is common throughout the show. Most of it is more humorous than anything, but some becomes a clear commentary on present times: he discusses the issue of bottled and contaminated drinking water and overwhelming credit card debt, for example. Finally, the Mary Sue character, in her perfection, is often able to help the main characters with all of their problems because the author — and so the character — have an often omnipotent view of them in the show and she can then explain them to themselves. Ichabod Crane works in this way as well, but not with the other characters. Crane explains a particular position on American history to the audience from the position of someone outside of time (yet, still within it as he is more modern than he likes to think and the show itself, of course, can only comment from within its own time period). In this way, Crane offers us a perspective on the world that we may not be able to see (as characters in this canon of society as it exists).

Building on that idea of society itself as a “character” in the canon upon which Crane is commenting,  I want to move into a short discussion of how the entire series works as an AU fic. Again, I am suspending belief for the moment and considering Sleepy Hollow as fanfic. An AU fic or Alternate Universe story is exactly as it sounds: the canon is transplanted into an alternate universe. Sometimes this means considering an alternate outcome for the characters within the canon world, other times it  means moving the characters to a completely new world. In this case, the characters of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” have been moved to a new world entirely. Not only is this the Sleepy Hollow of the future, but it is also a Sleepy Hollow where the supernatural DOES exist, whereas Washington Irving’s narrator suggests that Crane allowed himself to be influenced by old wives’ tales. Pugh suggests that “An AU may also be a chance to make the reader think again about some aspect of the canon” (62) and that “AUs, like crossovers, can also be a means of getting away from the original author’s voice and showing ‘his characters’ from an angle he did not” (64). This version of the Sleepy Hollow story does allow us to reconsider a number of canonical elements. The show reconsiders the supernatural in the modern world and, most notably, reconsiders the role of women and people of colour. Lt Abbie Mills is the first person willing to listen to Crane’s story of time travel and he is not quite ready to find an African-American woman in a position of power. Of course, this ties back into Crane’s position as Mary Sue since he quickly takes her position in stride and has no problem following her lead, something unlikely to happen in reality. Beyond this though, we can consider Sleepy Hollow as an AU fic of American history itself. It is important to note here that Washington Irving is regularly considered to be one of the first authors to write American fiction. And, as Michael A. Arnzen suggests, “When horror tales explore and speculate about the unknown, they often also teach us about what we do know, even if only to point out the limits of cultural knowledge” (1.4). Beyond the horror and supernatural genre conventions though, Sleepy Hollow as AU fanfiction with the popular conception of American history as canon gives us the opportunity to reconsider “the canon” itself. As I’ve mentioned throughout this presentation, the show takes characters and historical moments from the 18th century in America as canon. Not just the characters and moments, but the popular construction of them — that is, often the fiction of American history — and plays with it in a way that forces the viewer to reconsider popular opinion. While Crane’s character occasionally “teaches” the audience about its own history, he also plays with reality — most notably in the creation of a conspiracy between figures such as Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson to fight against the supernatural forces of evil. This rewriting of the past offers a reframing of the past in a way that makes it present. 

So the question now is why would I want to consider a TV show as if it were fanfiction? The first answer is pretty simple: while watching this season I couldn’t help but see Ichabod as a Mary Sue character — he is just too good at everything and a number of episode plots required his knowledge of personal “BFFs” who also happened to be famous. Beyond that though, Examining popular culture — particularly those examples that are already adaptations themselves — as though it is fanfiction or a fan product can provide insight into the product, its creators, and its audience. While we tend in fan studies, to focus on the ways in which the fan product or activity give us insight into the fans themselves, and outside of fan studies we ignore the “author” completely (unless, of course, we subscribe to auteur theory), a combination of the two insights may be necessary going forward as so many popular culture works ARE both “official” and fan-made. Beyond the more indie products such as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries or Space Janitors, this also applies to mass produced works such as Fifty Shades of Grey (and its film adaptation) among other Twilight fanfic turned profic works, and television shows such as Doctor Who, for example. The nature of products are changing and it is important to consider both industrial, creative, and fannish decisions to give us a more diverse understanding of media products. Likewise, some of my previous work has commented on the way that fanfiction conventions are blurring the lines between official and fan productions. Sleepy Hollow is another official product that is blurring those lines and, in this case, it offers us another insight into how the show is commenting on the popular conception of American history.