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.