The Spectre Bridegroom Sparknotes

The Spectre Bridegroom Washington Irving is known for his famous works such as Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle (?) found in his collection of essays titled “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent” or “The Sketch Book.” Another work found in the collection is a short story titled “The Spectre Bridegroom,” which deals with a wealthy family, an arranged wedding, and a spectre bridegroom hence the name of the story. The literary techniques Irving uses throughout his story such as setting, narration, and direct/indirect characterization allow the readers to fully immerse themselves in the story wondering if the bride will be able to find love in the end. Jane D. Eberwein and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky each offer different analyses of Irving’s “The

In his work titled, “Washington Irving and the Genesis of the Fictional Sketch” Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky writes on the fictional sketch as it relates to Irving’s work, “The Sketch Book.” On the setting he writes, “Irving’s literary sketches call attention to object as well as to observer and therefore rely upon a strong visual rendering of the realistic details of scene and setting” (232). A castle is immediately associated with wealth however, Irving continues on to write on the castle, “It is now quite fallen to decay, and almost buried among beech trees and dark firs; above which, however, its old watch-tower may still be seen struggling... “(107). The setting of the story may be set in a castle, but choosing to describe the castle this way indicates that the current family that occupies the castle is holding onto past wealth. This is the case as the story continues with Irving writing, “Though the warlike disposition of his predecessors had much impaired the family possessions, yet the baron still endeavored to keep up some show of former state” (107). By opening his story with a description of the castle in which the baron and his family are living in, Irving

At first, it seems as though Irving doesn’t indicate who the narrator is in the story but it’s clear that it is a third person narration. The answer to who is narrating the story can be found in the opening of the story where there is a subheadline that reads “A Traveller’s Tale” with an asterisk at the end indicating to the reader that there is more information to be known. The asterisk is to let the reader know that the narrator is a Swiss traveler, “The erudite reader, well versed in good-for-nothing lore, will perceive that the above Tale must have been suggested to the old Swiss by a little French anecdote, a circumstance said to have taken place in Paris” (106-107). In her essay titled, “Transatlantic Contrasts in Irving’s Sketch Book” Jane D. Eberwein writes on the importance of narration in a story, “”The writer’s personality,” or in this case the narrator’s, suffuses this form; so those who wish to analyze The Sketch Book must come to terms with Geoffrey Crayon as Irving’s representative. Not that Crayon narrates all these sketches… “The Spectre Bridegroom,” to a Swiss traveler in the kitchen of a Flemish inn” (154). Eberwein continues on and writes, “Even in those relatively few cases where he yields the narrator’s role to another of Irving’s personae, Crayon is the one who selects the story, frames it, and vouches to the reader for its interest” (154). Although the writer of the short stories