The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow Research Paper

Social class plays a big role in American writing as it has been used by authors for several thousand years. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Katrina Van Tassel chooses Bromm Bones over Ichabod Crane because Bones is of a higher social class. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy eventually chooses Tom over Jay Gatsby because she doesn’t want to live in a lifestyle of “New Money”. Barn Burning by William Faulkner is another example of social class by the reader being able to see how people of a lower social class live their lives. Social class is also displayed in movies, such as Forrest Gump, where it shows how Forrest deals with being an outsider based on his social status. In these examples, the creators indicate that social class is based off of a

As the years have gone by, social classes have been developed in American culture as a way to categorize Americans into a certain group of people based on their wealth and power. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, readers see social classes used when Ichabod Crane—a lower-class school teacher—is attempting to court Katrina Van Tassel, who is described as the attractive daughter of a wealthy farmer. In the story, Irving writes that, “Katrina Van Tassel [was] the daughter and only child of a substantial Dutch farmer” (Irving 13). Katrina Van Tassel is desired by most men in Sleepy Hollow, but she ultimately decides to marry a man who is not as intelligent as Ichabod Crane but a man of a higher social class instead. This shows how she only cared for social status and did not want a man that came from both poverty and was an

Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, social class was the most prominent it had ever been. People enjoyed basing their peers on how much money and power they had. Fitzgerald conveys social structure in the novel by using “Old Money” versus “New Money.” The main conflict in the novel is that Daisy Buchanan has to choose between her husband Tom—an athletic, wealthy, socialite—or Jay Gatsby— a man who has ultimately become wealthy from engaging in the crime of bootlegging. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes of Daisy that , “[i]n June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before” (Fitzgerald 40). The reader sees that Daisy no longer loves Tom, and she wants to be with Gatsby; however, she does not want to live in a lifestyle of “New Money” where Gatsby could lose all of his fortune one day and not be able to provide for her anymore. Daisy would rather be of a higher social class than be with her first love. This happened regularly in the 1900s and still happens well into modern times as people want to be secure in life rather than