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

Sketch Book” that is helpful in understanding what Irving was trying to accomplish in his story “The Spectre Bridegroom.”
“The Spectre Bridegroom” tells the story of a wealthy family, headed by Baron Von Landshort whose daughter is to marry a man chosen by her father. However, the man, Count Van Altenburg, is murdered on his way to the feast held for him and his future wife, giving his friend, Herman Von Starkenfaust the burden of having to tell his bride and her family that her future husband is dead. Before he can break the bad news to her family, the baron mistakes the man to be the bridegroom. Von Starkenfaust has no other option but to pretend to be the dead bridegroom since it’s too late to confess the truth. When he meets the bride for the first time, he immediately falls in love with her, forcing him to continue to pretend to be the dead bridegroom. He later on leaves the party and informs the bride’s father that the bridegroom has been dead all along leaving the family with the belief that they had feasted with a spectre. Toward the end of the story it is revealed that the bride has also fallen in love with the mysterious man and married him to the delight of her father who is relieved his daughter’s lover is not a ghost.
The main setting Irving chooses for the story is set in a castle in Germany, “On the summit of one of the heights of the Odenwald, a wild and romantic tract of Upper Germany that lies not far from the confluence of the Main and the Rhine, there stood many, many years since the castle of the Baron Von Landshort” (107).

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

sets the tone for the remainder of the story. This is a family who despite of their economic troubles are doing what they can to hold onto the past, whether it is by holding onto past wealth or old customs.
Narration is important in every story and this one is no exception.

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

found in “The Sketch Book” are all written by Irving, he uses different narrators to tell each of his stories. It can be assumed that Geoffrey Crayon is the narrator of this story since he narrates most of Irving’s stories in The Sketch Book, but that is not the case. By having a Swiss traveler narrate the story, the story can be seen as one that is not just a story but also a tale that can be passed down to many generations to come.
The main character in “The Spectre Bridegroom” is the baron’s daughter, whom the narrator fails to give her a name only referring to her with female pronouns, “by the time she was eighteen...” (108). Irving uses both direct and indirect characterization when writing about her character as evidenced in the beginning of the story where the narrator introduces the baron’s daughter writing, “The baron had but one child, a daughter, but Nature, when she grants one child, always compensates by making it a prodigy; and so it was with the daughter of the baron” (107). Irving continues on and writes, “By the time she was eighteen she could embroider to admiration… she could read without great difficulty… she had even made considerable proficiency in writing… (108). Here, Irving is telling the reader that the baron’s daughter is an only child while also letting the reader know that since most parents tend to view their only child as a “prodigy,” they consider any skills that they have to be great even if those skills are mundane. The skills that the baron’s daughter has aren’t skills that’ll do much in life for her, so marrying her off to another wealthy family seems to be her only recourse. This leads to the central plot of the story: her arranged marriage. She is being married off to a man she doesn’t know but is expected to marry anyway as is tradition during that time period. The baron prepares a feast for her and her future groom, however things don’t go according to plan saving her from potentially living an unhappy life. The bridegroom dies and so his friend travels to where the feast is being held to relay the bad news. By falling in love with Von Starkenfasut, the baron’s daughter can be viewed as someone who somewhat rebels since his family and her family didn’t get along, “Under any other circumstances the baron would have been inflexible, for he was tenacious of paternal authority and devoutly obstinate in all family feuds… and, though her husband was of a hostile house, yet, thank Heaven! He was not a goblin!” (118).
The central theme of Irving’s “The Spectre Bridegroom” is on love and marriage. Von Landshort’s daughter is to be married off to another wealthy family but tragedy strikes and instead she marries someone else forcing her father to accept their love and marriage and be content that his daughter didn’t marry a ghost or goblin. Irving’s use of literary devices such as setting, narration, and direct/indirect characterization of the story’s main character, the baron’s daughter, helps tell this love story and keep the reader immersed in the story. The analysis by both Jane D. Eberwein and Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky also help understand the literary techniques such as setting and narration that Irving uses. Eberwein focuses her work on the narration in Irving’s stories while Rubin-Dorsky focuses on the setting of his stories. Together, their works allow for a deeper understanding of how Irving uses these literary techniques and the effects they have on both the progression of the story and the reader.