Introduction
Washington Irving was a nostalgic man in whom a touch of Rip Van Winkle persisted. Like Rip, he was away from home for many years. He was in the earlier years of a seventeen-year sojourn in England when he wrote The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1920) with its two narrative masterpieces, this story and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
A conservative who enjoyed the old ways, Irving wrote best when he juxtaposed old and new, tradition and change. “Sir Walter Scott encouraged him to rummage in European folklore. Both of the famous stories in The Sketch Book are German tales Irving adapted them to create a uniquely American fiction”. (Myers, 228) Whereas earlier American imitators of European romances and gothic horror stories had suffered from the lack of convincing settings in a land without ancient abbeys and castles, “Irving realized the potential inherent in the Hudson River Valley, only a day’s journey from New York but teeming with romantic possibilities and local customs that, although they did not date from medieval times, but only two centuries back”. (Roth, 121)
In “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving seized on the venerable theme of the henpecked husband who turns the tables on his tyrannical wife, a feat Rip achieves by simply outlasting her—with a bit of preternatural help from the crew of Hudson’s Half Moon. “Rip merely wishes a leisurely, casual, convivial life, but his wife calls him home from the congenial mood of the inn and lectures him in bed at night”. (Hedges, 164) “Irving never, however, permits Dame Van Winkle’s point of view to obtrude; she does not speak in the story, and Irving elicits no sympathy for her. She is the enemy, to a degree because she embodies a whole culture which is completely different to Rip’s values: that of the tidy, thrifty, ambitious Dutch”. (Myers, 232)
Despite the story’s German source and its setting in a Dutch-American community, Irving domesticates his material very successfully. “First, he skillfully captures the beauty of a noticeably American region. For example in which the mountains become the setting for fantasy is sandwiched between two thicker slices of late eighteenth-century American village reality. By the very act of passing over a indication of an event in American history, the story draws attention to it”. (Wagenknecht, 84) “Rip returns to find people talking of the heroes of the late war, the new form of government, and national political parties”. (Roth, 123)
“Rip has paid heavily for his secure leisure, for he has lost what should have been the years of his mature vigor and all occasion to contribute in the great events of his lifetime”. (Hedges, 171) While loving freedom, Rip placidly endured the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle and King George and has escaped playing any role in the forging of American liberty. He has avoided the tribulations of family life by losing all title as husband and becoming dependent on his daughter, while he has sloughed off his responsibilities as a patriot by choosing “overnight” status as a senior citizen.
His easygoing philosophy is completely at odds with that of the great architects of American freedom, including Benjamin Franklin, whose almanac Poor Richard’s (first issued in 1732) stands at a polar opposite to Rip’s sluggishness. Irving even uses Franklin’s idiom to describe Rip, who “would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.” Rip would also rather starve himself of any satisfaction for accomplishment such as that permeating Franklin’s much-admired Autobiography (1771-1788).
The other Founding Fathers prominent in the story is George Washington, whose image has replaced that of King George in front of the new hotel. By virtue of exchanging the life of a country gentleman for the dangers and deprivations of military service in wartime, Washington became “the Father of his country,” while Rip’s children have in effect grown up fatherless. “After the war, Washington, almost about Rip’s age, did not go back into the past but accepted eight years of further duty as president”. (Roth, 125)
Irving, named for Washington, was, like Rip, a man who spent much of his life telling stories, but the one he labored at most diligently through his late years was his five-volume biography of Washington, the man after whom neither Rip nor his creator could pattern himself. In Rip, Irving created a character whom the reader can envy—but only by ignoring the implicit reminders of a far nobler type of American.
Style and Technique
Irving erected an elaborate facade for the book in which this story first appeared. Purporting to be the work of “Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman,” The Sketch Book featured primarily literary “sketches” of the type popularized by Joseph Addison a century earlier and influenced writers as late as Charles Dickens. “Irving’s sketches are mostly travel essays of an American in England, which are written in an elegant style, well-bred manner deliberate to appeal to the English gentleman as well as his American readers. This is the reason for which Irving became the first American literary man widely read abroad”. (Myers, 237)
Irving further distanced himself from his narrative by means of a headnote alleging the story to be a posthumously discovered work of “Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old gentleman of New York” and a postscript to the effect that Knickerbocker himself had it from a “German superstition,” though Irving more or less retracts this suggestion by including a note reputed to be Knickerbocker’s own in which the old gentleman claims to have talked with the real Rip Van Winkle himself.
This sort of elaborate hocus-pocus was common in American fiction up to about the middle of the nineteenth century, and readers may compare Irving’s frame for this story with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lengthy Customhouse essay at the head of The Scarlet Letter (1850). “Both works have a desire for the freedom from any obligation to respect prosaic everyday life and for an air of authenticity these writers seemed to feel readers of the time required”. (Roth, 126) Unlike Hawthorne, however, Irving does not aspire to profundity, and his style is much more colloquial and familiar.
The dialogue is extremely simple and straightforward, and the descriptions, while effective, are rather understated. Irving’s simplicity, which has helped make his tales enduringly popular school texts, is somewhat deceptive, for although Irving is not an ambitious artist, he has an artful way of suggesting more than he seems to say. “The allusions to Franklin and Washington create the standards of responsibility and achievements against which Rip’s withdrawal from responsibility is to be measured”. (Wagenknecht, 80) Unlike his greatest American contemporary in fiction, James Fenimore Cooper, Irving seldom overwrites. By describing his mountaineers very little and keeping them absolutely silent, he creates the desired atmosphere of enchantment. He understands the value of describing Dame Van Winkle indirectly through her effect on Rip.
Conclusion
In a century of writers always poised to spin great webs of words, Irving demonstrates the virtues of an economical and unpretentious style. For all its derivative nature, simplicity, and modest statement, “Rip Van Winkle” achieves universal significance. It depicts the pastoral contentment yearned for in a society aware of its own increasing complexity but shows this peace to be purchased at the expense of the protagonist’s full manhood and maturity. With considerable justification, “Rip Van Winkle” has been called the first successful American short story.
Works Cited
Myers, Andrew B., Ed. A Century of Commentary on the Works of Washington Irving. New York: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1976: 228-237.
Roth, Martin. Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976: 121-126.
Hedges, William L. Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802-1832. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965: 164-171.
Wagenknecht, E. Washington Irving: Moderation Displayed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962: 80-85.