AML 4213: Journeys to America
Spring 2012

Irving 

 
Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is the story I start my “American Romanticism” course with (Melville, Poe, Dickinson, etc.).  It, on the one hand, captures the anxieties of the Early National Period (1776-1820 or so) about what history “means”; and on the other hand, shows a clear fascination with the escape-from-civilization (or bourgeois society, or marrage!) that is the hallmark of the American Romantics who priviledge the “self” and interiority.

The external e-text link will provide you a quick background of Irving.



But Here are Some Additional Background Points:

1. The Knickerbocker pseudonym was in part just a convention, a sort of teasing game with the audience (everybody in the know knew Irving wrote the story).  But it also serves as a mask, distancing Irving for responsibility of authorship.  Why? Well, Irving became the first internationally recognized American (fiction) writer, but it was very difficult to be an artist/writer in America and succeed financially at this time.  The absence of a copyright law in the U.S. made it cheaper to make copies of British authors (without paying British authors) than to pay U.S. authors, and so very few fiction writers thought of such as a career (Brown tried, really hard, to make a career as a novelist).

2. Pursuing a profession that wasn’t a profession was all the more challenging in a culture that celebrated individualism, big-time.  Irving is writing in the Jacksonian Era (from the name of the Indian-fighting, "heroic," populist President of the period, elected in 1823): the masculine get-ahead, materialistic ethos prevailed (think of Jackson as being a cross between George W. Bush and Daniel Boone!).  No parent would endorse their child pursuing “literature,” and thus such was seen as an idle endeavor … and thus, to some extent, Rip's mountain reverie is about the idleness of the imagination.

Levels of Meaning, from Simple to Complex:

1. Droll supernatural tale, based upon Dutch/German folktales

--folksy description

--amiable narrator: chatty with reader, aloof from material

--smooth, easy style

2. Story of masculine independence/escape/evasion from domestic/bourgeois world of responsibility

--but does he seem masculine?

--note the martial character of forebears

--declension: patriarchal estate has dwindled/decayed

--escape from obligation to fulfill patriarchal role

--regressive: plays with children

--disturbing description of Dame V.W.: no subject position for female reader; stereotype of a shrew allows us to sympathize with Rip

3. Deeper psychological/symbolic meaning

--sleep/stupor in sublime, mysterious mountains = wild id-like scene vs. superego of wife?

--does R's masculinity briefly resurge in the mountains/ cosmic masculine sport: like football watching on weekends

--or are those strange fellows stern/repressed melancholic father-figures: hyper-patriarchal/ mock-patriarchal: no pleasure in all male realm without women?

--when R wakes up, he is in the second childhood of senility--too old for conjugal relations

4.  Independence from "petticoat" government parallels independence from Britain

--revolutionary change: but no progress/instead deterioration

--before revolution: pre-political

--after revolution: pointless political parties/ pointless debate (remember the newspapers?)

--no connection with past: dislocation/disorientation/ past devalued/ no stability

--at end, Rip gets stuck in repeating his story over and over

--perhaps revolution is meaningless!!!

5. Post-script: Deeper mythic?

--primal Garden of Eden scene/ snake?

--prelapsarian sexuality too powerful/dangerous?
--post-Garden gender relations gone awry in some fashion: shrew/non-erotic wife, regressive Rip
--ending of story suggests some anxiety about pure sexuality and its power?

A Professorial Summation

Irving seems to be playing infantile retreat/womb-like security of the mountain hills off of "maturing" into history/change. But both are found wanting—Rip is, indeed, immature, etc.; and history turns out to be bickering. It is almost as if Irving cannot conceive of history as something that people make. You're either in stasis (the town before the Revolution), evade history (Rip in the hills), or history just "happens" (you "wake up" and George Washington has replaced King George). Consider the postscript as well: static Garden of Eden (sort of) that seems sublime, but then change happens (gourds broken) and catastrophe follows.

Rip deserts/evades his family, just as the new "America" seeks to reject the Old World. These moments of separation, of evading genealogical responsibility (dismembered mountain: strange faded patriarchal ghost men), lead to crises of identity—the town is disunified after Revolution, and Rip can’t recognize himself (his alienation when he sees his son passage). Those who are not "making" history often retreat into regressive memories of the glories of the past—the ghost men are the perfect symbol of the ghostly power/faded grandeur of the past. You try to tap into that power, but there is no real power; you just sink into reverie.

Irving is neither happy with the ineffectual (impotent) Rip nor happy with the violence of history. Recall the story of "Legend of Sleepy Hollow": there Irving is posing the same impossible choice—between spineless, weak, non-sexy schoolteacher and violent/chaotic Brom Bones. Things in Irving tend to be either weak, cozy, sentimental, evasive, infantile, static, etc., or violent, turbulent, alienating, powerful, and potent but pointlessly so.

RIP is, incidentally, part of a tradition of U.S. male narratives in which the white male character flees to the woods. Rip just takes his gun and his dog; but in Last of the Mohicans, Huck Finn, Mel Gibson/D. Glover films, Miami Vice (“urban jungle”) TV series—the white character goes with a racially other/different character to sport in the woods and engage in the male heroics of shooting guns. Of course, you also rightly call such heroics infantile immaturity; a refusal to grow up into adult sexuality and responsibilities.

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