American Romanticism

Prof. Bruce A. Harvey

INTERPRETING IRVING'S "RIP VAN WINKLE"

Background

--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 also a mask:  it distances Irving from responsibility for the story

--Irving became the 1st internationally recognized American writer

--but very difficult to be an artist/writer in America and succeed financially at this time

--no 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

--Jacksonian (from the name of the Indian-fighting, "heroic," populist President of the period, elected in 1823) America: get ahead, materialistic, Franklinesque spirit (penny saved/penny earned)

--fear of imaginative as idle pursuit

--no parent would want their son/daughter to go into literature

--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

--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?

--above seems too Freudian: then think of what "Legend of Sleepy Hallow" is about?

--Ichabod Crane: weak, timorous individual contending with Brom Bones, figure of virility, for American Dutch maiden

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, potent but pointlessly so. 

The story is "Romantic" insofar as it juxtaposes the mundane, squabbling, domestic/bourgeois world (our day-to-day lives) against the more sublime, turbulent realm in the mountains and in the postscript.  Irving recognizes, however, that the two realms can't really be united.  Emerson and Thoreau try to connect the realm of deep interiority/consciousness or cosmic consciousness to our daily lives; they seem to believe, optimistically, that we are gods in ruin and could become godlike if we but quelled our petty thoughts and that wounds (Thoreau) or physical subjection (slavery in Emerson's journal passage) become irrelevant when you tap into the inward infinite resources of being.  Irving in effect says: sure, go follow your desire in the deep woods, but then you come back senile.  Melville in effect says: sure, get lost in interiority, but then you become solipsistic as does Bartleby.

”Wakefield,” “Bartleby,” and “RIP” in the Course Sequence

--The transcendental epiphany/quest for sublimity (Emerson’s vertical ascension into transparent eyeball ‘seeing’ in which ‘mean egotism vanishes’) has no content. You can’t really narrate such moments of pure euphoria.

--U.S. geographical non-social boundlessness of “the West” (or simply “the woods”) different from maximum social space--i.e. “storied” space--of Europe (in the 19th century, that is).

--DeTocqueville speaks of isolation of Americans (disconnected from previous generations) = problem of how you narrate a story when family dynamic not involved.

--The above three factors (craving for pure transcendental moment or pure desire without content or a pure feeling of power--“I am All,” Emerson says!; boundlessness; and isolation) lead many male U.S. authors to be fascinated by characters that refuse to become part of a family or social narrative.

--Most of our lives are spent making our “narrative” (our intents, motivations, and so on) mesh with others’ “narratives”; but Wakefield steps outside the narrative of his own life; RIP flees to the mountains; and Bartleby refuses to become an eccentric/stereotypical part of corporate America.

--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.

--All three stories, curiously, become a little self-conscious about narration itself on a meta level: “Wakefield” begins with a sentence that reminds us of narrative’s fictiveness (Hawthorne claims to have read the story in an old magazine etc); RIP begins with Irving creating a pen-name stand-in telling a quaint story; “Bartleby” is loaded with puns about texts, stationary, etc.—culminating in the “Dead Letter Office.” It’s as if each author wants to simultaneously immerse you in a narrative text, a story, but also wants you to step outside the story and see it is just a story. All three, in essence, seem distrustful of being imprisoned by bourgeois narrative structures.