Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle”

Lecture Notes

1.) Who has read this story before?  Where?  When?

2.) Introduction to Irving:

• The first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame
• First literary triumph was his History of New York (1809)
• Persona of Diedrich Knickerbocker
• An irreverent spoof of historical scholarship, salted with off-color comments
• Marked the beginning of the “Knickerbocker School” of New York literary satirists
• Flourished in New York in the first decades of the 1800’s
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820)
• First work by an American to receive wide international acclaim
• Made Irving a celebrity, praised in both America and England
• Included the two tales -- “Rip” and “Legend” -- that brought him his most enduring fame
• He set out to become a professional man of letters

3.) The Elements of Fiction:

• HANDOUT

4.) What makes the story an amusing story?  Why is it popular as a children’s story?

5.) What are we supposed “to get” out of this story?  (THEME)

• Brainstorm Themes -- satirizing passivity; pay attention to your own life; don’t be a slacker; don’t sleep life away; life passes lazy people by; life passes by quickly
• Political warning -- satire of politics, party leaders, voters not paying attention
• What does Irving satirize in the New America to which Rip returns?  What are the implications, for the story, of the references to historical events?
• Irving’s pervasive theme of mutability (change) -- “especially as localized in his portrayal of the bewildering and destructive rapidity of change in American life.”

6.) How is Irving “Romantic”?

• He was a transitional figure, exhibiting the literary ideals of both the 18th century (Neoclassicism) and the new age of Romanticism.
• His work reflected the shift in American literature from the rationalism of the 18th century to the sentimental romanticism of the 19th century

His neoclassic qualities:

• His early satirical writing had displayed a neoclassical pleasure in the comic qualities of life.
• His humor was often exaggerated, pun-ridden, and scornful of political liberalism.
• His emphasis on social and aesthetic norms, restraint, order, and intelligent wit.
• His relation to the 18th century tradition of the essay -- esp. Satire.

His romantic qualities:

• His taste for satire was mingled with a love of melancholy, of a mawkish, even morbid, world of sentiment.
• He was, like most of his writing, amiable, civilized, and gentlemanly, interested in moods and emotions rather than in the metaphysical speculation that became a characteristic of American romanticism
• Literary nationalism, his emphasis on American regional settings and character types
• Attraction to the sublime and the picturesque
• Desire “to escape from the commonplace realities of the present” and lose himself in the “shadowy grandeurs of the past” (vol. 1, pg. 626)
• Use of the supernatural and of Gothic suspense and horror
• Exploitation of folklore and legends

English -- vs. -- American:

• His writing was English as much as it was American, and it revealed a sense of the contrast between continental Europe and America that later was reflected in the work of Hawthorne and James
• He tended to find value in the PAST and in the traditions of the Old World
• He did not share the hopeful American vision of the New World as an Eden, free of the corrupt traditions of Europe

7.) Roots in German folklore:

• Nachtigal’s folktale – “Peter Klaus the Goatherd”
• A folktale tends to summarize the action, while Irving’s short story develops it.  (One way that he developed the story was to add more details about the protagonist’s wife.)
• He sacrificed the tragic undertones suggested in Nachtigal’s transcription of the folktale for his use of the humorous tone in the story.
• Do we think less of the story knowing of the existence of the folktale?  How important is evidence of an author’s originality in judging the success or failure of a literary work?
• Is there just cause for a Plagiarism charge?
• How does he make it an American story?

8.) The first short story?  The first “American” short story?

• Uses American settings, etc. -- not German, European.
• Writers learned from him that realistic details of rural life in America could be worked memorably into fiction.
• Verisimilitude / Romanticism -- vs. -- Realism / Local Color Fiction.

9.) The use of the “FRAME”:

• Why does he set up the Diedrich Knickerbocker authorship?
• Washington Irving (author) --> Geoffrey Crayon (frame narrator) --> Diedrich Knickerbocker (framework-story narrator) who is curious about the Dutch history of the province of New York.
• Who is really his audience?
• Why would he (humorously) assure readers of its accuracy?
• Why would he be mocking scholarly documentation?
• Why did he begin with them poem by Cartwright (an unidentified poet) and the cumbersome explanation of the origin of the tale in Diedrich Knickerbocker's papers?

10.) Feminist Criticism:

• Is Irving fundamentally an anti-feminist?
• Is there the theme of the rejection of women and of domesticity and domestication?
• Is the portrayal of Dame Van Winkle fair?  What about the portrayal of men, is it any better than of women?
• Dame Van Winkle represents the British Government = “petticoat government.”  When Rip wakes up, Dame Van Winkle is dead and the British Government has been defeated.  However, many things are the same although the people perceive them to be different.

11.) Mythological Criticism:

• This is “a tale of a man who deserted his wife for a twenty-years’ sleep and returned to find her (happily) dead.”  What elements in the story justify such a conclusion?
• The “Myth of the Runaway Male”
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces – the “myth of a life-enhancing return” -- is Rip a “hero”?

12.) Other American Responses to the Story:

• Why does Herman Melville refer to Rip as an “Archetypal Artist Figure”?
• Rip is sometimes viewed as a counter-hero (or an anti-hero), anti-Franklin-ian, who makes a success of failure.  Why or how is this important?

Relevant Page Numbers (NAAL)

Frame / Device – 980, 981, 992

Romantic Qualities – 980, 981, 982, 984, 985, 985, 985, 985, 985, 985, 986, 987, 990, 992

Magic – 981, 981, 982, 986, 987, 990

History / Folklore – 980, 981, 986

Irony – 980, 982, 982

Great Britain – 982, 983, 988, 989, 991

New United States of America – 988, 988, 988, 991

The War – 989, 989

Bad Marriage – 982, 983, 983, 984, 985

Bad Women – 983

Dead Wife – 990, 991

Bad Marriage = British Government – 991

Not Ben Franklin – 982, 983, 983, 984

Alone / Lonely Artist – 989, 991

Storyteller – 990, 991

Identity – 989