Rip Van Winkle

A New Critical Approach and a (New) Historical Approach

Starting Questions Do you like the story? Its Language? Humor? Anything

else? What could it possibly mean? What pattern(s) is there in the story? Have you found

any words repeated? How are the worlds before and after Rip’s sleep

different from each other? How do you compare this with the other popular texts on

time and space travels? -- e.g. Somewhere in Time; Kate and Leopold, 《胭脂扣》-- Lost Horizon (1937, 1973)—Shangri-La -- 黃梁一夢 ( 盧生 、呂洞賓 ）

http://big5.zhengjian.org/articles/2008/1/30/49772.html

-- 桃花源記

Outline

(1) A New Critical Approach –Rip’s Identities Lost from and Re-Written into History

(2) As a Realist/Historical Text (3) “RVW” in Historical Context – critical

of contemporary politics (4) the unsaid: Irving’s contradictions

Rip Van Winkle A New Critical Approach

Narrative elements (1): 3-part structure & plot

Beginning – Rip as a hen-pecked

husband; Middle – his venture

into Katskills; End – his return

Rip Van Winkle Loss and Re-gaining of Rip’s “Identities”

Narrative elements (2): characterization Rip – contradictory right from the start Beginning: easy-going but insistent in not doing

homework; helpful to others but no use to his family p. 4) • Identifies with his dog – p. 5

• Contemplates the landscape – 6 The middle part—a realm of mystery (with

silence, strange peals, game and liquor//an escape from the original stage for performing his identities.)

Rip Van Winkle (2) Narrative frames (2) –entry into mystery

1. p. 4: from the present tense to the past tense; 2. the village’s location -- the foot of the fairy

mountains. A village of “great antiquity.” 3. p. 6 –away from the human world: talking to the

dog and contemplating the landscape on a green knoll;

4. p. 6 – stranger – dress of antiquity to another time zone? (Or the haunting of Hendrick Hudson as the past?)

5. p. 7 – amphitheatre –another stage;6. p. 7 – Dutch alcohol sleep --back to the past?

Katskills Mt.: More Signs of Mystery and Antiquity

1) A stranger in an antique dress – p. 6

2) long rolling peals, like distant thunder – p. 73) silence, “something strange and

incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity.”

4) The nine-pins game on the amphitheatre.

5) Their “peculiar” faces—all with beards, like on an old Flemish painting p. 7

Rip Van Winkle Rip: Loss of Identities

After – changes: (of signs for his identities)1. External things: gun rusted, dog (alter ego) gone, and the

amphitheatre; mountain streams(p. 8) 2. Social and Geographic Changes: a. a crowd of new faces

in the village, strange children (more next page); b. the village altered; the inn also different p. 9 3. Changes of Family and Acquaintances– the others to

whom the self relates. 4. Changes of Self: the beard the one who is like him: 1. unaccustomed the other parts forming one’s identity:

fashions of clothing; his village, and his own house. a double "I'm not myself ... I can't tell what's my

name, or who I am!" (p. 10)

Rip Van Winkle A New Critical Approach

improvement(?) in the environment

Family "as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody"

Nagging wife

son—the same;

Judith Gardenier "fresh comely woman" with a child.

His wife dies.

(The shrewd tamed)

Vedder

Brommel: school master

(Authorities gone –but…)

-- dead

-- In congress

Rip Van Winkle A New Critical Approach

Narrative elements (3): political changes

perpetual club of the sages (p. 8)

There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it"

RVW: easy going, not taking sides.

"A tory! ... a spy! a Refugee! hustle him! away with him!" (14)

Rip Van Winkle Identity re-gained (authenticated) and written into History

Narrative elements (4): ending (climax and solution) Identity re – gained or re-written into history

1. Finds his Relatives and old acquaintances; makes adjustment

2. Gets confirmed by new authorities: -- p. 11 self-important man’s loss of attention;

-- the historian’s affirmation of Rip as well as Hudson

3. Becomes “a history” himself in two senses:

-- does nothing but tells stories;

-- has many versions of his story until it is settled down to the present one.

(2) Rip Van Winkle As a Realist/Historical Text

With multiple frame for Rip/reader to enter the mysterious center step by step.

The outmost frames (DK’s head notes and end notes) show attempts to establish credibility which are either contradictory (beginning) or overdone.

The other frames lead Rip and the readers in the direction of the non-human and fantastic.

(2) Rip Van Winkle Narrative frames (1) --contradictory

self-contradictory attempts at establishing credibility? Beginning –

• Knickerbocker's published history-- is known for its "scrupulous accuracy.“ (pp. 3)

• His errors and follies remembered; his imprint on New-Year cakes (“ a chance for immortality).

Ending –DK’s claim of accuracy – belief in story and storytelling

• K an I-witness, suspicion refuted by the end note.

• --Dutch area-- subject to marvellous events and appearances; there are stranger stories.

Rip Van Winkle in Context: Washington Irving &

the United States

Any ideas? It embodies historical

changes (in literature, in the U.S. history and in Irving’s life), the historical “unsaid,”

but not escapism.

(3) “Rip Van Winkle” in Literary and Historical Contexts

Significant in U.S. Literary history (the first famous American story), national identity.

Adding national colors (landscape, history, immigrants) to a German and Dutch folklore;

“A national fantasy of escape” from responsibility (Rust 171)

“Rip Van Winkle” in Literary Context -- the tale & essay-sketch tradition romance

Tale dramatic incident as formal skeleton--the long sleep and astonished waking.

The essay-sketch tradition the subtly detailed descriptions of place which dominate the first two paragraphs

Combined into a modern short-story form, the emergence of American Romantic nationalism (combining myth and realism romance). (Cf. Evans)

but is it a story of escape or the U.S. for all?

(3) Irving as a critic of US nation Jefferson: “We have called by different names brethren of

the same principle. We are all Republicans,we are all Federalists” (‘First Inaugural Address)

Irving as a critical alternative witness to American Independence and Jeffersonian optimism

his critique conveyed in neglected writings (his contributions to the Analectic Magazine (1812–15) and familiar tales (Rip van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow).

e.g. negative presentation of the revolution—on both personal and national levels—which involves death.

The Time Before the War

“Rip Van Winkle” (1819) in U.S. Context; set sometime in between 1750 and 1799A Time of Displacement and Tensions

Before the Revolutionary war, NY is slow-pace and rural.

(1) After 1783 the influx of New Englanders, also called Yankees, became a torrent that almost submerged the small Dutch settlements. At that time more people immigrated to New York from New England than from anywhere else in the world. By 1820 people joked that New York was becoming a colony of New England.

(2) After 1779 – the development of ‘Democracy’ and capitalism not without conflicts: Republicans had accused Federalists of being crypto royalists or unabashed "Tories" ("Washington Irving: `Rip Van Winkle.'“ )

(4) “Rip Van Winkle” in National Context

My argument: after considering the historical details, the text can be read as an embodiment of Irving’s contradictory views to changes, which he resists but has to accept. (Cf. Blakemore)

(3) RVW/Irving in Historical Context: Contradictions

Escaped from the States for financial reasons;

Implied criticism of the new nation and its democracy, which, however, he had to embrace.

Contradictory attempts to justify his escape to England or to a European mythic past.

“Rip Van Winkle” (1819) in Context Washington Irving (1783-1859) 

One with desultory interests in: • the theater,• association with literary-

minded young men in New York,

• and travel (including several trips up the Hudson and a two-year excursion to Europe in 1804 and 1805).

“Rip Van Winkle” (1819) in Context Washington Irving

His jobs: • A practicing attorney for only a few years• 1810 -- joined two of his brothers in the hardware

business. • Late1812 -- the editor of the Analectic Magazine• Late 1814 -- an officer in the militia and to serve in the

War of 1812. • In 1815 -- went to England to help with the failing family

business. • 1815 – 1832; 1842 - 1846 – remained abroad•1829 -1832 -- served as secretary to the American

Legation in London.• In 1842 -1846 -- he was appointed U.S. Minister to Spain

• How about 1815 to 1829? (Rust, Blakemore)

“Rip Van Winkle” –The Dutch Mythologized but Displaced into the Past

The Dutch

“though these folks were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. Nothing interrupted the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of thunder.”

But – Is Knickerbocker credible?

Knickerbocker’s credibility: A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, with Knickerbocker named as the author. This work is blatantly satirical, and presents Knickerbocker as humorously illogical, even foolish. New Yorker of Dutch descent

Consider the frames of “RVW”

The Stranger as an embodiment of the Dutch past

The stranger (p. 9): “His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion—a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist—several pair of breeches, the outer one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the sides, and bunches at the knees.” Hendrick Hudson (the 1st explorer of Hudson river)

The Dutch as a National Haunted

“For a country that came into cultural self-awareness in an era of Romanticism, a country perennially self-conscious about a perceived lack of historical depth, hauntedness has proven perversely attractive as a form of cultural memory, able to weave historical sense out of shadows and to both express and displace the social anxieties inherent in a nation built on colonialist dispossession and largely composed of strangers.”

(Richardson 37)

Irving on Romance vs. politics

“Poetry and romance received a fatal blow at the overthrow of the ancient Dutch dynasty, and have ever since been gradually withering under the growing domination of the Yankees….But poetry and romance still live unseen among us, or seen only by the enlightened few, who are able to contemplate this city and its environs through the medium of tradition, and clothed with the associations of foregone ages.” ( Irving“Conspiracy of the Cocked Hats” 1839)

The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod (a New England teacher)--expelled from Sleepy Hollow by the apparition of the headless horseman.

Katrina marries Brom Bones, and life goes on as before Ichabod’s arrival.

The manners and customs of Sleepy Hollow’s inhabitants “remain fixed, while the great torrent of emigration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved”

References: 《李伯大夢》導讀 -- 真與假的模糊地帶 http://www.novel.idv.tw/text/

comment_3.asp "Family Resemblances: The Text and Contexts of 'Rip Van Winkle.'" Blakemore, Steven. "Family Resemblances: The Text and Contexts of 'Rip Van

Winkle.'" Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 187-207. Rust, Richard D. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 74: American Short-

Story Writers Before 1880. Ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel, et al, Bowling Green State University. The Gale Group, 1988. pp. 171-188.

Evans, Walter. “Rip Van Winkle: Overview.” Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st ed., edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994

"Washington Irving: `Rip Van Winkle.'“ Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them, Volume 1: Ancient Times to the American and French Revolutions (Prehistory-1790s). Ed. Joyce Moss and George Wilson, Gale Research, 1997.

Richardson, Judith. “THE GHOSTING OF THE HUDSON VALLEY DUTCH.” Going Dutch : the Dutch Presence in America, 1609-2009Eds. Goodfriend, Joyce D.; Schmidt, Benjamin.; Stott, Annette. Leiden, Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.