Rip Van Winkle

1
Rip Van Winkle

• A New Critical Approach and a (New) Historical
  Approach

2
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 Rips 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,
  ???
• -- Lost Horizon (1937, 1973)Shangri-La
• -- ???? (?? ???? ) http//big5.zhengjian.org/arti
  cles/2008/1/30/49772.html
• -- ????

3
Outline

• (1) A New Critical Approach Rips 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 Irvings contradictions

4
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

5
Rip Van Winkle Loss and Re-gaining of Rips
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 parta realm of mystery (with silence,
  strange peals, game and liquor//an escape from
  the original stage for performing his
  identities.)

6
Rip Van Winkle (2) Narrative frames (2) entry
into mystery

1. p. 4 from the present tense to the past tense
2. the villages 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?

7
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. 7
3. 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 facesall with beards, like on
   an old Flemish painting p. 7

8
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
• unaccustomed the other parts forming ones
  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)

9
Rip Van Winkle A New Critical Approach

• improvement(?) in the environment

Family "as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody" Nagging wife ?sonthe 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
10
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)
11
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
• Finds his Relatives and old acquaintances makes
  adjustment
• Gets confirmed by new authorities
• -- p. 11 self-important mans loss of attention
• -- the historians affirmation of Rip as well as
  Hudson
• 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.

12
(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 (DKs 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.

13
(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 DKs 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.

14
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 Irvings life), the
  historical unsaid,
• but not escapism.

15
(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)

16
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?

17
(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 (181215)
  and familiar tales (Rip van Winkle, The Legend of
  Sleepy Hollow).
• e.g. negative presentation of the revolutionon
  both personal and national levelswhich involves
  death.

18
The Time Before the War

19
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.' )

20
(4) Rip Van Winkle in National Context

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

21
(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.

22
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).

23
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)

24
Rip Van Winkle The Dutch Mythologized but
Displaced into the Past

25
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.

26
But Is Knickerbocker credible?

• Knickerbockers 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

27
The Stranger as an embodiment of the Dutch past

• The stranger (p. 9) His dress was of the
  antique Dutch fashiona cloth jerkin strapped
  round the waistseveral 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)

28
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)

29
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. (
  IrvingConspiracy of the Cocked Hats 1839)

30
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 Ichabods arrival.
• The manners and customs of Sleepy Hollows
  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

31
References

• ??????--????????http//www.novel.idv.tw/text/com
  ment_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.