Washington Irving
America in May 1819, with the series completing in September the following year. “Rip Van Winkle” was one of the two pieces that appeared in the fi rst installment. Of the success and instant fame he received on both sides of the Atlantic with the publication of The Sketch Book, Irving writes humbly: “I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with success, —anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do.” To his friend Brevoort he expresses his intended aesthetic goal: “I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our American writers at present. I have preferred addressing myself to the feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment.” On the success of his latest work, Irving traveled to Paris, returned to England, and, in search of a cure for an unknown illness that plagued his ankles and prevented him at times from walking, toured Germany. He later returned to England and published “Tales of a Traveler.” Soon after, in February 1826, Irving journeyed to Madrid, Spain, and began work on his famous biography of CHRISTOPHER C OLUMBUS, which was published in 1828. Warner considers this three-year period in Irving’s life to be his most productive, as he also wrote The Alhambra, The Conquest of Granada, and The Legends of the Conquest of Spain. These works came about through Irving’s access to primary sources and other documents, including Columbus’s journals. He returned to England when he received, and reluctantly accepted, an appointment as secretary of legation to the Court of St. James. In April 1830, the Royal Society of Literature awarded him a gold medal in honor of his literary works. He died shortly after the fi nal volume of his last work, a biography of his namesake, George Washington, was in press. He was buried overlooking Sleepy Hollow.
“Rip Van Winkle” (1819) On its most basic and straightforward level, Irving’s short story, taken from The Sketch Book, recounts
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the tale of a lovable henpecked husband named Rip Van Winkle who travels into the Kaatskill (Catskill) Mountains and sleeps for 20 years after having consumed the contents of the Dutch settler Hendrick Hudson’s flagon and witnessed figures resembling “an old Flemish painting” enjoying a game of ninepin. He hastens with his faithful companion, a dog named Wolf, to escape from the harping remonstrances of his wife. When he awakens and returns to the village, he discovers that his extended nap transpired during the Revolutionary War, his wife and dog are deceased, and his daughter has grown and married, with a family of her own. Irving complicates this fantastic tale of a sociable loafer with a propensity to “attend to anybody’s business but his own” by interrogating the notions of truth, history, and what may or may not be believed. The epigraph for “Rip Van Winkle” derives from a play entitled The Ordinary by the British playwright William Cartwright. In his selective reference to the play, Irving introduces readers to the idea that a person will keep truth “unto thylke day in which I creep into my sepulcher,” meaning that a person carries his or her own version of truth until death. In referencing Cartwright’s play, Irving preempts readers’ skepticism by turning the very notion of truth on its head. If each person carries his or her own sense of truth to the grave, then he or she cannot be persuaded to part with what he or she believes to be true, and this truth is not subject to interrogation or inspection. For Irving, then, truth is subjective. On a humorous note, Irving’s theme of the capricious nature of truth, that it exists for everyone but is not necessarily shared, explains the odd pairing of Dame Van Winkle and her husband. To him, the other members of the village, and his numerous friends and acquaintances, Rip Van Winkle is a “simple, good-natured man.” To Dame Van Winkle, his “termagant wife,” his reluctance to perform productive work for the farm has caused his estate to dwindle and fall into disrepair. The discord between husband and wife, representing two different notions of labor and value, are reflective, perhaps, of the cultural shifts America