IntroductionIt is interesting that American folklore and myth, as with ancient mythologies, are based on realities. The characters, situations, and fantastic scenes in mythology seem to be unreal, but they depend upon needs to explain something natural or a part of the culture and era. This is very clearly seen in Washington Irving’s classic story, “Rip Van Winkle,” which is as purely American a myth or legend as may be found. The story is supernatural and elements of the impossible are foundations of it, but these only add to the meaning the author seeks to convey. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Washington Irving combines remarkable characters and extremely mysterious events in a landscape that is powerfully historical and real, and to comment on how the most important movements of an era may be lost or missed by the careless person.
Discussion
The effect of Irving’s story and its power as American myth cannot be in place without the author’s use of an actual time and place. By setting Rip’s story in a village near the Catskill Mountains, and by having the events occur before and after the Revolutionary War, Irving creates a fable founded on reality. All of this adds vital weight to the tale being told, just as the environment goes to the essential point of the legend. It begins in an “innocent” way, as fables do: “There lived…while the country was yet a province of Great Britain, a simple good-natured fellow” (Irving 10). What is critical here is the casual reference to the society and government, which is powerfully reinforced later, as Rip learns: “How that there had been a revolutionary war – that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England” (34). By maintaining the reality of history, then, Irving may use the unreal to make his point.
Secondly, Irving’s characters are both ordinary and unreal. Rip himself is not all that strange, but he is a kind of caricature. He represents all men who are agreeable, lazy, and happy to let life take its course without being much interested in anything but their comfort. Dame Van Winkle is also a caricature of a nagging wife, but the supernatural is present in the men Rip encounters in the woods. Everything about them is strange, from their silence to their appearance and clothing: “The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting” (21). The clear idea is that these are ghosts, if harmless ones, and the fact that their company leads Rip to drink and sleep adds to the mystery of them, just as there is no trace of them again in the tale.
Finally, and because of the encounter with the Dutch ghosts of the past, a magical and impossible series of events occurs. Rip, on waking and returning to the village, cannot begin to understand why nothing is familiar to him: “His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched” (26-27). He knows it is his village, yet all he sees are strangers. Even more mysterious is how Van Winkle, still in shock, confronts a more disturbing fact: “Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up the mountain” (31). In the middle of the “real” and ordinary village, magical and mysterious events have great impact, as Rip begins to understand the mysterious possibility of his having slept through two decades.
Conclusion
The qualities of real history, strange characters, and even stranger events in “Rip Van Winkle” create an actual myth or fable, and with a purpose common to most myths and legends. There is a kind of moral lesson here, and because the hero, by virtue of a careless and lazy nature, misses one of the most important events of Western history, the American Revolutionary War.
Irving does not punish Rip for his laziness, except in the sad reality of how what a person allows himself to miss may never be known again. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” then combines remarkable characters and supernatural, mysterious events in a landscape that is both historical and real, and Irving does this to comment on how the most important movements of an era may be lost or missed by a careless person.
- Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle.” 2009. Web. 11 Jan. 2016.
