Rip Van Winkle

“Every change of season, every change of weather, indeed, every hour of the day, produces some change in the magical hues and shapes of these mountains, and they are regarded by all the good wives, far and near, as perfect barometers. When the weather is fair and settled, they are clothed in blue and purple, and print their bold outlines on the clear evening sky; but sometimes, when the rest of the landscape is cloudless, they will gather a hood of gray vapors about their summits, which, in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory.” 

The Catskills are an ethereal wonderland whose natural majesty draws Rip further and further into the wilderness. Hence, Dame Van Winkle hates them as a source of distraction—she is unlike some idealized version of a “good wife” who could use the mountains to predict the weather. 

“It is a little village, of great antiquity, having been founded by some of the Dutch colonists; in the early times of the province, just about the beginning of the government of the good Peter Stuyvesant, (may he rest in peace!) and there were some of the houses of the original settlers standing within a few years, built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland, having latticed windows and gable fronts, surmounted with weather-cocks.”

This picturesque town on the Hudson is untethered to time and even to place—it feels Old World and connects the United States to a heritage more ancient and distant than the British Empire. 

“A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing, and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.”

A “termagant” is a shrewish and violent woman—that Rip may benefit from his wife’s ill temper is a typical example of the light-heartedly misogynist humor Irving often employs. 

“The great error in Rip’s composition was an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labor [...] In a word Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.” 

Rip is the story’s hero and is in many ways a sympathetic character, but Irving makes no qualms about underlining how deeply Rip fails his family. 

“He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far below him, moving on its silent but majestic course, with the reflection of a purple cloud, or the sail of a lagging bark, here and there sleeping on its glassy bosom, and at last losing itself in the blue highlands.”

Myths often feature a place of great natural beauty, far from human society and otherworldly in its splendor—a literary device called a locus amoenus, (Latin for “lovely place”). Supernatural activity is especially likely to happen here. 

“Their visages, too, were peculiar: one had a large beard, broad face, and small piggish eyes: the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and colors.”

Despite being historical figures, Henry Hudson and the crew of the Half Moon have a distinctly fairy-tale feel to their appearance. Rip’s drunkenness might account for their distorted features. 

“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.”

This passage tells us we are firmly in the realm of the supernatural. The great heights of the mountain are reminiscent of Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, and the thunder recalls that of Zeus.

“He now suspected that the grave roysterers of the mountain had put a trick upon him and, having dosed him with liquor, had robbed him of his gun.”

Rip is trying to be rational in the face of the supernatural, a common theme in Romantic literature. For now, the reader is with him; did this man just get drunk and fall asleep in the mountains, where some local mischief-makers took advantage of him (a “roysterer” is a partier)?

“Surely this was his native village, which he had left just one day before. There stood the Kaatskill mountains—there ran the silver Hudson at a distance—there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been […]”

Rip is comparing human civilization, which is in a constant state of flux, to the landscape, which changes much more slowly. 

“A large rickety wooden building stood in its place […] and over the door was painted, “the Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.” Instead of the great tree that used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole […] from it was fluttering a flag, on which was a singular assemblage of starts and stripes—this was all strange and incomprehensible.”

The closeness to nature is gone; the New World has replaced it with industry and politics. Seeing the portrait go from King George to George Washington creates dramatic irony—a literary device where the reader knows more than a character. In this case, we understand the time shift that has occurred.

“The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.”

Because Rip’s identity within the community no longer exists, he is rudderless. Despite his previous disdain for the rules society put in place for him, he now finds himself lost without them.

“Peter was the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood.”

Like Rip, Peter Vanderdonk is a repository of the legends of the area: it is significant that it is he, not an expert historian, who saves the day.

“To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election.”

Rip’s tale ends by moving us out of the realm of the fantastic and back into reality, and the mundane story of the first presidential election.