Rip Van Winkle Washington Irving

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Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, is the story of Rip Van Winkle, a seemingly lazy man, prone to habitual drunkenness who wanders into the mountains to escape the tyranny of his nagging wife Dame Van Winkle. During his alleged hunting trip, he meets with a mystical band of creatures “dressed in a quaint, outlandish fashion” ( (Irving p 476). Upon the encounter, he is offered a flagon of beverage of mysterious nature, which he consumes most eagerly and then falls into an alcoholic induced slumber. Rip awakens to find himself in a strange and confusing new world, which is both familiar and unfamiliar to him. He returns to his tiny village to find that new faces have replaced the old familiar ones. The house he once lived in has fallen into disrepair and his loved ones are nowhere to be found. Even the inn where he spent many an evening is no longer the same. Where there was once a portrait of King George, a new portrait of another George, this one named Washington, hangs in its place. The old familiar British flag has been replaced by a strange new flag with an “assemblage of stars and stripes” (Irving p 478). In what seems like at first like a fable, Rip Van Winkle, is actually an allegory of the American Revolution. Irving uses creative symbolism throughout the story to portray America before and after the Revolutionary War. Rip is representative of the American people, Dame Van Winkle shows qualities of King George and British rule and the townspeople represent the change in the American people.
The character of Rip portrayed the image that most British people had of Americans. Rip “has allowed his farm to fall under rack and ruin, and he does little to provide for a large and growing family” (Ferguson p 529-530). He is port...

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...rew of freedom” and then finding his “place back in the fold, sober with self-knowledge” and granting his “fellow townsfolk a connection to their colonial past (Wyman p 220).”

Works Cited

Beidler, Philip. "America's Fairy Tale." Fairy Tale Review (2008): 19-30. Web.
Catalano, Susan. "Henpecked to Heroism: Placing Rip Van WInkle and Francis Macomber In the American Renegade Tradition." Hemingway Review 17.2 (1998): 111-117. Web.
Ferguson, Robert A. "Rip Van Winkle and the Generational Divide in American Culture." Early American Literature (2006): 529-544. Web.
Irving, Washington. The Norton Anthology American Literature. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2013. Print.
Wyman, Sarah. "Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle: A Dangerous Critique of a New Nation." ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews Vol 23 no 4 (2010): 216-222. Web.

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