Themes in Rip Van Winkle

Upon his introduction, Nicholas Vedder was described at length, using language that tied him closely to the preceding image of the Catskill mountains. When Rip returns to the village, however, the surrounding mountains are unchanged—”every hill and dale precisely as it had always been”—and Vedder has vanished completely, reinforcing themes of human insignificance and transience as compared to the natural world.

This latter half of “Rip Van Winkle” combines the inn’s conflation of George III and George Washington with Rip’s own momentary loss of self to show how difficult it can be to place oneself in a political and social context. In this moment, Rip stands in for the rural American everyman, unsure of his place in a new landscape that demands active engagement from its inhabitants.

Mythological traditions of sleeping kings hidden in mountains are prevalent throughout Europe. These traditions frequently include promises of the kings’ eventual return to their countries. The United States is no longer under the sway of a monarchy, but Hudson is fulfilling the role of an attentive ruler, watching with “a guardian eye” over the land he mapped for settlement. By incorporating this European tradition into “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving is elevating the mythology of the United States the the same level as that of more firmly established countries. He is also implying for the US a longevity that will be comparable to that of European empires.

By giving life to this area of nature that surrounds the relatively peaceful town the author gives the mountains a mystical aura. Doing this sets a magical tone early on in the story, before the reader enters the forest. Irving will continue to personify the natural environment—the mountains, the river—as “lordly” throughout “Rip Van Winkle.” A common theme in Romantic literature is the relative smallness of the individual contrasting with the unknowable vastness of nature, with the latter held to be inherently superior.

Despite the revolution and the political investment that the inhabitants exhibit, Rip’s son is just as lethargic and poor as his father was. This perhaps symbolizes that while times have changed, at the core, things have remained the same.

These familial dynamics should feel familiar to Rip, as they duplicate the gender roles displayed in his own marriage. Rip’s daughter keeps a neat home, and his son is uninterested in profitable work. Unlike her mother, though, Judith appears to have settled down with a husband well-suited to structured commercial work. Perhaps the village is no longer as widely supportive of Rip’s preferred lifestyle, or perhaps Dame Van Winkle’s demands were not as unreasonable as they seemed.

The appearance of the town, the behavior of its inhabitants, and indeed, the government of the country, have changed significantly while Rip has been gone. However the face of King George III’s looking out from the clothes of George Washington shows that at the core, some things are much as Rip left them. Rip’s blurring together of George Washington and George III is indicative of his “missing time” on a personal level, as he looks for links to the familiar past. It is also symbolic of the distance governments often have from the everyday lives of people, rendering authority figures somewhat interchangeable to Rip and his village.

We know from Rip’s reexamination of the wooded glen that this statement is not strictly true: there is a stream flowing where there wasn’t one before. The overall appearance of the land surrounding his village hasn’t changed, though, contributing to the theme of nature’s independence from human governance.

This passage shares features with Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker,” also published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. In both, the titular protagonists meet strange men in the wilderness. Tom Walker finds himself in a “lonely, melancholic place” when he meets his stranger, and Rip’s approaches from out of a “wild, lonely, and shagged” glen. European settlers in America would have been suspicious of the unexplored country around them, and Irving is linking this to the Romantic idea of the natural world as a strange and forceful place.

Whereas Irving has described the sound Rip hears as “long rolling peals,” Rip himself revises the noise to a much gentler “muttering.” The specificity of these words and the huge difference in volume between the sounds they describe show that Rip is either not experiencing his environment accurately, or that he is unwilling to confront what he is experiencing.

It is notable that Rip’s first thought upon awakening is an expression of fear of his wife. This can be understood to be a fear of leaving the freedom of the forest for the demands of village commercialism. Rip has essentially woken up after a great party and is dreading his return to work.

Rip himself is added as another dubious layer through which his story percolates to the reader. As Knickerbocker explains away the variances in Rip’s story, so has Crayon explained away the poor veracity of Knickerbocker’s. The result is a narrative that is completely untrustworthy, presented with every assurance of its truthfulness and value.

This explicit comparison between Rip and the American colonies does not necessarily show the latter in a favorable light. Irving was deeply invested in the cause of the United States, but he held no illusions about its questionable impact on the everyman. National identity is depicted in this story as a choice made on the individual level rather than the civic one: Rip may technically now be “a free citizen of the United States,” but it is doubtful whether he ever participates in the structures that uphold that status.

A wooden tombstone decomposes over time, removing the information about the deceased. The fact that it lasted less than 18 years shows just how uninterested the village of Rip’s time was in leaving a permanent legacy. However, Dame Van Winkle seems to have been a forerunning influence, and the village is moving slowly toward a more participatory role in the world.

Despite borrowing heavily from German stories, Irving wants the stories he creates for the United States to stand on their own. To do so, he describes a rich folkloric tradition to which his stories contribute. That a party of ghosts can be treated as a “fact” from a “historian” references the dubious scholastic qualifications of Knickerbocker and by extension the doubtful veracity of all such stories.

It is hard to resolve Irving’s feelings about women in “Rip Van Winkle.” Diedrich Knickerbocker respected them as a rich source of historical information, but he is an unreliable source. The wives of the village are positively disposed toward Rip, except for his own, and she is either a shrewish caricature or has been misrepresented in her silence. This inconsistency of opinion lends weight to the interpretation of Dame Van Winkle as a symbol of a larger tyranny, perhaps that of England or of civilized society, more than as a well-rounded character in her own right.

While modern readers might find it strange, and even silly, that Rip doesn’t question his circumstances, the theme of human helplessness when confronted by an unknown force was common for Romantic writers in the 18th and 19th centuries. This contributed to the evolution of gothic literature, in which characters frequently find themselves in thrall to strange and indescribable powers. For Irving’s readers, a character who is unwilling or unable to question a strange experience would not be unusual or jarring.

The introduction to this short story uses a “framing device”; that is, the narrator tells us that he’s recounting a story that was told to him. This accomplishes several things: it draws attention to the fictional narrator, which encourages us to question the truth of the story, and it gives “Rip Van Winkle” an element of historical truth mixed with legend. Since we are encouraged to question the truth from the start, all themes and statements present in the text must be considered both at face value and satirically.