Personfication: The Catskills as a Character

Setting

The story begins about five or six years before the American Revolution and ends twenty years later. The action takes place in a village in eastern New York, near the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains. The river was named after Englishman Henry Hudson, who explored it in 1609. The Catskill Mountains were named after Kaaterskill, the Dutch word for a local stream, Wildcat Creek.

Characters Rip Van Winkle: Meek, easygoing, ne’er-do-well resident of the village who wanders off to the mountains and meets strange men playing ninepins. Dame Van Winkle: Rip’s nagging wife. Nicholas Vedder: Owner of a village inn where menfolk congregate. Derrick Van Brummel: Village schoolmaster. Wolf: Rip’s dog. Man Carrying Keg Up the Mountain: Spirit of Englishman Henry Hudson, explorer of the Hudson River. Ninepin Bowlers: Henry Hudson’s crewmen from his ship, the Half-Moon. Brom Dutcher: Neighbor of Rip who went off to war while Rip was sleeping. Old Woman: Woman who identifies Rip when he returns to the village after his sleep. Peter Vanderdonk: Oldest resident of the village. He confirms Rip’s identity and cites evidence indicating Rip’s strange tale is true. Judith Gardenier: Rip’s married daughter. She takes her father in after he returns from his sleep. Mr. Gardenier: Judith’s husband, a farmer. Rip Van Winkle II: Rip’s ne’er-do-well son. Rip Van Winkle III: Rip’s infant grandchild. Its mother is Judith Gardenier. Van Schaick: Village parson. Jonathan Doolittle: Owner of the Union Hotel, the establishment that replaced the village inn. The Catskill Mountains: See Personification. Various Men, Women, and Children of the Village "Rip Van Winkle" is a short story–one of America's most beloved–based on German folk tales. It was first published in a collection of Irving's works called The Sketch Book (1819-1820). Themes

Change With Continuity and Preservation of Tradition

After Rip awakens from his long sleep and returns to the village, he does not recognize the people he encounters. But not only their faces are new but also their fashions and the look of the village: It is larger, with rows of houses he had never seen. His own house is in shambles now with no one living in it, and the inn he frequented is a hotel. His wife and old Vedder are dead. Others left the village and never came back. Everything is different, it seems; nothing is as it was. There has even been a revolutionary war in which America gained its independence from England and became a new country. However, when Rip looks beyond the village, he sees that the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains are exactly the same as they were before his sleep. He also begins to encounter people who knew him long ago: first, the old woman, then the old man, Peter Vanderdonk, who testifies to the truth of Rip’s strange tale about the ninepin bowlers he met in the mountains. At this point in the story, Irving’s main theme begins to emerge: Although wrenching, radical changes are sometimes necessary to move society forward, such changes must not eradicate old ways and traditions entirely. Real, lasting change is an amalgam of the old and new. New builds on the foundations of the old. There must be continuity. So it is that old Vanderdonk, in confirming Rip’s tale, says he himself has heard the thunder of ninepin bowlers, who are the crewmen of The Half-Moon, the ship Henry Hudson captained in his exploration of the Hudson River. It seems that their spirits return to the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains every twenty years to keep a “guardian eye” on the river and its environs. Hudson was an Englishman, yes, but his association with his overthrown country does not mean the values he represents must die with the revolution. Rip also sees his son, Rip II, now a grown man, who looks just like him, and is reunited with his daughter, now a grown woman, who is holding an infant–Rip III. Thus, though, change has come to the village, their remain links with the past; there is continuity. New generations come along that bring change, but old values and traditions–as well as family lines–remain alive and thriving. And, every now and then, thunder rumbles in the Catskills when Hudson and his crew play ninepins.

The climax of the story occurs when the townspeople recognize Rip after he returns to his village.

When Rip Van Winkle returns home after twenty years of absence, he finds his house empty and in apparent bewilderment repairs to the village inn which, in any case, had always provided him with a more hospitable reception. The inn is gone, in its place "The Union Hotel, by [sic] Jonathan Doolittle." Doolittle has been as good as his name, in that the "hotel" is "rickety with great gaping windows, some of them broken and mended with old hats and petticoats." Social comment edges into the fable. For "the great tree which used to shelter the quiet Dutch inn of yore," there is substituted "a tall, naked pole," with something on top that looked like a red night-cap." (So much for the Liberty Pole, to the unbiased observer.) And clearly the "naked pole" is no more proper "shelter" for "The Union" or the United States, we might say than is the "empty, forlorn and apparently abandoned" hearth which has replaced the "neat order" Dame Winkle once kept. Just as the inn sign, once "the ruby face of King George" under which Rip "had smoked so many a peaceful pipe," has been "singularly metamorphosed into General Washington," so "the very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputations tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity." Instead of his old cronies, Rip sees "a lean, bilious-looking fellow with his pockets full of handbillsЕ haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens elections members of Congress liberty Bunker’s Hill heroes of seventy-six."

Rip’s apparent bewilderment isn’t the only point here. The delicate tale is being freighted with the notation of epochal change, of social transformation including but deeper than the surface of political change. An easy-going, feudal way of life has passed an been replaced by an atmosphere of bourgeois business and calculation. What was once to be found only within the walls of RipТs house, in the person of the scolding Dame Van Winkle Ц from which could periodically escape to inn or mountainside Ц has now passed outwards into the communal and public life. Rip is now harassed by "tavern politicians" and "bystanders" as he had once been only by his wife: "The orator bustled up to him, and drawing him partly aside, inquired Сon which side he votedТ. (My italics.) Only "partly aside" because the orator wishes no real privacy for Rip and himself but rather a performance in front of an audience. He demands that Rip categorise himself as Federal or Democrat. Rip is sternly quizzed, by a man with "keen eyes and sharp [cocked] hat penetratingЕ into his very soul." Rip has a gun on Election Day. Despite his obvious infirmity and the gunТs rust, "[did he] mean to breed a riot?" And when Rip declares himself a "loyal subject of the king," the bystanders in "general shout" brand him "ТA tory! a tory! a spy! a refugee!"

It is all but impossible to read this otherwise than as the writerТs allegory of himself, his situation and his writings. Irving is sending his modestly-titled "sketches" back to the United States after his own long absence. ("Rip Van Winkle" was the concluding sketch in the first packet of five to be printed in America.) Rip the character stands for the story named for him, for The Sketchbook as a whole and for Irving himself. Will they be treated as the equivalent of "refugee tories", turncoats, traitors? The allegory may betray IrvingТs fears of rejection, but it is equally his attempt to surmount them Ц in part by humor, wit and insight Ц and Rip is not in the end lynched or even rejected by the so-far harsh and humourless society to which he has returned.

What enables Rip to gain a foothold back in his village is the story he tells to explain his twenty-year absence Ц which is, of course, the story Irving is telling us. The story is fetched up by Rip in extremis, to avert the sharpness and penetration of his "self-important" peer, the responsible citizen who stayed at home and can affect patriotism in every pore. The chances are that the dour community doesnТt accept RipТs tale for a minute: "The neighbours stared when they heard it; some were seen to wink at each other, and put their tongues in their checkЕ. [T]here was a general shaking of the head throughout the assemblage." Probably they take Rip to be a smart fellow, like they think themselves to be. But, "To make a long story short," the narrator says, the people "turned to the more important concerns of the election," leaving Rip to the care of his daughter, and to refine the various versions of his tale into "precisely the [one] I have related."

Just as it is this tale which affects the new Americans sufficiently to avert their wrath, so it comes to have a strong effect upon the rising generation." The younger generation of Americans to whom Rip turns Ц and to whom Irving is himself appealing in 1820 Ц is more at easy over the transition of authority than are the revolutionary elders who quiz Rip. Rip prefers them a friends, and "he soon grew into great favour" with them. For them, he becomes as much a patriarch as those who had fought the War, "and a chronicle of the old times Сbefore the war.Т" It is claimed that on the matter of his absence Rip came to be believed, but we may suspect some admixture of admiration for RipТs having invented to wonderful if specious a story to explain his having run off from Dame Van Winkle and his familial responsibilities and perhaps his public ones, too. Being shrewd, these Americans are prepared to accept Rip as one of them, possessor of a crafty madness at the least.

Perhaps as well the duties and responsibilities which Dame Van Winkle was always trying to inflict upon Rip represent a foreshadowing of the democratic responsibilities to come. They certainly have a similar accent. The RipТs evasion, which is the evasion of art Ц being his story and IrvingТs Ц simultaneously acknowledges an unfitness for the strenuous demands of democracy and adumbrates a personal and artistic method of dealing with that unfitness. Rip gains a place in America despite his having opted out of the Revolution; Irving hopes for one despite his absence and despite the commitment to English literature, culture and tradition evident throughout The Sketchbook in which he placed this story Ц a commitment thus obliquely acknowledged to need apology. Despite it, he is claiming a place in America, his knowledge of the past Ц when America was English (and partly Dutch) and things English hers as well Ц being comparable to RipТs chronicles of "old times Сbefore the war.Т"

RipТs story and IrvingТs "Rip Van Winkle" are then substitutes for the Revolution. "What did you do during the War," asks a character of James Joyce in Tom StoppardТs Travesties. Undaunted, Joyce replies, "I wrote Ulysses. "

Personfication: The Catskills as a Character

At the outset of his story, Washington Irving uses personification to invest the Catskill Mountains with human qualities. Irving tells us in Paragraph 1 that they are part of a “family,” the Appalachian family. And they are a proud, majestic member of that family, “lording it over the surrounding country.” They are also active rather than passive, reacting to the weather and the seasons with changes in their “magical hues and shapes.” In fair weather, “they are clothed in blue and purple.” But sometimes, even though the sky 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.
Making the mountains come alive enables them to become mysterious and unpredictable; they may even play tricks on those who venture within their confines.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29