Rip Van Winkle as Allegory - Research Paper Example

Rip Van Winkle wanders up into the hills one day to get away from his pestering wife and celebrates a wild party with some strangers. When he wakes up, he wanders back down to his village only to discover that everything has changed. His wife is dead, his children are grown up, his daughter has grown into a loving woman willing to take care of him and his lazy ways are now acceptable (Irving, 1819). He is also no longer the subject of a king but a free citizen of a new country basking in the glow of its newness. In Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” the wife represents the American man's sense that he is not free to do as he wishes, but is instead under the domineering cultural control of the American female.

In Irving’s story, Rip’s wife is represented to be a constant problem for him in that she refuses to allow him to live his life in a manner that seems right to him. In the story, Irving says, “his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tongue was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence” (11). The harshness of Rip’s wife is emphasized by the reported unproductive nature of his farm and the sense that she continued to harass him about farming rather than encouraging him to find some other form of gainful employment that he might enjoy more, such as selling or bartering the toys he made for children (Irving, 1819).

Within this illustration of Dame Van Winkle's character, it is clear to see the kind of cultural enforcer role assigned to women at this age. According to Nina Baym (1981), the typical American myth was structured around a very feminized natural environment waiting for the male to plunder and violate her while the human woman was the enforcer of social rules and norms, keeping men from accomplishing this goal. Baym says, "The myth narrates a confrontation of the American individual, the pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances, with the promise offered by the idea of America" (131). This myth sets up the fallacy that the individual can achieve unadulterated self-definition in America's great wilderness without the destructive or limiting power of society, which is represented in the figure of the human woman or, in this case, Dame Van Winkle. Since women were considered the embodiment of society's destructive influence, she couldn't be the quintessential American individual hero and was often established as the villain.

In keeping with the true American myth formula, Rip takes off into the wilderness where he can celebrate his masculine prerogative to escape the confining influence of society and then returns 20 years later to live an entirely new life. The significance of Dame Van Winkle's death is that Rip is now free of his tormentor. He is liberated from the constraints of his former home life, his daughter welcomes him into her house giving him a new life, and he can find happiness in his popularity within the village. “He had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony and could go in and out whenever he pleased without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle” (Irving, 61). Rip's liberation from Dame Van Winkle parallels the colonies' liberation from England and his life following his return becomes everything he always wanted it to be. He is free to express his own stories, opinions, and pursuits without the constraining external force of a wife who expects him to be productive. With her death, Rip is free of the "combination of puritan conscience and protestant ethic" (Hedges 137) that attempted to dominate and subdue the American spirit of individualism and freedom. The society to which Rip returns is the hopeful, energetic, idyllic image of the new nation free of any form of social or cultural constraint (Baym, 1981).

Throughout the story, Dame Van Winkle is presented as a nag, a domineering woman so furious with her husband that she has no sympathy left for him. She continuously tries to force him into a mold for which he is simply not suited and, in doing so, strips him of his ability to find happiness, and independence or to pursue his interests. In light of this situation, he has no option toward fulfilling his manhood other than plunging into the forests and scavenging through the mountains with his gun and his dog looking for something to shoot. His impotence is reinforced here in that he never does find anything to propel lead into, but he does manage to at least escape the civilizing attempts of his wife. With her dead on his return, Rip is given a new chance at life, like the hopeful new Americans. Within the village, he can enjoy his independence, pursue whatever pleasures he has in mind, and exercise full freedom of movement without any of the constraints of culture his wife once attempted to force him into accepting.