Rip Van Winkle: American Revolution

In his lifetime, Washington Irving wrote many stories, and one of his most notable pieces is Rip Van Winkle. Rip Van Winkle focuses on the titular character, Rip Van Winkle, who has just woken up from a deep sleep and is suddenly in the future, post the American Revolution. One of the most prominent themes in this story is change, especially change in a radical or revolutionary sense. In his work, Irving uses Rip Van Winkle and his unique experience to show how even with dramatic or revolutionary change, humans will always adapt to new or strange situations accordingly. The revolutionary change Rip and his town experience is the American Revolution. Though he slept through the American Revolution, an incredibly drastic change, Rip is there
Rip, at the beginning of the story, longs for freedom from his wife, whom he views as hen-pecking and an oppressor. Rip is constantly antagonized by “his wife continually dinning on his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ryin 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” (Irving 2). Rip’s attitude towards his wife strikes a strong parallel with how America felt before declaring war on England. Similarly, England would use the same argument after the French and Indian War, accusing the colonies “of being lazy, of not maintaining patrimonial estate” (Blakemore). Rip and America would eventually earn their freedom from the so-called “tyrants,” though America would take a direct approach. After the drastic and unprecedented change that was the American Revolution, before he adapted, Rip felt as though he mad gone mad and the world had gone topsy turvy. Panicking at the Union Hotel, Rip cries, “‘I’m not myself-I’m somebody else-that’s me yonder-no- that’s somebody else in my shoes… Everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!” (Irving 8). Here, Rip is suffering an identity crisis, which is comparable to America’s reaction to their transition from a colony to a new, independent nation. To elaborate, Rip trying to adapt to these new circumstances is like how “the transition of the nation's inhabitants from colonial subjects to Americans, whose identity is inchoate because their relation to past traditions and to the newer institutions and forms of exchange is unsettled” (Blakemore). Both America and Rip had to acknowledge their strange circumstances, panic a little, and then finally settle down and try to adapt to this revolutionary change. Eventually, Rip was