Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Hugh J. Dawson

Critical Essay by Hugh J. Dawson

SOURCE: “Recovering ‘Rip Van Winkle’: A Corrective Reading,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 40, No. 3, 1994, pp. 251-73.

In the following essay, Dawson contends that the forest scene in “Rip Van Winkle” is gothic rather than comic and that the story is not anti-feminist.

While compiling a notebook of reminiscences during his term as American minister to Spain, Washington Irving reflected upon the history behind a tale he had written a quarter century earlier. “The idea,” he writes, “was taken from an old tradition” that he “picked up among the Harz Mountains.” By using the New York Catskills as the background for “Rip Van Winkle,” he furthered his project of providing the young nation with a measure of the folk tradition dear to romanticism. He was astonished at his success: “When I first wrote the ‘Legend of Rip van Winkle,’” he records in his notebook,

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