Rip is a descendant of the Van Winkles who fought bravely under Peter Stuyvesant, though he himself is too timid to participate in such martial gallantry. He is “a simple, good-natured man … a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband.” Too lazy to work the farm he inherited, he allows it to deteriorate while his children run around in rags. His only pleasures are squirrel-shooting, fishing, and hanging out in the local tavern, but even these activities are curtailed by his “termagant” wife, who torments him with scoldings.
He has no option but to get away from her by wandering through the woods with his trusty dog Wolf. One day, after taking a nap in the forest, he comes upon a group of men who are strangely dressed in old-fashioned Dutch outfits and playing ninepins. They offer him some of their liquor, which puts him into a deep sleep.
When he awakens, his dog is gone and his trusty musket has rusted. He wanders into his old Dutch village, only to find it much changed. No one seems to recognize him, nor are any of his old friends around.
Rip’s main role now is oral historian, telling his story along with “a chronicle of the old times ‘before the war’” to all who will listen. When he asks about them, he learns that they died long ago. In fact, twenty years have passed while he slept, and during that time the American Revolution was fought and the colonists were freed from British rule.
The old tavern sign, which used to feature a portrait of King George III, now sports the image of another George—George Washington. The disputatious “tavern politicians” demand to know on which side Rip voted, “Federal or Democrat,” and he naively confesses that he is a “loyal subject of the king, God bless him!” Naturally, they accuse him of being a Tory and a spy, but in time they accept his story that he has simply been asleep. Unsure who he is anymore, Rip learns to his great relief that his wife has died and he is now as free of that “petticoat government” as the American provinces liberated from their British despots.
He is taken in by his daughter and lives out his last years as a contented man and “one of the patriarchs of the village.” There’s that word again, “patriarch.” As in The History of New York, the Dutch patriarchs are invariably idle and quiescent. That this ordinary man, this “loser,” as one of our presidents is fond of saying, should triumph and ultimately become one of the immortal figures of our culture merely by taking a long nap tells us something about Americans’ apparently unconscious hunger for resisting the heroic. Steven Blakemore has argued in his thoughtful paper “Family Resemblance: The Text and Contexts of ‘Rip Van Winkle,’” that there is also a political dimension to the tale.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
