The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Wr - Washington Irving [7]
More than a simple pun on the title of his book, this description exemplifies a significant shift in the public conception of reading. The subjects of his sketches are not meant to illustrate ethical norms for citizenship. They are meant to provide some distraction and relief from the pressures and anxieties of modern, professional life. Literature had become a leisure activity rather than a moral exercise in character formation.
If Geoffrey Crayon is a self-portrait, then Irving clearly thought of himself as a romantic writer recording his unique impressions with little regard for instructing readers in the political or moral truths of the moment. In so doing, he assumed a narrative persona that Nathaniel Hawthorne later imitated when he wrote in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, “I am a citizen of somewhere else” (Hawthorne, vol. 1, p. 44). Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon inaugurated a literary tradition of interiority and introspection that led subsequent writers such as Henry David Thoreau to declare that the true American frontier was to be found within each individual’s experience. “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,” Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, “[they are] wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor.... Let him build himself a log-house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT” (Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, pp. 323-324). Irving’s insistence that literature was a species of imaginative entertainment rather than a means of moral or political instruction helped usher in a new conception of artistry that contributed to the formation of an American literary culture conducive to democratic individualism.
Irving grew up in a post-Revolutionary America torn between its democratic aspirations for the future and its memories of the colonial era. During his boyhood, British sympathizers lived next door to veterans of the Continental army. Memories of the hardships endured while quartering British troops during the occupation of New York were mixed with frustration over financial losses incurred from the severing of ties with Great Britain. The War of 1812, often referred to as the Second War of American Independence, rekindled and put to rest some of these memories, but the early republic continued to be haunted by its British colonial past. The story “Rip Van Winkle” wonderfully illustrates Irving’s strategy for putting these ghosts to rest. Set in Sleepy Hollow, “a little village of great antiquity ... founded by some of the Dutch colonists, in the early times of the province,” this story conjures up the ghosts of New York’s Dutch colonial past in a way designed to erase the memory of America’s subservience to British rule. Rip wanders from the village and out into the Kaatskill Mountains at a time when “the country was yet a province of Great Britain” (p. 74). When he returns after a twenty-year nap in the wilderness, the Revolutionary War is over and the signs of British colonial rule have been replaced by symbols of American independence. The village inn, which used to be “designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third” (p. 77), has been renamed the Union Hotel, and the sign bearing the portrait of King George has been repainted to look like George Washington. “The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held in the hand instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, GENERAL WASHINGTON” (p. 84).
Irving’s story exemplifies the shift in public discourse that coincided with this transformation of the signs of colonial rule into the symbols of American nationalism. When he returns to the village Rip