TREATMENT OF TIME IN RIP VAN WINKLE
Rubén Balaguer Fayos
Universitat de València
In this work by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle journeys into the mountains and falls asleep during the time when “the country was yet a province of Great Britain.”
When Rip returns, sometime between 1789 and 1794, significant changes have occurred. The American Revolution has come and gone, the colonies are an independent nation, and George Washington is the first president of the United States. Beyond these superficial changes, Rip notices something else: “The very character of the people seemed changed.” There are still people gathering around the local inn, but now their conversation carries “a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity.”
This story may be the first popular example of a character that is ‘frozen in time’ and whose reawakening is used to contrast two time periods. In this case, the two time periods contrasted are the twenty years overlapping the American Revolution. In addition to contrasting the political shifts over twenty years, the story also alludes to the economic shift from a more rural based economy to an increasingly urban one. While Rip's view of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains is romantic, his shock at the change in the style of life is clear: "The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared."
The term ‘Rip Van Winkle’ has come to mean someone who is oblivious to social change. That is to say someone who is stuck in his or her own time and have not kept up with the times, intentionally or not. Here the concept of time refers back to the romantic theme of tempus edax rerum (‘time finishes it all’), whereby time is seen as an enemy that destroys or transforms everything, not only physical life –Rip’s wife dies-, but also beliefs, traditions and ways of life.
References:
-Irving, Washington, Rip Van Winkle (1819).
-Wells, Robert V., While Rip Napped: Social Change in Late Eighteenth-Century New York in New York History, Vol. 70, January 1990, pp. 5 – 23.
INITIATION JOURNEY IN YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
Rubén Balaguer Fayos
Universitat de València
Young Goodman Brown tells the story of a Puritan man who loses faith in humankind after he thinks he witnesses his wife and respected members of his town participating in some sort of Black Mass with a figure representing the Devil himself.
Here Hawthorne presents sin as an inescapable part of human nature. The fact that Goodman Brown only has to make his journey into the evil forest once suggests that the spiritual quest is a ritual all humans must undergo at some point in their lives. But Goodman Brown completely misses the Devil’s point: "I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it was I that brought your father a pitchpine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war". In tying these words to the Devil, however, Hawthorne is explicitly saying that intolerance is evil. Thus, not ‘respecting’ the Devil’s Black Mass that is taking place is, controversially, acting to the Devil’s benefit.
Nevertheless, the protagonist still assumes his community has a monopoly on virtue; he does not understand that as long as his own people act uncharitably and unkindly toward those who do not conform to the Puritan ideal of goodness, they serve the Devil every day of their lives. Because he doesn’t ‘get it’, Goodman Brown cannot see that as long as he insists on only one true interpretation of faith, his faith is false.
Therefore, the ‘initiation journey’ that Goodman Brown must experience can be seen as a kind of ‘anti-initiation journey’, since his faith in Puritanism is not consolidated, but rather tottered and collapsed. And probably this story can also be interpreted as an allegorical projection of the protagonist’s own guilt onto the others, because in the end he returns to Salem determined to be more ‘pure’ than anyone else in town, but in fact he really becomes a failure as a human being.
References:
-Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Young Goodman Brown (1835).
-Levy, Leo B. The Problem of Faith in ‘Young Goodman Brown’, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 115-26.