Greed In Washington Irving's Devil And Tom Walker

The choices we make every day can have enormous consequences and ultimately decide our fate and future. Washington Irving’s Devil and Tom Walker reveals the various character attributes that can influence one’s life, including greed, religious hypocrisy, and moral corruption. These attributes ravage through Irving’s tale, consuming lives of colonial people. The influences of greed are exemplified rather consistently throughout Irving’s short story. Tom Walker’s overwhelming greed is first shown after he lets his wife know of his business with the Devil. His wife goes out to make the deal with the Devil, and instead of bothering with the well-being of his wife, he is concerned rather with the silverware she took from their home. Mrs. Walker’s

The Northern colonies, including Boston where the story took place, were gripped with the materialistic aspects of life. Joyce Moss and George Wilson note that this was likely due to the fact that in colonial times, the British did not allow the New Englanders to mint their own coins, nor did they import money into the new colonies (3). Also, in areas such as Boston, the settled Puritan men were accountable to stray from poverty. With all these influences in mind, Tom Walkers irrational greed becomes more feasible to the

Specifically, Irving manifests severe religious hypocrisy through Tom’s actions within the story. Regretting his bargain with Old Scratch, Tom increasingly begins to act more religious. However, he merely has a pretense of religious beliefs, rather than actually possessing them. For example, Tom Walker’s public display of newfound religion “has nothing to do with his belief in God, but is rather an attempt to save him from hell.” (Devil and Tom Walker, 51) Thriving throughout the story Tom’s religious hypocrisy is exhibited as his ways remain the same, as he “delights in tallying his neighbors’ sins, as if their wickedness alienates his own.” (Overview: The Devil and Tom Walker) Tom’s basis for religious hypocrisy was an attempt to get his soul back, and thus cheating the devil out of his deal, but ultimately, his false piety fails to assist him in doing this. Proving useless and entirely ineffective, Tom Walker’s fictitious religious conversion changes nothing, as he refuses to see error in his own ways, and still criticizes others in the church. As he is swooped away by Old Scratch at the end of the story, Tom’s superficial displays of religion, such as constantly carrying a bible, was solely pernicious religious hypocrisy all