Rip Van Winkle And The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

678 Words3 Pages

Gothic literature is acknowledged as one of genre in literature. Horace Walpole creates Gothic genre at late 18th and early 19th centuries. (Hume, 282) It is basically a story that combines both horror and romance together. Typically, it follows a plot of suspense, mystery and includes supernatural events. Indeed, both of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are considered as part of American Gothic Tradition as it possesses some gothic elements in its settings, characters, and supernatural events. The first gothic element is dark and gloomy setting. For both stories, Irving uses the dark settings which are wood and mountain. In Rip Van Winkle, the setting takes place at the Kaatskill Mountains. Irving has created Kaatskill mountain as a place where readers can feel mysterious. When Rip decides to run from Dame’s nag, he meets a group of people playing ninepins and drink liquor, which is very strange because no one play pins in forest or mountain. Similarly, in The …show more content…

Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane represent the ineffectual hero in these stories. Both stories are set up with an antihero where the main character is not having the ability to fight back, lack of confidence and very coward. For instance, Rip Van Winkle run away to avoid hearing his wife nagging on him and Ichabod Crane leaves the party because Katrina has hurt his feeling. Unlike other fairy tales, gothic literature penetrates on female body and property. ( Reka, 31 ) As an illustration, Ichabod falls in love with Katrina not only because her beauties’ but also her father’s property. It is shown at page 13 where he praises the beauty of Katrina’s body, “She was blooming lass of fresh eighteen; plump as partridge. . . the tempting stomacher of olden time; and withal a provokingly short petticoat, . . . prettiest foot and ankle in the country round” ( Irving, 13-14