Rip van Winkle Narrative: a Quest for Identity
The illustration established the concept of full age, it is related with the moral maturity of a person required to be free and take own decisions without the influence of others. In this path, an individual cannot be completely free if their identity still attached to the laws and mandates of the society. However, United States after the revolutionary war had to face this freedom without the enough maturity to build their national identity. Through the narrative of Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving depicts the quest of the Americans for patriotic and cultural identity, because lost their identity as England`s subjects.
In the story, a lazy and middle-aged man wanders off from the demands of her wife and village to hunt in the Catskill Mountains. Having escaped to these fairy hills, he encounters the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s, joins in their
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The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name?
First, to build this identity Americans wanted to be recognized in the world as a particular culture and rejected all the English influence in art and literature, because any cultural products which represent the singularity of the country appeared and a sense of inferiority towards the British culture emerged in America. People all over the world knew North America as a British colony. In Rip van Winkle, it is represents through the well-known fame of Rip as a subjugated and submissive husband in his hometown, all women know his suffering and inevitable attachment to Dame van Winkle (Hilton, 1986).
Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity (Rip van