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LITR 4232 American
Renaissance 2010 Student Midterm Samples 2. Short essay (4-6 paragraphs) on 1 of 2 options (or combinations as inspired) :
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Jennifer Hamilton
"Who Am I?"
So far, my favorite work we have read is Washington Irving’s
Rip Van Winkle. The passage that
interested me the most, and I think explained America’s fascination with the
story, was:
“I’m not myself – I’m somebody else – that’s me yonder – no – that’s somebody
else got into my shoes – I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the
mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed,
and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
One of the
reasons this passage caught my attention is that, even today we can relate to
his feelings. America is constantly
changing. The generation I was born
in is completely different from the one my parents were raised in, and it will
be the same for my daughter. When
Rip Van Winkle fell asleep, America was still a British colony, and when he woke
up everything was different; not just physically, but emotionally as well.
For example, when he described the town, he wrote: “the very character of
the people seemed changed. There
was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it.”
This is one of the issues of modernization and change romanticism was
trying to deal with.
This passage has
another popular theme found in romanticism: individuals in nature trying to find
themselves. Before he fell asleep,
Van Winkle was lazy and did nothing to provide for his family, which lead his
wife to constantly nag after him.
After he woke up, alone in the mountains, he had to return to those who did not
recognize him, being a part of their past.
It is interesting that on his return, Van Winkle was “reverenced as one
of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times ‘before the
war,’” when the only thing he did was sleep twenty years, and avoid helping his
country during the revolution. This
is another characterization of the romantic.
Romanticism deals with the past, or “good days,” or the hopeful future,
never the present here and now, and provides a way to escape reality.
There are also
elements of the gothic in the story.
It takes place in the Kaatskill Mountains, which are told at the
beginning to have legends of supernatural occurrences.
Peter Vanderdonk, who recognized old Van Winkle, told the village: “that
it was in a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the
Kaatskill mountains had always been haunted by strange beings.”
The imagery of Van Winkle, waking up alone and afraid is also gothic;
with feelings of loneliness and isolation. He himself has grown old and in a
sense decayed, and his wife died.
He returns to his house, which has decayed, and is now “empty, forlorn, and
apparently abandoned,” the “lonely chambers” were characterized by “silence.”
All these images bring feelings of horror in the reader, which is what
the gothic wants to do.
The passage, as
well as story, combines many of the terms we have learned in class so far.
As someone who loves history, it really interested me to see how an
author wrote a fictional story that actually held such deep meaning.
The only way we have to understand the past is the written word, and what
it can symbolize and represent.
Today, so much is changing so fast in the world, which this passage really
speaks to.
