Rip Van Winkle’s Coat: Inheriting the American Republic

Abstract

Inheritance—of goods, reputation, and even physical traits—is a matter of paramount importance to Americans throughout the decades following Revolution. Paine and Jefferson, in propounding their vision of a new republic detached from Old World tyranny, continually assert every generation’s right to take only what it desires from prior generations, the better to reshape themselves and their nation as they see fit. In this world of generational self-fashioning, an older generation cannot be suffered to direct its successors from beyond the grave, or to refuse the task of provisioning those successors with material and intellectual wealth. Drawing on the works of Washington Irving, especially sketches like “The Art of Book-Making” and “Rip Van Winkle,” my paper will consider how the concept of anachronism is deployed in American literature to expose infractions against the logic of generational succession that is supposed to grant each new wave of Americans their freedom from those that came before. When the ancient British writers in “The Art of Book- Making” notice young scribblers tearing wisdom from their books and literally wearing it as old- fashioned clothes, they rise from the grave to take back what is rightfully theirs by any means necessary. In contrast, the peace-loving Rip, returning from his twenty-year nap, is so aghast at seeing some lookalike (his son) wearing his old clothes that for a moment he seems liable to rip them off the younger man’s back—but instead he finally settles into the role of storyteller and human curiosity, allowing the young to direct their own lives. Ultimately, this article uses anachronism to complicate how we regard nineteenth-century conceptions of historical change and generational influence.