The Failed Hero's Journey in Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

The Failed Hero's Journey in Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

Male Flight from Home and Responsibilities into the Wilderness

According to Joseph Campbell, the story of the hero takes place in three stages: withdrawal, initiation, and return. The hero abandons his family or community, undergoes an initiation, which is usually an encounter with supernatural forces, and eventually returns to society, wiser than before.

A closer reading of "Rip Van Winkle" alongside Campbell's work will demonstrate that Irving was well aware of this pattern, and that he both followed and veered from it intentionally for his own purposes.

Withdrawal: Escape from Domestic Strife

As Campbell explains, the hero's story starts with a call to adventure. The hero does not necessarily want to become a hero or venture out on a quest that will separate him from the known world and change his life forever. Instead, some outside force compels him to leave home. In Rip's case, the force that drives him away from home is his wife's bad temper. She scolds him to such an extent that he is "at last reduced almost to despair," and finally "his only alternative" is to take up his gun and "stroll away into the woods."

Initiation: An Encounter with the Mysterious

The next step in the hero's progress is an encounter with supernatural figures who guide him through his initiation, his first tests. Frequently, the supernatural helper is masculine. Rip meets a stranger whose clothes are almost two hundred years old. This guide does not offer advice; in fact, he never speaks at all. Rip does not speak either, for there is "something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe." The only version of an amulet the stranger carries is "a stout keg, that seemed full of liquor." Then, they arrive at the small amphitheater, where a group of odd-looking personages is playing at nine-pins.

Gradually, he gains courage and dares to sample the liquor. This carries him to the next important stage of the hero's progress: forsaking or losing his connection to the world so that when he returns, it will be as a new man.

A Dubious Return: Lost and Found

Now the hero must return home. He has seen and learned things that he must take back to his people. Sometimes the hero refuses to go back or hesitates. Rip thinks three times in four paragraphs that Dame Van Winkle will be furious with him for sleeping all night in the mountains, but he is hungrier than he is afraid of his wife, so he descends the mountain. As a hero, he is ordained to bring new wisdom to the world. But what wisdom does he have?

Campbell points to "Rip Van Winkle" as a "delicate case." The fact is, he writes, "Rip moved into the adventurous realm unconsciously, as we all do every night when we go to sleep." He returns from that realm "with nothing to show for the experience" but his "whiskers." Rip has lost his gun, his dog, his wife, his home, and his friends. What has he gained? Campbell writes, "Rip Van Winkle never knew what he had experienced; his return was a joke."

The Failed Hero

Irving takes Rip through the hero's stages of separation and initiation but does not let him return as a hero. Why? Perhaps he wishes to show that Rip is not the man who will lead the nation into the future. He is a missed opportunity, a failed hero.