Reinventing Patriarchy: Washington Irving and the Autoerotics of the American Imaginary

I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they've changed my gun, and every thing's changed, and I'm changed, and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!

—Rip Van Winkle

When Rip Van Winkle awakens from his twenty-year sleep, the past remains wholly unavailable to him; bereft of all familiarity, stranded in an alien environment, Rip must create an origin story that not only doubles as the story of the new nation he stumbles into but also resolves the threat to patriarchy posed by the Dame Van Winkles of the world. But what possibilities—besides the thin mountain air that surrounds him—are available as the basis of this new national identity? The Sketch Book makes it clear that the old English domestic order that it valorizes as the ideal structure of national identity is gone forever, if, indeed, it ever existed in the first place. Infected by the rise of capitalism, domesticity, whether in England or America, can no longer serve as a site of untrammeled patriarchal power, because the home and the patriarch's status within it are now subject to the instabilities of the new economic regime. Male control, therefore, can no longer be justified by men's capacity for economic provenance because the brave new world throws doubt on all economic guarantees and prospects. The nascent American imaginary, revolving around a fluctuating market and the mobility of frontier life, is also too unstable to be a seat of patriarchal power. The Sketch Book's double problematic, then, is to relocate patriarchy to more secure grounds while detaching the American imaginary from its present preoccupations with frontier and market in order to wed it to a nonthreatening past that can stabilize American identity.

In The Sketch Book, storytelling emerges as a locale in which a new form of patriarchal control can flourish, thus building a foundation for national identity on firmer ground than the domestic sphere, the frontier, or the market can provide.¹ The sketches shift the locus of patriarchy from the home, in which every man is putatively a king, to storytellers like Rip Van Winkle, who hold court in the public square, binding the community and, ultimately, the nation together through the tales they tell. The stories that Irving's characters tell further secure these bare national beginnings by embracing an autoerotic logic—a logic in which the absolute control enjoyed by the fantasizer over his fantasy must be disavowed to produce the illusion of mutual engagement and agency in the actual world—that obscures the tales' genesis in individual fantasy by presenting them as objective observations. The moral stain of the autoerotic process by which the storyteller compiles his material is averted by the act of storytelling itself because the action of telling the story is also a consummation, one that transforms an onanistic fantasy into a larger story of shared cultural and historical origins. This illusion of mutuality effaces the power dynamics responsible for the story's creation and casts the storyteller-cum-patriarch as a figure of paternal benevolence who seeks to evade the instability that capitalism introduces into the home by practicing his craft in the communal rather than domestic arena. It is precisely the ceaseless public repetition of such stories that Irving hopes will produce an authentic American literature that can bind the nation together in a harmonious, unchanging whole.

Family Manors: The Aristocratic Estate and English National Identity

If, as Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky writes, Geoffrey Crayon's "main objective is somehow to get inside the timelessness of England via an imaginative projection into the very fiber of its cultural and spiritual heritage," his failure to do so is not because "[t]he feeling of tradition informing the cultural heritage of the past is beyond the grasp of one who, like Crayon, has not been conditioned and nurtured by it" ("Value" 397). Instead, it is because the onset of modernity saps the tradition of its vital force to such an extent that it cannot be grasped by...