Reflection-Irving

I just read the stories Rip Van Winkle and The Devil and Tom Walker. Both these stories had to deal a lot with the Romanticism period and nature. Just like Irving wrote in The Devil and Tom Walker, "On one side of this inlet is a beautiful dark grove; on the opposite side the land rises, on which grow a few scattered oaks of great age and immense size" (Irving 242). This shows how a great deal of his story he threw in a lot of detail about nature. When I was reading The Devil and Tom Walker I realized that Tom Walker is a greedy man. His reputation around town is that he is a greedy man. His wife is nothing but the same from him. They seem perfect for each other, but it's everything but love. They keep secrets from each other and do not tell each other anything. When Irving wrote, "The house and its inmates had altogether a bad name. Tom's wife was a tall termagant, fierce of temper, loud of tongue, and strong of arm. Her voice was often heard in wordy warfare with her husband, and his face sometimes showed signs that their conflicts were not confined to words" (Irving 242). This just shows how much they do not like each other throughout this first part of the story. It turns out that the wife sells her soul for nothing and now Tom does not even care that she is gone. All Tom cares about is finding the treasures and valuables that his wife took with her. To find out about the treasures and valuables that his wife took with her he decides to make a deal with the devil. So he basically scams people his whole life and then in his twilight years he tries to beat the devil, but loses and gets taken away. Overall this books theme is about greedy. People being greedy these modern times are skyrocketing. People want more and more of something even if they have enough to satisfy themselves. That is what it seems like with Tom Walker. He and his wife are very greedy and they both get taken by the devil. Being greedy never gets you anywhere in life. Anyway, you can tell that this story was written in the Romanticism period because of all the great detail that was put in it. When Irving wrote in The Devil and Tom Walker, "It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bullfrog, and the water snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half drowned, half rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire" (Irving 243). He is talking about the swamp that he passed and goes into great detail about it.

In reading D'Ammassa's literary criticism he says that, "despite his [or Rip Van Winkle's] willingness to work hard without pay to help others, he has never been able to make a financial success of his small farm or any other job" (D'Ammassa). This is completely different from Tom Walker because Tom Walker scams people and does not work basically. Rip Van Winkle on the other hand does work hard unlike Walker. Both these themes have to do with letting life go and live carefree. Rip Van Winkle brings in nature a lot better in the story because he has to get away from where he lives and get away from his wife in order to head into nature (Rip Van Winkle). I find that both these stories have some differences and then they have some similarities also.

Bibliography

D'Ammassa, Don. "Rip Van Winkle." Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Irving, Washington. "The Devil and Tom Walker." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 242-250. Print.

Matthews, Washington Irving. "4. Rip Van Winkle By Washington Irving. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 06 Dec. 2011.