What Would Margaret Fuller Say about Rip Van Winkle?

            I think that Margaret Fuller would have understood and sympathized with Rip Van Winkle’s ideas about the value of wilderness.  For Rip, the beautiful wooded wilderness of the Kaatskill Mountains is a place of sanctuary, the only place left where he can escape from his wife’s abusive treatment.  “Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative to escape from the labour of the farm and the clamour of his wife, was to take gun in hand, and stroll away into the woods” (459).  The wilderness is the one place where he can find peace and simply be himself without being castigated for it.  Fuller expresses a similar sort of idea when she says, “If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls after a while into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up” (745).  Her use of the masculine pronouns “he” and “his” demonstrates her understanding that persons of both genders need periods of solitude in order to realize their true selves. 

            Further, I think Fuller would have recognized that the Van Winkles’ marriage was not representative of any of the “four kinds of equality” (739) she wrote about:  “the household partnership” where “their relation is one of mutual esteem, mutual dependence” (739); “intellectual companionship” (739); “mutual idolatry” (739); or “the religious, which may be expressed as pilgrimage towards a common shrine” (743).  When one partner’s frequent verbal and emotional abuse makes the other partner miserable, as it does in the Van Winkle household, it is not a relationship between equals.  As Fuller says, “Union is only possible to those who are units,” (745), and in abusive relationship the balance of power is severely out of whack.  Irving offers several examples of Dame Van Winkle’s “tart temper…and…sharp tongue” (458), but to me the most convincing evidence of her abusive behavior is the statement that “everything he [Rip] said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence” (458).  Psychologist Patricia Evans, in her excellent book The Verbally Abusive Relationship, aptly describes this kind of behavior:  “…the anger addict will reconstruct whatever he hears in such a way that it becomes for him the ‘reason’ for venting his anger on his partner” (Evans, 110).  Dame Van Winkle treats the family dog as abusively as she does her husband (see the first full paragraph on page 458), but in the end her foul temper brings about her own demise, in a moment of irony that made this reader laugh out loud:  “she broke a blood vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England pedlar” (464).

            I think Margaret Fuller would have appreciated Rip Van Winkle’s predicament and approved of his escaping into the mountains, and I think she would have been fair-minded enough to realize that in adult couple relationships, the male is not always the oppressor.  Fuller voices the balanced perspective that “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism…There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (744).  However, I think she also would have recognized that a woman in Rip’s situation would have far fewer options for coping with it.  In Fuller’s and Irving’s day, a woman’s place was considered to be in the home – from which she could hardly stroll off into the woods for the day to get away from her abusive husband!  The patriarchal culture’s withholding of basic human rights from women – education, professional pursuits, a political voice – kept untold numbers of women economically dependent on their husbands with no hope of freeing their “incarcerated souls” (745).

Evans, Patricia.  The Verbally Abusive Relationship.  2^nd ed.  Avon, MA:  Adams Media Corp., 1996.  Print.