Irving was clearly fascinated—and perhaps not a little frightened—by the question of what it means for a nation to spring into existence. What could unite this bustling, disputatious new country? It was founded on noble ideas (rights of citizens, representative government), and the Revolution had produced its own mythology (Bunker’s Hill, heroes of seventy-six). But could ideas hold a country together? In the early decades of American history, these were open questions. They still are.
As a storyteller, Irving was particularly concerned with how America would fare without a common culture. He worried, the scholar Howard Horwitz has written, “that the legendary transmission of tales and thus of cultural memory was fragile in the new republic.” In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” also published in The Sketch Book, Irving wryly explains that the village of the title was rife with ghost stories because it was an old Dutch village; elsewhere in the country, such stories were uncommon: “There is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon.” Americans were too rootless and restless, too eager to seek their fortune—they didn’t stay in one place long enough to be haunted by ghosts.
“Rip Van Winkle” is a story about the young nation making room for a figure from the past. In an unpublished fragment written while Irving was serving as minister to Spain under President John Tyler—this was a time when literary achievement could lead to a choice diplomatic appointment—he described what he was up to: “When I first wrote the Legend of Rip van Winkle my thought had been for some time turned towards giving a colour of romance and tradition to interesting points of our national scenery which is so deficient generally in our country.”