립 밴 윙클 대 그의 아내: 미국 남성주의 문학의 탄생

Rip Van Winkle vs. Dame Van Winkle:The Creation of American Masculine Literature

Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” presents the story of the henpecked husband Rip who runs away from his “termagant wife” and from the responsibilities of civilized society into nature, Kaatskill Mountains. He stays one night in the Mountains to come back 20 years later with a new life in which he not only regains his masculine self and freedom but reestablishes his patriarchal authority and his social status. In the story Rip rejects to do “what he ought to do,” what the wife embodies, but ultimately gets “his neck out of the yoke of matrimony” as well as his immunity from all the domestic and social duties he has to fulfill as a member of civilization. Irving’s story indeed establishes a male-fantasy, masculine wish-fulfillment literary tradition in the history of American literature. This paper thus attempts to examine in the story how American masculine literature, also anti-feminist and misogynistic, has been created at the very beginning point of “the American imagination.”Following closely the storylines of Rip, Dame, and their daughter Judith, this study traces the meaning of masculine narrative, the role of feminine space, war of sexes, and Irving’s misogynistic imagination. Although Dame’s narrative often challenges Rip’s patriarchal authority and subverts the conventional sexual hierarchy between man and woman in marriage, the story in essence reaffirms the value of men’s culture and patriarchal order, reducing women’s narrative space to that of negativity and absence. Irving’s imagination here opens a new era of masculine literary tradition, heralding a significant body of 19th and 20th century men’s writings in America.