Abstract This article takes up the literary history of the republican ideal of informed and active citizens—and its antithesis, ignorant and passive citizens—through the political afterlife of Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving’s story became an enduring resource for political commentary and critique—from antebellum debates about slavery and sectional conflict to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights–era speeches. Despite the extensive body of scholarship on “Rip Van Winkle,” its absorption into US political commentary remains unexamined. The first section of the article revisits the period that is dramatically absent from Irving’s story (the revolution Rip sleeps through) by examining a little-known origin for US citizenship: a series of congressional resolutions that established political membership without public knowledge or consent. Building on this, the second section considers the story’s internal departure from founding narratives of consent. The third section tracks the transformation of “Rip Van Winkle” from a singular short story into a highly portable political metaphor (including “The Rip Van Winkle of the South,” an epithet for North Carolina that dates back to the Nullification Crisis). By examining the story’s political histories and afterlives, the article shows how Irving’s titular hero became a popular shorthand for “unconscious citizenship,” a form of political membership made rote by a lack of knowledge and agency.
Carrie Hyde (Fri,) studied this question.