“The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving, is a tale written in the romanticism period. It displays many characteristics of romanticism. In a lot of writings during this time period, nature is a big theme. It was important in this time and you can tell by how much it is displayed in their writing. For example, in “The Devil and Tom Walker”, when Tom first ventures out into the forest, the author uses great detail to describe the appearance of the forest. “The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday… 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 242). I like all the details that authors use in this time period to describe nature, it makes the writing a lot more interesting and better to read.
When comparing “The Devil and Tom Walker” to “Rip Van Winkle”, I found a lot of similarities between the two of Washington Irving’s stories. They are both a type of legend. “The Devil and Tom Walker” is a legend that takes place in Boston, Massachusetts. “Rip Van Winkle” took place in New York. Both of these stories have the theme of the nagging wife. In “The Devil and Tom Walker”, Tom’s wife nags him about taking the devil’s deal because she is very selfish and she wants all the money for herself. The only reason that Tom does not take the Devil’s deal in the first place is because he refuses to listen to his wife. Only after she disappears does he decide to go after the Devil and take the deal. In “Rip Van Winkle”, Rip is described as a “henpecked husband” or one who is constantly nagged by his wife and is very obedient to her. Rip goes into the mountains because he wanted to get away from his wife, and that is how he ended up getting into the situation that he got into. I think that Washington Irving had kind of a messed up view of women since he keeps depicting them as nagging trouble makers.
“The Devil and Tom Walker” and “Rip Van Winkle” showed a writing style of the romanticism period. They both used a lot of detail in describing things and they also had a lot of nature themes in them. I found these tales to be a lot more interesting than any of the other things that we have been reading in this class in a while because they were a lot easier to understand than the poems of the fireside poets and they are also much more entertaining and interesting than the poems and writings of the puritan and rationalism writings.
Good details - be sure to review a literary criticism and use for support.
ReplyDelete