How Does Rip Van Winkle Relate To Self Reliance

In “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving he writes about a simple man, Rip Van Winkle, who does just enough to get by in life. He lives in a village by the catskill mountains, and is loved by everyone in the village. He is an easy going man, who spends most of his days at the village inn talking with his neighbors, fishing all day, and wandering the mountains with his dog to refuge from his wife the thorn on his side. On one of his trips to the mountains Rip Van Winkle stumbles upon a group of men who offer him a drink, and that drink changes everything for Van Winkle. He later wakes up, twenty years later, and returns to his village were he notices nothing is the same from when he left. He learns that King George III is no longer in charge,

but George Washington. Van Winkle an older man now with a full beard, and all his old friends dead, goes right back to his old ways. Living with his daughter, just getting by, and telling his story of how he slept for so long and came back to a different world.

In “Self Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he promotes the importance of self reliance as an individual, and in society. Individuality to Emerson Opposed the traditional ideas of society, and to him it meant to oppose the conformity and consistency in society. He believes that the majority of people have given up their self reliance because of their fear of judgement by society. To be an individual, Emerson stresses that one has to be a risk taker, and disregard all things external.
At first I thought Rip Van Winkle differed completely to what Emerson spoke about. Van winkle was an ordinary man who was the farthest thing from a risk taker. He was a simple man, but at second glance he was not so different from what Emerson wrote about in “Self Reliance”. Van Winkle returns to his village after sleeping nearly twenty years in the mountains and find everything different. When he returned he could have tried to assimilate to a new way of life and forget all things in the past, but he did not. Emerson emphasized Individuality and to trust thyself, and I think Van Winkle expressed his Individuality when he came back to town and spoke his stories of the past. He did not rely on other people's judgments, according to Emerson

that would have been cowardly. Van Winkle was a man and did not conform to the new society he stumbled upon after his long sleep. I think Van Winkle was his own individual and he displayed that with his actions, and not caring of how society viewed him. At first I saw Rip Van Winkle as the opposite of everything Emerson wrote about, but soon after i realized they had more similarities in self reliance. Van Winkle knew his worth, and keep things under his feet, this was made apparent when he did not want to let go of his stories of the past, and the way things used to be before his long nap. He could have returned to his village and forgot about his past, and learned the new ways of society, but he didn't. Van Winkle returned and it was like he never left, he went right back to his ways like nothing changed. The majority of people are the same, scared to be individuals because of the judgment they might face. Emerson mentions some of the greatest thinkers, Plato, Moses, and Jesus. These men were all great individuals who were outcasts and judged by their peers. Van winkle was a sort of an outcast because of his thoughts, beliefs, and the past he held on to. He didn't let the current societal norms change him or his beliefs. Van Winkle is not the typical risk taker but in his own way he took risk, he challenged the new society he encountered, and was self reliant. Van Winkle’s self reliance brought him peace, and Emerson views self reliance as the only principle that can bring one peace.