Washington Irving Stereotypes

At a glance, you would think that Irving’s stories are just generally entertaining pieces of work, and aren’t necessarily pinpointing a certain group of people, right? Wrong. Irving’s texts incorporates some issues of gender equality and victimization within the stories. In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and The Devil and Tom Walker, there were many examples of how Washington Irving discriminated against the female gender in these three texts.

First, within The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Irving creates the character Ichabod Crane for being known as to having “feminine characteristics.” He negates the fact that he is a schoolmaster and that the career is looked down upon, or not as “manly” of a job; being a teacher back in the days

This portrayal of Dame Van Winkle exhibits that Irving thinks lowly of women and that they’re controlling, manipulative people that perpetually aggravate men. A quote that represents that is “For a long while he used to console himself, when driven from home...” She made him so miserable that he didn’t even want to be at his home with his family. It is understandable that he would write this so the story is more interesting, but it’s disappointing that the scenario is repeated multiple times in many of his other works because it’s so degrading to women. The view of women being controlling and manipulative is also seen during the part when Rip finds out that his wife is dead, resulting in him being not necessarily sad about it. The controlling and manipulative aspect ties in here because it is just that which resulted in Rip not being affected that greatly by the event. When he is told by his daughter that Dame had passed away, he was more concerned about her not realizing that it was her own father rather than being sorrowful about Dame’s passing - “The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught his daughter and her child in his arms. ‘“I am your father!’” Overall in this story, it is quite obvious that Washington Irving looks at women

She died at age 17 and he never married or found love after that tragic death. I think as he grew older, he developed these rough feelings towards any women due to possible trials with different girlfriends and had bad experiences. For the purpose of the comedic views of Rip Van Winkle and The Devil and Tom Walker, I think the whole bothersome wife versus the discontented husband was set in place for these two texts. In this day and age now, the comedic part of that isn’t what appeals to the readers anymore even though it did when these stories were written. Today, there are more controversial issues that are being recognized and one significant component of that is