Nature and Irving's Work

Think of England. It’s a place that surely has it’s beauty, but it’s not very large. The types of landscape that one sees there is nothing compared to the vast landscape of America, which is exponential bigger than England. Many of the settlers that came here came from cities, and were presented with the vast amount of nature that America had to offer since it was so huge. These landscapes of America are very evident in the works of Washington Irving, who describes them in his works “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”. In Sleepy Hollow, Irving paints a picture of a drowsy little town near a “little valley…one of the quietest places in the world” with a small brook “gliding” through it. Irving uses his amazing writing abilities to go into extensive detail about the landscape and create a drowsy feeling. In the movie that I have seen based upon this story, the woods are old, dark and creepy, which is the vibe that I get from this reading.

In “Rip Van Winkle”, Irving talks of the town that Van Winkle lives in as a place where “the blue tints of the upland melt away into the fresh green of the nearer landscape”. When Irving explains the part where Van Winkle goes out squirrel hunting, he writes that through “an opening in the trees, [Van Winkle] could overlook all the lower county for many a mile of rich woodland”. This picture brings to mind a beautiful scene. I had already had an advantage when reading this and creating a mental picture, however, because the Wishbone episode depicted the landscape very well. However, for the people who haven’t seen the Wishbone episode, this phrasing and description is amazing; it provides a since of beauty that can make one feel emotions that can’t be described, as anyone who has seen a beautiful scene like this can attest. He goes on to look at the “deep mountain glen, wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun”. This is where the story moves on from lovely and beautiful into kind of creepy. This is right before he meets the straggler with the keg, so we know something eerie is about to happen since the landscape is creepier now.

These stories take place in a very close area to each other. In “Sleepy Hollow”, Irving mentions the Hudson River, which runs through present-day New York. The story of “Rip Van Winkle”, takes place in the Catskill Mountains, which also run through New York, and the Hudson is mentioned as well whenever Van Winkle is squirrel hunting. This probably accounts for why the landscapes in each of the stories are so similar, since they take place in almost the same place. It also makes since that Irving would write about this area because it is near where he grew up, so he would know a lot about the landscape and the people living there.