"Rip Van Winkle" takes place in colonial New York, before and after the American Revolution. The story has three primary settings: the Van Winkle farm, the town inn, and the Catskill Mountains. Diedrich Knickerbocker first introduces Rip on the farm he has inherited from his family, which takes more effort than it's worth to maintain, as far as Rip is concerned:
[T]hough his patrimonial estate had dwindled away under his management, acre by acre, until there was little more left than a mere patch of Indian corn and potatoes, yet it was the worst-conditioned farm in the neighborhood.
Everything about Rip's farm and dilapidated house is topsy-turvy for an American folk hero. Instead of investing his labor in his own property (the cornerstone of American self-making), Rip gives his labor to his neighbors. Instead of running his household, Rip lets his wife call the shots. Dame Van Winkle's tyranny drives Rip out of the house much as British tyranny drove the American colonies to strike out on their own. But Rip's disinterest in maintaining his household and property also represents Irving's ambivalence about American independence and self-making.
Rip hides from Dame Van Winkle at the town inn, where Irving further explores his ambivalence about national identity. At the inn, Rip and his fellow townsmen sit beneath a portrait of King George III,
talking listlessly over village gossip or telling endless sleepy stories about nothing [...] [P]rofound discussions […] sometimes took place when by chance an old newspaper fell into their hands from some passing traveler. How solemnly they would listen to the contents, […] and how sagely they would deliberate upon public events some months after they had taken place.
The inn is the center of public life, where neighbors come together as fellow subjects of the King of England. It represents the rural town's odd position between idyllic and old-fashioned life in the countryside, where people bond over mere neighborly gossip, and the fast pace and high stakes of the modern political world. The outdated newspapers demonstrate that political change is a source of conversation but little actual consequence in the village. Without the old newspapers, the villagers would never know the world was changing. The collective sense of what it means to be a subject of the king in an American colony can change with every outdated and disposable newspaper, giving the sense that national politics are much ado about nothing.
The third setting, in the picturesque Catskill Mountains, is where the magic of the story happens. The supernatural spirit Rip encounters there, local folk hero Captain Hendrick Hudson, challenges the story's historical truth but provides a longer-lasting cultural touchstone than anyone can find in a disposable newspaper. The story's Postscript appropriates Native American stories about the mountains, deepening the sense that the Catskills provide the region with a cultural history much older than Revolutionary politics. Time moves slowly in the mountains, allowing Rip to remain unchanged throughout a 20-year period of major political turmoil. Similar to Hendrick Hudson, Rip becomes
a chronicle of the old times “before the war.”
Like the Scottish Highlands in Walter Scott's Waverley novels (which Irving surely had in mind when writing this story), the mountains allow Rip to resist the fast-changing political world. He returns as an unwitting folk hero in his own right, nostalgic proof that American identity is as old as the mountains and more steadfast than any political ideology.
