Answer to one of the following:
1. Read here about nine types of heroes in fiction, and justify how you would classify Huck Finn and Rip van Winkle. Which characteristics do they share and what draws them apart?
2. Can you draw contrasts and resemblances between the use of the sceneries of the "woods" and wilderness in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and "Rip van Winkle"? Justify
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2.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the wilderness serves as a recurring setting for Huck’s journey, offering the adventurous boy not just a space for introspection and self-discovery, but also enabling his desire to escape societal expectations and embrace a life of freedom. Though the setting encompasses a large part of the narrative, its significance and symbolism is particularly highlighted in Chapter 7, the chapter in which Huck initially escapes from his father through the river.
“I can stop anywhere I want to. Jackson’s Island is good enough for me; I know that island pretty well, and nobody ever comes there.”
In this chapter, Huck wants to escape not just the abuse of his father, but also the “civilizing” of the widow. Despite coming with their own set of dangers, the river and the woods serve as a refuge for Huck and allow him to plot his escape. In other words, the wilderness seems to represent freedom and serves as a refuge from a corrupt and restrictive society.
As for Rip Van Winkle, however, though the wilderness’s role shares some similarities with Huckleberry Finn’s, there are some important distinctions. For Rip Van Winkle, the titular character, the wilderness does offer an escape as well. Rip enters the mountains as a way to shirk his responsibilities and temporarily get away from his “termagent wife”. Thus, in this short story, the wilderness represents escapism more than it does freedom; it is not a space in which Rip actively seeks out his real desires, but rather a space in which he retreats to while passively ignoring his duties.
Here, we arrive at the first crucial distinction between the wilderness in Huckleberry Finn and Rip Van Winkle - not by analyzing the wilderness itself, but rather the protagonists as they interact with it. While Huck actively engages with the wilderness as a space for exploration, reflection, and for seeking freedom, Rip’s interactions seem to be passive and avoidant. This is particularly marked by the use of the active/passive voice respectively. With Huck, there’s a near constant use of the active voice (“The next minute I was a-spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of a bank.”), but with Rip, on the other hand, we see more usage of its passive counterpart (“Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair..”). Also especially notable is the way they physically enter nature: with Huck, after breakfast, he “cleared out up the river-bank”, demonstrating a rather lively kind of movement; Rip, however, either strolls “away into the woods” or “unconsciously” scrambles to the mountains. In essence, Huck’s engagement with nature is done actively; his decision to escape the two authority figures demonstrates a strong sense of agency, underlining his desire for freedom and control over his own destiny. Though his journey comes with its share of adversities, he ultimately demonstrates resourcefulness and an ability to adapt as he traverses the river. Rip, contrastingly, merely bumbles into nature almost unconsciously as a way to evade life. While Huck’s decision to seek out nature is a form of empowerment and self-discovery, Rip’s deep sleep in the wilderness symbolizes the exact opposite, a rejection of personal growth.
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As for the characterization and portrayal of nature in both works, there also appears to be an interesting distinction, reflecting primarily the thematic roles the wilderness plays and ultimately its impact on the story. In Huckleberry Finn, the river and the woods are described through concrete imagery. Huck, despite only being recently literate and still struggling with writing, is still able to paint the reader a vivid picture of his surroundings, describing not just what he sees, but also what he hears and smells. On top of this, he seems to display something close to a mastery of this craft - when he hears or smells something, he knows exactly what it is, even if he can’t quite put it into words. (“Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean - I don’t know the words to put it in.”; “...I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks…”) These realistic, true-to-nature descriptions stress Huck’s intrinsic connection with nature and give it a dynamic quality.
In contrast, Irving’s portrayal of the wilderness seems to be less grounded in reality and far more fantastical or dreamlike. Rip’s entrance into the mountain happens almost hypnotically as time seems to move in a haze (before eventually transporting the protagonist 20 years into the future). The woods are described as “wild” and “shagged” (“On the other side he looked down into a 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.”), evoking an almost expressionist imagery, characterizing it as distorted and hostile, bringing about a sense of anxiety - and finally coalescing into its supernatural quality. This surreal depiction of nature seems to ultimately be tied with Rip’s way of life; he enters the woods not with a sense of purpose, but as an escape. Thus, the wilderness serves as a mirror for this passive, detached attitude toward reality, where decades can slip by in an instant, mostly unnoticed.
Essentially, though the wilderness in both stories might initially appear to serve similar goals, upon closer examination, it's actually portrayed quite differently, highlighting some major distinctions in its role and symbolic nature for both characters. While for Huck, it serves as a space for him to actively engage with and learn from, for Rip, it’s merely a place for him to avoid his responsibilities temporarily and simply be a passive recipient of whatever life happens to bring upon him.
To insert Huck Finn and Rip Van Winkle in this list of hero categories, we need to look at their actions throughout their respective narratives.
First, I would classify Finn as a "reluctant hero". As I read, a reluctant hero is someone that, for instance, doesn't really seek for the heroic status, but at the end he is forced to due to the circumstances. Initially, Huck is only seeking for his own freedom and survival from the Widow and then from his father. However, later in the narrative he is forced to change as he builds a relationship with Jim, the fugitive slave. He deals with the fact that he needs to decide between giving him in or helping him escape. When he decides to protect Jim from being found, he had to act as a hero, not worrying about the code morals but his own. Therefore, he took the courage of a hero to take responsibility for Jim.
As for Rip, we can classify him as an “anti-hero”. Such as Finn, this type of hero is a forced hero. Throughout the narrative we can see that their qualities and traits are not from a traditional hero, we can see that Rip is not courageous, actually he is quite the opposite. He tries to runaway from his responsibilities, avoiding challenges and being lazy (“Times grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on; a tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant used. For a long while he used to console himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages…Here they used to sit in the shade through a long, lazy summer’s day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or telling endless sleepy stories about nothing.”), and especially from his wife’s constant demands of domestic life (“…for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fierce furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain-lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering”). In addition, his transformation at the end, when he “wakes up” from his 20 year sleep, doesn’t come from his will but by his acceptance to the new world’s reality. He is not proactive in understanding it, but he passively accepts his new position in the village, allowed to live from his responsibilities, contrary to how he used to live before (running away from responsibilities to living free from them) and also apart from Huck, who develops as a character, making moral decisions a having responsibility for Jim. Not having heroic actions at all, contrary to the actions Finn takes through the novel. We can say that his heroism is accidental because it comes from his sleep and not from his proactivism.
Ana Beatriz Gonçalves
1 - I think the website you might be referring to is this one (https://writersedit.com/inspiration/the-top-9-types-of-literary-heroes/), I’m not sure if it was just me who hadn’t access to the hyperlink, but I searched it up on Google and I’m keen that’s the one you might be referring to, so I’ll be using it as my guide. I couldn’t fit both heroes in only one “archetype” or “box”, rather, in a “mixture” — Huckleberry Finn, I would fit him in “reluctant hero” — “is forced to be there”, just like Finn is left with no choice but to fake his death, disguise himself as girl in order to obtain information, etc, and in — “everyman hero” — who is “an ordinary person, with no special abilities”; other than that, the most “out of the blue” factor about Huckle is the fact that he’s a pre-teen, and not an ordinary grown man. On the other hand, Rip Van Winkle may be a bit of an “anti-hero” (although that sounds a tad extreme for someone who’s just lazy and not villainous), for he was “ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to owing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible”. In contrast to Finn, Van Winkle certainly does not fit the “everyman hero” box, since he is a time traveler.
Generally, we can say that both texts use the wilderness as a space of escape from the constraints of civilization and society. In Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry escapes to the river and the woods to avoid the restrictive rules of society, abusive guardians, and his personal conflict with morality imposed by civilization. In Rip van Winkle, Rip retreats into the woods to avoid the pressures of work and the overbearing control of his wife, symbolizing an escape from domestic obligations and societal expectations. Thus, we have to distinguish in one significant aspect: while rip is escaping into the wilderness for the sake of escapism and running away from his responsibilities “his only alternative, to escape from the Labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to (…)stroll away into the woods” (p.35.). Whereas Huck is escaping due to his longing for freedom and liberty, but first and foremost to get away from his abusive father. The reasons therefore a very different, as in the first case it is a rather selfish decision to flee into the wilderness and in Huck´s case more of a necessity and self-protection. This shows that the wilderness has different purposes in the two stories. In Rip's case the Hudson River is described and romanticized as breathtaking, stunning natural scenery “with the reflection of a purple cloud”, fulfilling its purpose of distracting “poor Rip” from his worries and burdens. Huck on the other hand needs to conquer the wilderness to get away but also to survive, which is why he claims the island as his own.
A similarity of the woods in both texts is that it is friend and enemy at the same time. Both, Huck and Rip have a close connection to nature and feel safe and home in it. On the other hand, there are many dangers waiting for them in the woods, nevertheless I would say both love to be in the nature and get great advantages out of it.
Comment by
Elena Kieschke
Not a time traveler! My bad, what I wanted to convey was that his “superpower” would be sleeping for 20 years straight
2) Both in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and "Rip van Winkle" the woods represent a place to escape their lives. Huckleberry Finn from his Pap and the Widow and Rip van Winkle from his wife and the “labor of the farm” (page 35). Rip considered his wife to be a terror. However, for Rip the woods are also a place where he lost 20 years of his life, He is the guy who slept through the revolution, while the others were fighting for the independence.
Moreover, both were meandering through the woods with their gun. Both are surprised to find “any human being in this lonely and unfrequented place” (page 35). However, Huck is glad when the person he finds is Jim, the “nigger”. While Rip is “rather shy and distrustful of this new acquaintance” (page 35).
These two characters are like each other in a sense that both are looking for freedom from something.
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