76 The Rise of the American Short Story, Washington Irving, and German Fairy Tales

As part of his goal to support himself through his fiction, Charles Brockden Brown brought the gothic to America in 1798 with his novel Wieland. He wrote five more novels, most of them similarly gothic-sentimental. None were particularly successful. At the same time he was publishing his novels, he tried to supplement his income with literary magazines, such as The Monthly Magazine and American Review, and later The Literary Magazine and American Register, established in Philadelphia.

In 1803, Brown visited a little known nineteen-year-old author named Washington Irving. Brown wanted Irving to join his staff and contribute to his Literary Magazine because of his humorous essays from the Morning Chronicle. Irving declined to contribute or join the magazine. Brown died in 1810. Irving continued to tinker with various literary forms, joined the army during America’s conflict with Britain, and traveled quite a bit through the late 1810s. He moved to England in 1815, experienced economic turmoil while his business went through bankruptcy, then began working on a series of sketches inspired by German folk tales and his travels.

In 1819, Irving began publishing one of the most successful literary collections published in antebellum (pre-Civil War) America, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 

In 1820, just as Irving was publishing the second volume of the Sketch Book, Sydney Smith published a scathing assessment of America’s contribution to global culture in The Edinburgh Review:

During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the Arts, for Literature, or even for the statesman-like studies of Politics of Political Economy. Confining ourselves to our own country [of Britain], and to the period that has elapsed since they had an independent existence, we would ask, Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Wilberforces? — where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys? — their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys and Malthuses? — their Porsons, Parrs, Burneys, or Blomfields? — their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores, or Crabbes? — their Sidonses, Kembles, Keans, or O’Neals? — their Wilkies, Laurences, Chantrys? — or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples? In so far as we know, there is no such parallel to be produced from the whole annals of this self-adulating race. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? … Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a Slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture? When these questions are fairly and favourably answered, their laudatory epithets may be allowed: But, till that can be done, we would seriously advise them to keep clear of superlatives.^[1]

Smith captured the general opinion about American literature during that time—the burgeoning democratic experiment did not appear to contribute much. And Smith provocatively lists the lack of a literary culture alongside the prevalence of slavery.

In fact, up to this point in American literature, many students are puzzled why the texts count as “literature.” It feels nothing like Shakespeare or Daniel Defoe. The most popular early American publications were never intended as literature. North America’s first published poet, Anne Bradstreet, wrote poems for her private edification and immediate circle of friends and family.

A smattering of sentimental novels was published during the Revolutionary Period (1770s through the late 1780s). But what now passes for canonical “literature”—at least the kind commonly taught in secondary education—began taking shape just after the Early Republic (1790s through early 1800s) but before the “American Renaissance” (1830-Civil War), a term coined by F.O. Matthiessen to capture the zeitgeist associated with Emersonian Transcendentalism. In between the Revolutionary period and the American Renaissance emerged the beginnings of a literary nationalism, captured by Walter Channing’s 1815 literary declaration of independence:

Our literary delinquency may principally be resolved into our dependence on English literature. We have been so perfectly satisfied with it, that we have not yet made an attempt towards a literature of our own. … So easy is it for us to read English books, that we have hardly thought it worth while to write any for ourselves.^[2]

Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”—a short story—was one of the first blockbusters. This story, along with several others, was included in Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

It’s not irrelevant that the 1810s also saw the the beginnings of the “mythification” of the United States, as writers such as Irving looked back on the young country and attempted to trace a consistent arc from Columbus to the Puritans and famous Revolutionary figures. Washington Irving was himself named for the first president, George Washington. It’s also during this period when the Second Great Awakening (1795-1835) led to a renewed interest in the Puritans—a legacy that did not play a large role during the Revolutionary period.

Irving’s career is helpful for tracing the path from the neo-Classicism and quasi-secular outlook of the Revolutionary figures (many were neo-classical thinkers who embraced an Enlightenment-Deist worldview skeptical of orthodox religiosity) to a political and cultural atmosphere that had become more heavily imbued with religious fervor inspired by the Second Great Awakening. This short video offers a broad summary of Irving’s biography, which overlaps fairly well with the entirety of the New Republic and rise of American literature:

Irving’s short stories were so influential that American artists from the 1840s and later immediately canonized him. The painting below is titled “Scene on the Hudson (Rip Van Winkle),” painted in 1845 by James Hamilton. He belonged to the Hudson River School of painters, which was an outgrowth of the American Romantic movement.

The Romantics belonged to an era known as the “American Renaissance.” Most students are probably familiar with authors from this period: Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Fuller, etc. American literature (or, conventional views of what counts as the “American canon”) really came into its own during the 1840s. However, the American Romantic movement was highly indebted to Irving’s legacy.

To understand why it took so long for American literature to take shape, and why the short story quickly became the quintessential American literary form, it will help to understand how the print market worked during the Early Republic.

Print Culture in the Early Republic

In his chapter on this period of American letters, “Building a National Literature: The United States 1800-1890,” Robert A. Gross offers a summary of how rapid political and economic changes during the 1790s led to the rise of the American short story.

So the New Republic finally developed an active print industry in North America, and this development was necessary before “literature” could really take off. But even then it took a while for truly professional authors (individuals who could make a living from writing literature) to fully emerge. Irving was one of the first to discover success by publishing short stories.

Why?

“A Brief History of the Short Story in America” offers one explanation:

With no periodical market for the novel in the U.S., writers of fiction in the first half of the 19th century borrowed the form of the short tale from German authors such as Wilhelm Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffmann and altered the form to suit American newspapers. The result was the literary form we now know as the short story. … Because urban populations in America were so unstable, workers moving from city to city as new lands and employment opportunities arose, newspapers found that serializing novels was bad business: advertisement space was worthless alongside a chapter from a novel that no one lived in town long enough to read.^[3].

Writers such as Irving turned to the German fairy tale in part because the kunstmärchen, as it was known, effectively contained an entire story within a limited amount of space. The short story was a perfect fit for the market.

The American Short Story and the German Kunstmärchen

As mentioned above, Irving’s tales borrow techniques from a late 18th-century German literary movement, much like Charles Brockden Brown’s sentimental gothicism did.

In fact the comparison with Brown is entirely apt. As the chapter on Brown explains, Wieland owes a debt to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a sentimental novel written in the epistolary mode that focuses on deep emotion, to the point of suicide. All of those elements play out in Wieland.

If Brown’s literary career is indebted to Goethe’s first breakthrough novel, Irving’s own career can be tied to Goethe’s innovations in the German short story tradition at the turn of the century, termed “kunstmärchen,” roughly translated as “literary fairy tale.” These tales belong to a broader folklore category that can include mythical creatures and enchantment. Many of us become familiar with this genre through Disney movies, which in turn are based on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1812), including “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids,” “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” and many more.

Credo Reference’s background to the development of 18th-century German kunstmärchen is thick and fascinating and I recommend that students give it a look. The shorter version is this: Although the “literary fairy tale” initially took shape in early 18th-century France, Germany’s obsession with folk tales allowed late 18th-century German Romantics to master the genre and exploit its full potential. Christoph Martin Wieland seems to be a key figure here, as well as Johann Karl August Musäus. The latter’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Folk Tales of the Germans, 1782–6) was particularly influential on German Romantics such as Goethe.

The Credo entry on kunstmärchen summarizes:

All the major romantic writers, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Adelbert Chamisso, and E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote fairy tales that reveal a great familiarity with the French and oriental literary tradition, as well as the oral tradition and folklore in Germany. In addition, the romantic writers were either inspired by or rebelled against Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Das Märchen” (“The Fairy Tale,” 1795), a highly complex metaphorical depiction of the chaos wrought by the French Revolution and a call for a new enlightened society.^[4]

Like Goethe, many German Romantics used the fairy tale form to comment on contemporary events, albeit from a distance.

Irving’s source for “Rip Van Winkle” was “Peter Klaus,” a kunstmärchen by Johann Karl Christoph Nachtigal. Here’s what Irving borrowed, according to Andrew Burstein’s The Original Knickerbocker:

• Peter is a goatherd from a generic village
• He goes into the mountains, looking for his missing goats.
• When Peter looks for them, a “knightly man” calls to him and leads him to an area where others are playing a “small pin bowling” game.
• Peter tastes their wine and falls asleep.
• He wakes up with a long beard. His goats and dog are gone.
• He finds his way back to the village, sees people dressed unfamiliarly, and feels out of place.
• When conversing with a woman, however, things become clear. He asks about her father. She says his name is “Peter Klaus,” but “it’s been twenty years that we’ve been looking for him…” Others begin to recognize him once again.^[5]

As with Brown’s borrowing of elements from Goethe’s Sorrows (via Godwin’s Caleb Williams), however, Irving managed to adapt the German folk tale to the unique conditions of the U.S. in the early 19th-century. Irving’s short stories feel American. They feel like folk art for the emerging United States, yet they’re also completely imbued with German folklore elements.

Irving’s Idle Story-Teller

While the origins of the American short story (and the short story more generally!) is easily explained by print market conditions in the Early Republic, it’s important to keep in mind that, thematically at least, authors such as Washington Irving saw themselves in slight tension with the highly industrious American economy.

Here’s a helpful excerpt from Sean Kelly’s “American Idle: Washington Irving, Authorship, and the Echoes of Native American Myth in ‘Rip Van Winkle'”:

In other words, Irving and some of his fictional characters tended to be aligned with qualities such as idleness that cast them as outsiders to the dominant American culture. If Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography offers a model for what the new citizen should look like—ever industrious and aiming toward self-perfection—the most influential American author in the New Republic often explores values that are the exact opposite of Franklin. This contrast between Franklin’s hyper-productivity and literature’s focus on leisurely pursuits is one of the keys to understanding how American literature evolved in the 19th-century—in tension with an emerging industrial economy.

As you read Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and other stories by Irving, look for these tensions between industry and idleness.