Stateless Citizens in Nineteenth Century American Literature: “Rip van Winkle”, “The Seven Vagabonds” and “A Wizard from Gettysburg”

Abstract

The article seeks to explore the issue of citizenship through an analysis of three nineteenth-century short stories, all of which have tramps as characters. The author of each of these tales exhibits a certain hesitancy that they clearly felt in relation to this issue. In Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle”, the shift from British subject to American citizen explores American identity and the political and experiential ties that bind people to the state. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Seven Vagabonds” describes an alternative America peopled by vagrant citizens who create a heterotopia. The narrative allows Hawthorne to analyse some political ambiguities affecting the American nation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kate Chopin’s “A Wizard from Gettysburg” portrays the loss of citizenship as an example of the lack of belonging in postbellum America. While Hawthorne is the only writer who establishes a firm sense of American citizenship, in that he depicts a society of vagrants as an alternative to his contemporary America, Irving and Chopin emphasize the loss of citizenship as a result of political turmoil, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, respectively. The article also discusses the role of the genre of local narrative in creating the figure of the tramp that represents the stateless citizen and suggests that local narratives reveal the limits of citizenship in a nation in ways that may be not perceived by national narratives.