Reviews Heinz Tschachler, Washington Irving and the fantasy of masculinity. Escaping the woman within. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. Walter Grünzweig Washington Irving seems not so “in” these days. This is only the second booklength study dealing with his person and oeuvre in this century, the first being Andrew Burstein’s biography The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving published in 2007. But then again, Irving is always present, if only because he is the only “early” American writer prominent in American literary history. With the exception of Irving, the foreground of the American Romantics from Emerson to Whitman is fairly empty. There are indeed some interesting authors born before the end of the Revolutionary War, such as James Kirke Pauling (1778), Timothy Flint (1780), or, a decade later, such as Fritz-Green Halleck (1790) or even William Cullen Bryant (1794), but they are hardly discussed, let alone taught. So Washington Irving, born a few months before the end of the War, in April 1783, is the actual beginning of the literary history of the young nation. Studying in the 1970s, as I did, the scholarly bias was on the “American Renaissance,” but at least in teaching, the early period required Washington Irving to make American literary history ‘whole.’ Heinz Tschachler’s new comprehensive study proves Washington Irving’s oeuvre deserves a full and renewed consideration. The importance of his book, however, does not become immediately accessible from the title. Washington Irving and “the Fantasy of Masculinity,” alongside the subtitle “Escaping the Woman Within” at first sounds like another biographical study. And, indeed, Tschachler, taking up C.G. Jung’s anima/ animus theory, seems to want to prove that Irving was uncertain of his gender identity. The most frequent motif of the book, often repeated in precisely these words, is Irving’s “imperfectly realized masculinity” (8). The first chapter of the book makes the claim that Irving, the human being, is characterized by “effeminacy, his unmanly softness and delicacy,” the reasons for which “[w]e can only speculate about” (25). Both biographical information as well as literary texts are used in order to AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0007 Reviews 138 prove a claim which, in my view, does not need to be made. Every once in a while, the argument even delves into classical biographical fallacy: “Irving himself, we have seen, often felt that he had to flee from his own ‘woman within.’ What, then, is Rip’s position in Irving’s quest for his own imperfectly realized masculinity? (81) The book’s subtitle suggests that the author managed to escape from his anima. That would be too bad but, thankfully, title beats subtitle, and masculinity remains a “fantasy.” Jung himself, basing his work on Freud’s thesis of human inherent bi-sexuality, saw those notions bound together. In fact, one would not even have to go to the psycho-analysts of modernism for such an understanding. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “Power,” one of his finest later essays, stated: “In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of the mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class” (Emerson 59). Thus, Emerson disassociates active and passive from men and women - what we are talking about here is a “sex of the mind” or, in Tschachler-via-Jung’s words, a fantasy. What we are getting in this book then, and why this study is so important, is a re-reading of Irving’s oeuvre through the perspective of gender. The animae in the protagonists, Rip van Winkle’s “troubled masculinity,” Ichabod Crane’s failure as a (male) capitalist, Irving’s personae traveling to and explaining Europe, mostly England and Spain, subversively disrupt the dominant heterosexual male patterns connected to the then emerging American capitalism. Through the category of gender, Tschachler turns a traditionalist mentality like Irving’s towards social and cultural criticism. A prime example of this transformation comes in the book’s second chapter, the subtitle of which is “Whimsicality, Gentility, and the Loss of Communal Manhood.” Aggressive American capitalism is best exemplified through the country’s first two major financial crises (“panics”) of 1819 and 1837, where an ideology of ruthless individualism contrasts with an earlier “communal” mode of existence. But Irving does not only present nostalgia for a vanished (pre-revolutionary) existence. His specifically gendered characters also become instruments for a critique of the inhumanity of this new economic system. Obviously, the values of gentility and patriarchy of the previous era were no more human and just than the present one, but as they are less aggressively gendered than the capitalist operator, they can serve as an ideological counter-image. Here Tschachler uses Raymond Williams’ notion of “residual beliefs,” which continue to survive in a new era and can gain a new, unexpected political and cultural effectiveness. In Tschachler’s hands, Irving even has new and surprising messages for our own time. For decades, fans of the American Romantics have been forced to live with these authors’ contradictory attitudes towards Jacksonianism. Systemic racism, openly genocidal tendencies with regard to Native Americanism, and an uncomfortable expansionism had to be stomached if one approved of the (populist) celebration of the new rule of the democratic individual. But when a portrait of Jackson entered the Oval Office with President Trump (through the kind offices of historian Walter Russell Mead), many Americanists Reviews 139 had to reconsider the wide-spread, albeit often ambivalent, fascination for the man on the 20$ bill. Maybe one would have done well listening to a “Federalist” like Irving and his warnings of a mobocracy. This is one of the insights of a gendered reading of Irving’s works. This perspective introduces Irving as a revisionist chronicler not just of America, but the world (travelling to Europe, a sign of effeminacy). Irving’s preferred version of Spain is its multicultural, formerly Arab part, countering the Catholic story of Spanish liberation we have been served up to the present. Irving rather is ready to “identify with the defeated in history,” an attitude he also develops in the American West, when he criticizes the injustice towards the Native Americans. If Irving is a conservative “Federalist” in his politics, a gendered reading of his work tells a different story culturally. Heinz Tschachler has written a number of remarkable studies in the past few years. His book on George Washington as a National Myth has a direct bearing on this interpretation of Irving, whose final work - and in Tschachler’s view magnum opus - is a long biography on the founding figure of the United States. His three books on the cultural significance of American money, the Dollar as text, so to say, serve him well to explain a creator as well as a questioner of national myth like Irving who, as literatus and businessman, has, as emphasized in the magnificent epilogue of Tschachler’s book, himself become an American myth. We - as well as Irving - are lucky to see such cultural expertise applied to a literary oeuvre. Having read Tschachler’s well-written book, I can now not wait to get back to my fairly complete edition of Irving’s works - and start looking at them with a fresh look. Because this is what Tschachler has done: he has re-read Irving for our time. Much to the dismay of feminists, Marxists too often downgraded gender to a Nebenwiderspruch (side contradiction) to be solved after the central Hauptwiderspruch of class would have been taken care of. Tschachler has shown how productive side contradictions can be - which was to be expected as much important insight comes from the margins. Tschachler’s study uses a fine example like Washington Irving to demonstrate it. Works Cited Ralph Waldo Emerson (1893). Power. Emerson’s Complete Works, Riverside Edition, Vol. VI, Conduct of Life. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 53-81. Walter Grünzweig TU Dortmund University