“The Devil and Tom Walker” is a fairly simple story. Tom Walker is a man who is so greedy that he has a reputation for it, and he has a wife that is the same (Irving 242). Their relationship is nothing close to loving and they hide things from each other. Tom meets “Old Scratch” and is reluctant to tell her. She goes out and basically sells her soul for nothing. Tom does not even care that his wife is gone, but is interested in a treasure and the valuables that his wife took. He makes a deal with the Devil also, and scams people his whole life. In his twilight years he tries to find a way to beat the Devil, but is eventually taken away (Irving 250).
A strong theme in this is about greed. Tom and his wife are both very greedy, and this gets them into trouble. This is a good Romanticism-related theme. They are consumed by material needs, but transcendentalists are about nature and really the opposite of greed. The moral is that greed is not a way to live life. There are finer things in mortality than material wealth. The story does a good job with description, which shows that this was written in the Romanticism period. Walker takes a shortcut through a swamp, and it is described with immense detail like “the swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday, and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood” (Irving 243). I would consider the amount of detail to be unnecessary. Irving could have left it by just saying it was a swamp. Everyone knows what swamps are like, but it was the writing style of the time.
Both of Irving’s stories are pretty similar. They both have a wife that is unlikeable, which is kind of weird. It would seem like a simple part of a story if he had a termagant wife in only one of them, but it seems like he must have some sort of problems with his own wife. A difference in the stories would be the main characters. According to Don D’Ammassa “despite his [Rip Van Winkle’s] willingness to work hard without pay to help others, he has never been able to make a financial success of his small farm or at any other job he has attempted” (D’Ammassa). Tom Walker is the opposite because he becomes a usurer. His job becomes ripping people off and making money. Both works also have similar themes. The theme in “Rip Van Winkle” is to not run away and let life fly by; and in “The Devil and Tom Walker” it is to not be greedy, but also to live a non-materialistic life. They both have lessons about being more carefree in life and just living. They also embody Romanticism. Almost the majority of the stories are description, but “Rip Van Winkle” does a better job with bringing in nature. Rip has to “escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife” to go into nature (Irving). The stories are quite similar in a lot of ways with only a few differences.
D'Ammassa, Don. "'Rip Van Winkle'." Encyclopedia of Fantasy and Horror Fiction. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2006. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= EFHF0432&SingleRecord=True (accessed December 6, 2011).
Irving, Washington. “The Devil and Tom Walker.” Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 242-250. Print.
Irving, Washington. "4. Rip Van Winkle By Washington Irving. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story." Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and Hundreds More. Web. 06 Dec. 2011.
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