'Rip Van Winkle" is an early work that casts the American woman as the cultural villain. Analyze the character of Dame Van Winkle in the story and discuss the significance Irving adds to her death

This is the version of the Van Winkle marriage that the story presents, but it is not difficult to peer behind the curtain of irony in the narrator's voice and see things in another light. The fact is, although she has become an incurable nag, Dame Van Winkle has reason to be angry. If Rip is always willing to "assist a neighbor even in the roughest toil," including "building stone-fences," why are his own fences "continually falling to pieces?" If he has found time to be the man who played with the neighborhood children, "made their playthings, taught them to fly kites and shoot marbles, and told them long stories," why are his own children "as ragged and wild as if they belonged to nobody?" It is true that "everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence" from Dame Van Winkle, but it is hard to see what Rip might be doing to earn praise from her.