"Rip Van Winkle" and Self-Incurred Tutelage

       Washington Irving wrote "Rip Van Winkle" during the early publishing period of his literary career. He writes the story saying that he found in the room of a man, Diedrich Knickerbocker, who had recently disappeared. This makes the short story satirical because it builds on the idea of a men who suddenly go missing. Before the Revolutionary War, Rip Van Winkle helped and cared for everyone in town, except his family. Rip Van Winkle's wife often drove him into such a state that he left the house. When his wife followed him to his asylum, he left to hunt in the woods. There he met a strange man with liquor, who took him nearby to a place where other strange people were playing nine pegs. Van Winkle began drinking the liquor, only to pass out and not wake up for eighteen years. The story ends with him returning to town and explaining who he is; he learns that his sleep lasted eighteen years and during that time his wife died and America is free from Britain's rule. Rip Van Winkle was now free to live and converse with townspeople as he pleased, instead of taking orders from his wife or from Britain.  

       The story and form of "Rip Van Winkle" remind me a lot of what Alexis de Toqueville wrote about in Democracy in America and Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment?". Irving's short story is an example of bold, short American literature that presents social chaos, which Alexis de Toqueville told of American literature. The main character, Rip Van Winkle, portrays some self-incurred tutelage and later tries to force others into bonding themselves with his opinions. Rip Van Winkle faces social tutelage due to the way he treats his family and their response to it, especially Dame Van Winkle. He's forced to spend his time outside of the house, "the only side which, in truth, belongs to a henpecked husband" because he dislikes working his farm and caring for his family (Irving 939). His wife even drove him from conversing with friends outside of an inn. After sleeping for eighteen years, Rip was free of any social tutelage caused by his wife or the British. Instead of basking in freedom with the next generation, he tried to force them to believe his story verbatim and to believe what he knew about the strange, almost magical men that drugged him. Both Kant and Toqueville warn against using others' opinions verbatim instead of a person's own because the cycle of self-incurred tutelage then continues. 

Did Irving write as being Diedrich Knickerbocker in all or others of his works, or was it just in "Rip Van Winkle"?