Relationship between Rip Van Winkle and his wife Dame Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle is a “simple, good-natured fellow” with a faithful dog, a son, a daughter, and a domineering wife Dame Van Winkle. Rip is a popular member of the village, but he is not as welcome by his wife because he is lazy and unproductive at home. In short, he is “ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own.”

His wife never lets him forget his responsibilities to the family, or the many ways he fails to fulfill them: “his wife kept continually dinning in his ears about his idleness, his carelessness, and the ruin he was bringing on his family. Morning, noon, and night, her tongue was incessantly going, and everything he said or did was sure to produce a torrent of household eloquence.” Rip usually doesn’t argue with his wife: “He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing.”

In the eyes of Rip and his sympathetic neighbors, Dame Van Winkle is stern and unreasonable. The narrator calls Rip as “an obedient hen-pecked husband,” and places his wife in the category of “shrews,” calling her a “termagant,” or overbearing, wife: “A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.”

She treated his dog, Wolf, the same way: "Rip's sole domestic adherent was his dog Wolf, who was as much hen-pecked as his master; for Dame Van Winkle regarded them as companions in idleness, and even looked upon Wolf with an evil eye, as the cause of his master's going so often astray." 

Apparently, she finds fault with Rip because he does no profitable work, does not help around the house, and shows no interest in the well being of his children or his wife. One autumn day, Rip feels so oppressed by the haranguing of his wife that he escaped to the mountains.

How readers are to see Dame Van Winkle’s character is a central question in the story: Is she a shrew, or is her anger at her husband understandable? For Rip the answer is clear. When he returns to the village to find that his wife has died, he feels the news as “a drop of comfort.”  So in simple, their relationship isn’t a positive one - Rip's wife hates his laziness, and he hates her nagging.