American Mythology, Part II
Yesterday before work I went to the library and checked back out the Bryson book. (See yesterday's post.) I'm not going to re-read it completely, just the parts with the most interesting history, the parts that separate fact from myth. For while history is very interesting to me as well, it is, at this time, myth that I am primarily fascinated with.
Starting with Plymouth Rock. The Pilgrims never set foot on it, at least not on the Mayflower voyage. In fact there is nothing indicating that the Pilgrims even noticed the rock. Its first recorded appearance is 1715, almost a century after the Mayflower voyage. The image that most of us have of the Mayflower and its passengers comes from a poem by a Welsh woman (yes, Welsh, not American at all; she never even set foot on America) called Ms. Felicia Dorothea Hemans. Also, the term Pilgrims was not used of them until two hundred years later. They called themselves Saints, and they called all others Strangers. Nor were they Puritans. They were Separatists, because their desire was to leave the Church of England (which they of course did), while Puritans were those who remained in the Church of England but wished to purify it. The Mayflower itself was held in no high regard. The man who wrote the first history of the Plimoth colony, William Bradford, never once mentioned the ship by name, and three years after its famous ocean crossing, it was broken up and sold for lumber and parts.
This is only the beginning of American myth, and, strictly speaking, hardly myth at all because it is not a complete story. However, what seems more interesting to me than reading a myth in complete, fleshed out form, is getting its shape by examining historical truth; almost as if one was shining a great light on history, illuminating the truth, while the shadow that truth cast became a myth. This is the sort of picture one gets when reading Bryson's book. He does not put forth the mythical stories themselves: we already know them well enough (although someone, perhaps, should put them forth in a form that acknowledges and celebrates the fact that they are myth). Instead the reader feels acutely the mythical quality of what we have been told by discovering what exactly is truth. Hence, the great light and the shadow of myth.
That's all I'm going to post for the moment.
Starting with Plymouth Rock. The Pilgrims never set foot on it, at least not on the Mayflower voyage. In fact there is nothing indicating that the Pilgrims even noticed the rock. Its first recorded appearance is 1715, almost a century after the Mayflower voyage. The image that most of us have of the Mayflower and its passengers comes from a poem by a Welsh woman (yes, Welsh, not American at all; she never even set foot on America) called Ms. Felicia Dorothea Hemans. Also, the term Pilgrims was not used of them until two hundred years later. They called themselves Saints, and they called all others Strangers. Nor were they Puritans. They were Separatists, because their desire was to leave the Church of England (which they of course did), while Puritans were those who remained in the Church of England but wished to purify it. The Mayflower itself was held in no high regard. The man who wrote the first history of the Plimoth colony, William Bradford, never once mentioned the ship by name, and three years after its famous ocean crossing, it was broken up and sold for lumber and parts.
This is only the beginning of American myth, and, strictly speaking, hardly myth at all because it is not a complete story. However, what seems more interesting to me than reading a myth in complete, fleshed out form, is getting its shape by examining historical truth; almost as if one was shining a great light on history, illuminating the truth, while the shadow that truth cast became a myth. This is the sort of picture one gets when reading Bryson's book. He does not put forth the mythical stories themselves: we already know them well enough (although someone, perhaps, should put them forth in a form that acknowledges and celebrates the fact that they are myth). Instead the reader feels acutely the mythical quality of what we have been told by discovering what exactly is truth. Hence, the great light and the shadow of myth.
That's all I'm going to post for the moment.