Early Theorizing - American Mythology

[talkstowolves]

Some of my first formalized thoughts on American Mythology, taken verbatim from an e-mail to a friend:

America has no mythology... like other cultures have mythology.

That's right. We don't have the ethnic background for it.

Okay, okay, so the Native Americans have a mythology, yes. But that's not American. That's Native American.

You see, America is made up of people who abandoned their own cultures (for the most part) and came to a
new land to make a fresh start. They brought their beliefs with them, but those beliefs had to be adapted
to (and ended up being molded by) the new land in which the people found themselves. (I am especially
interested in examining that critical change point by researching new immigrants to the USA and how their
personal mythos is warped in the first-generation Americans born to immigrant parents.) Because people
were eventually stripped of their ethnic identity and thrown into the so-called melting-pot of America,
their mythologies faded away.

Of course, a contemporary mythology has slowly evolved in America, but it's actually a relatively unhealthy mythology. The mythology of America involves it being:


the land of plenty (but often the land of waste considering the huge portions, etc.);

unparallelled beauty (Americans idolize unhealthy concepts of beauty represented by supermodels that
aren't even real. And this high bar of beauty can be met by, well, pretty much no American.);

the land of the young (Americans are pathetically scared of aging and death-- hence the obsession with
plastic surgery);

the land of purity/deviance (America has a real split personality when it comes to sexual topics. There is a serious lack of sexual education and it's almost considered taboo in some ways-- that's the Christian
Fundamentalism. On the other hand, there's the pornography industry that promotes a pretty unhealthy
view of sexuality.)

Those are some of the bigger topics in contemporary American mythology. I know they're mostly negative,
but America hasn't represented its virtues for many, many years now (if it ever really did represent its
supposed virtues). Instead of fighting for freedom for everyone, we're now involved in a war in Iraq that's more about control. Instead of being the "land of the brave," more than half of the youth of America would never wish to serve in its military. Instead of being the "land of opportunity," hardly anyone can find a suitable job in spite of the appropriate college degree.

Sometimes I feel like America is a lost country, and I'm not sure how we'll reclaim that fundamental
American spirit.

Comments

[reticent-manner.livejournal.com]

America has plenty of mythology. The contemporary mythologies you mention all have roots in the 18th/19th centuries. Typical white mythologies are going to be patriotism (Republican Motherhood for women, which is actually pretty interesting - this idea pops up in children's books and stories for women) and individualism and liberty; that's where George and the cherry tree tale and Honest Abe come in, but also Horatio Alger (which are pretty abdunant 19th century) and John Henry stories. You could also consider many sentimental and domestic works in the 19th century to function as mythologies as they deal primarily with how women are to be guided by God (Wide, Wide, World; The Lamplighter; Ruth Hall; Uncle Tom's Cabin). Slavery gave way to some of the best myths, which appear in songs and other works of art (quilts, for one), but Charles Chesnutt (turn of the 20th century) is a good example of "conjuration" mythologies (see "The Goophered Grapevine" and "The Conjure Woman ") and how those myths are sustained after slavery.

You could also look at how America seeks to build its own mythology by using other forms (and, ultimately, fails in a way), with books by James Fenimore Cooper and his attempt at capturing the expansive and natural America (Deerslayer is probably best in the series though Last of the Mohicans is probably most well known) and Charles Brockden Brown's "Weiland," which was an attempt to take the gothic and make it American (with no castles or landed gentry, it was pretty hard; he tried nonetheless). And the land of purity/deviance brought to mind "Charlotte Temple" by Susana Rowson (1791) which has become this sort of epic mythology complete with gravesites in New England claiming to be poor (fictional) Charlotte (originally published in England, but it is American in theme).

So while Americanists (like me) get chided for our area of study because America is still in its infancy, there is still a lot to work with in terms of mythologies that have nothing to do with Native Americans (although something like "Hope Leslie" by Catherine Maria Sedwick is good because it's revisionist history in the good way by altering the falsehoods about Native Americans). Just like everything else that has to do with America, it has to be tweaked and reconfigured. But perhaps the most inherent Americanism in terms of mythology is that Americans have to make it new and make it particular to them.