The May Pole Of Merry Mount Sparknotes

In “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” Nathaniel Hawthorne displays a different view of the Merry Mount people, than that which was earlier described my William Bradford. In the 17th century Bradford wrote an autobiography about Merry Mount, while two centuries later, Hawthorne decides to write a fictional story about Merry Mount. While each writing is great, they each have their own view on how the people and activities that happened at Merry Mount were. Hawthorne’s analysis of this event varies from Bradford’s in that Hawthorne is trying to tell a story, shows the maypole as not just an object, but as a symbol also, and he tends to take the middle ground of the two sides. Throughout Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford’s motives are to observe and explain what the Merry Mount people were like at the actual time it took place. Hawthorne, on the other hand, takes the approach of
Bradford takes the pilgrim side and looks on to the Merry Mount people as if they are horrible creatures. He displays this distaste by writing, “They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together, like so many fairies, or furies rather, and worse practices” (87). However, Hawthorne decided to take the middle ground. Hawthorne first explains that parties are fun, but that life is not always a party. An example is, “From the moment that they truly loved, they had subjected themselves to earth’s doom of care, and sorrow, and troubled joy, and had no more a home at Merry Mount” (631). Secondly, he shows that the Pilgrims may have been strict, but that they also had compassion. For instance Hawthorne states, “Yet the deepening twilight could not altogether conceal, that the iron man was softened; he smiled, at the fair spectacle of early love; he almost sighed, for the inevitable blight of early hopes”