The Picture of History in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount"

TLDR: The May-Pole of Merry Mount as discussed by the authors is described by some critics as an ''historical essay'' that conflates history and story into a common, enduring truth.

Abstract: Perhaps the most curious texture in \"The May-Pole of Merry Mount\" is the interlude described by some critics as an \"historical essay.\"1 Within \"these authentic passages from history\" the narrator concludes, \"[the May-Pole] has made their true history a poet's tale\" (9: 60). 2 That visual and spiritual center of the colony conflates \"history\" and \"tale\" into a common, enduring truth. This conclusion also represents an authorial signature in the comer of his canvas: like its title symbol, the tale itself, however historical, makes history into story. \"The May-Pole\" 's rich effect derives in good part from the apparently competing claims of history and story, which I take to be the tale's dominant contrasts. History and story—under which umbrella I locate common features of allegory, Hawthorne's favorite term; romance, critics' favorite term; and dream—implicate one another so pervasively that each exists only in the context of the other, as a sort of shadowy double. This symbiosis, evident in an oscillating textual rhythm,3 results in an emblem that stresses eternal contraries rather than reconciliation, and that simultaneously records and stops change.4 The entire tale figures as an emblem whose quintessential gloss describes a permanence that displaces the transitory: