News Bytes
October/December 1998
by John Seelye
The popular images we have of the Pilgrims, whether gathered in tearful prayer as they prepare to depart from Leyden or in thoughtful congress as each in turn signs the Mayflower Compact, or posed on the threshold provided by Plymouth Rock, or making their solitary way to Sabbath service through snowy woods, or seated with Massasoit and other Indians at the Thanksgiving table, all of these promote a powerful image of pure, selfless integrity that is without equal in the icons of American experience. . . . For those who would later celebrate them, the Pilgrims are sanctity itself. . . . These are not people portrayed in motion: they have been frozen, rather, at a key point in their passage, the moment they landed on the Rock. Behind them lies the Mayflower - their ark of passage from the Old World - before them is a vastness they will define by their presence. The moment is liminal, the Rock a literal threshold, but the execution conveys permanence, stability, structure. The perspective, as in virtually all depictions of the Landing, is from the shore the Pilgrims are contemplating and opens outward to the ocean. We never see what the Pilgrims are looking at; we are what they are looking at; we are the realized future. They are frozen in beholding us.
Memory's Nation is available at bookstores for $39.95 (hardcover), or from the University of North Carolina Press. 1-800-848-6224. Say you saw it on the internet.
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