Americans love happy endings, so Bulfinch sees her reconciled at last with the husband she abandoned.īulfinch’s audience consists of those with whom he had come in contact during his long and unsuccessful career as a merchant, the self-made men and their wives, who do not want to have to choke down “only the dry facts without any of the charm of the original narrative.” They want the poetry, too, and they don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on getting it. His audience has never gone with Homer to Troy the Trojan War is new to them and they want to know how the story comes out in the end: “Our readers will be anxious to know the fate of Helen, the fair but guilty occasion of so much slaughter.” As Bulfinch must have known, Helen is the creation of the poets who wrote about her, and different poets provided her with different fates. It does not consist of members of his own class, the privileged few who have had the benefits of a classical education and would have acquired such knowledge already or at least have the leisure and the means to acquire it. How is this knowledge to be attained? Bulfinch is very certain about his audience. But, perhaps because he had seen how fortunes may disappear overnight, never to be recovered, Bulfinch puts his faith in the kind of knowledge that can make us “happier and better.” This knowledge is the knowledge of literature, but we cannot understand the literature of our time without first understanding the mythology that literature so often alludes to. raise our station in society,” and there are, of course, books that will tell us how to get rich quickly and how to behave when we have amassed our pile. In his Preface, Bulfinch firmly sets his work within the emerging American genre of self-improvement: Other kinds of knowledge may “enlarge our possessions or. From Charles Martin's Introduction to Bulfinch's Mythology

Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch