ABSTRACT
The year 1957 saw the publication of two books which have remained deeply influential: Mythologies by Roland Barthes and Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye. We will consider Barthes’s book first, but must begin by recognizing that, though its title seems the more relevant to our discussion, the work itself is less about mythology than about ideology, and that in the pejorative sense of mystification. Or, to be more accurate, for Barthes the two terms are interchangeable. Thus, there is a ‘mythology of wine’, predicated on certain assumptions about health and social behaviour, which attributes magical properties to the French national drink: ‘it is above all a converting substance, capable of reversing situations and states, and of extracting from objects their opposites – for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative’. But it also serves to distract consumers from the fact that the production of wine is ‘deeply involved in French capitalism’. It is a drink which ‘cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance, except if we wrongly forget that it is also the product
of an expropriation’ (Barthes 1973: 61). Other ‘myths’ considered include a black soldier saluting the French flag on a magazine cover, Roman haircuts in Hollywood films, the face of Greta Garbo, steak and chips, striptease, the Citroen car, and a wrestling match.
