Mythologies (Mythologies) was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1957, collecting short essays Barthes had written for Les Lettres nouvelles between 1954 and 1956, plus a longer theoretical essay (“Myth Today”) that provides the semiological framework for reading them. The book became foundational for cultural studies, semiotics, and what would later be called “theory” — the academic practice of reading cultural phenomena as systems of signs.
The short essays (each 2–5 pages) analyze objects and practices from contemporary French culture: professional wrestling (which Barthes reads as a moral spectacle where good and evil are performed through the body), the new Citroën DS (which functions as a modern cathedral — an object of worship disguised as a commodity), steak-frites (which encodes French national identity), the face of Greta Garbo (which represents a transition from divine to human beauty in cinema), and detergent advertisements (which promise spiritual purification disguised as domestic cleanliness).
Barthes’s method is to demonstrate that what appears “natural” (steak is just food, wrestling is just sport, a car is just a car) is actually ideological: each object carries meanings that serve bourgeois interests by presenting the historical (constructed, changeable) as the natural (given, eternal). “Myth” in Barthes’s sense is not falsehood but naturalization — the process by which culture disguises itself as nature.
The theoretical essay “Myth Today” provides the semiological machinery: myth is a “second-order” sign system that takes an existing sign (word, image, object) and fills it with new meaning while appearing to preserve the old one.
Collecting Mythologies
First edition (Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1957): French paperback.
Market values:
- First French edition: $40–$120
- First English edition (Jonathan Cape, 1972): $25–$60
- US first (Hill & Wang, 1972): $15–$40