The Virgin Bride
I DO NOT PLAN to have another wedding; Im standing pat at two. But I must confess that after spending a pleasant hour gazing at the photographs in a recent crop of wedding guides, I began to feel a bit of the old itch. There is something deeply seductive about a wedding: romance in its great last stand, not yet sullied by routine and responsibility. Even a photograph of that ill-fated girl Diana Spencer, standing on the steps of St. Pauls, her veil caught in a gust of wind and her father waiting to take her hand, can provoke in me a vague yet undeniable longing. But it took only a few minutes of actually reading the texts of these manuals to bring me to my senses. More than fondness for my husband keeps me from getting on the phone to price tea roses and a tent.
Planning a wedding is hell. Things are said. Doors are slammed. Quarrels about the most inconsequential thingsyellow tablecloths or white? hors doeuvres set out on tables or passed around on trays?are often pitched at such a level that it seems the combatants may never recover from them. Much of the anxiety, of course, is tribal. It is wrenching to have to open the sacred circle to admit an outsider. If, as Joan Didion once wrote, marriage is the classic betrayal, a wedding is the Judas kiss, public and terrible. But what brings people almost to the breaking point (emotional, social, financial) is that white weddings as they are currently practiced in Americawith flocks of attendants, dinner dances for hundreds of guests, and a code governing every moment of the proceedingsdont come naturally to most. Perhaps they dont come naturally to anybody other than the members of the $70-billion-a-year wedding industry, who seem to have all but created the contemporary event, weaving together attractive bits of genuine tradition and bolts of pure invention.
Before World War II the idea that a girl of modest means would expect any of todays purchased grandeur would have been laughable. She would have been familiar with the elements of such a ceremony, would have seen lavish movie weddings and photographs of society and royal ones, but she would not have imagined that those events had much to do with her own plans. She would have been married much as her mother had been: with her best friend standing up for her and everyone looking forward to a nice party at the brides home, the two mothers wearing corsages and ladling punch.
But times have changed, and middle-class couples are routinely trading the down payment on a first house for a single eye-popping party. Ilene Beckerman ponders the shift in the charming little book Mother of the Bride: The Dream, the Reality, the Search for a Perfect Dress. After being confronted with her daughters hideously complex reception menu, Beckerman cant help herself: When your father and I were married at your grandmothers house in Queens, she tells her aggrieved daughter, we served deli platters. Everybody loved them.
Nowadays every aspect of a formal wedding has become so intensely merchandized as to render its original design and purpose almost unrecognizable. The bridal registry, for example, was once a means by which a young couple could acquire the basic accoutrements of good housekeeping. Now couples old enough to have fully stocked homesnot to mention full-grown childrenregister for loot. They can be seen trolling through Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, and Target, carrying bar code scanners and zapping anything that looks good. The trend toward multiple showers means that a guest may return to a couples registry several times. Web sites such as WeddingChannel.com and The Knot provide an opportunity for couples to showcase their weddings for their friendsand to put those friends a click away from the brides registry, where a gift can be selected and paid for in a matter of minutes.
Everything is big. The wedding invitation, once the model of a certain kind of brevity, is now often a mere component of a thick dossier with multiple stamps. Whats this fat, unsolicited envelope in your mail, packed with forms that you must fill out and instructions that you must obey? asks Judith Martin in her Miss Manners on Weddings. She concludes that it is, in fact, a wedding invitation from people who have gone around the bend. In the many published accounts of peoples experiences planning and hosting weddings, couples are constantly getting blindsided by the professionals, never imagining the pressure that vendors would put on them to consider various trifles absolutely essential. Just as the morticians whom Jessica Mitford described in The American Way of Death preyed on the grief and guilt of mourners, so do the wedding merchants capitalize on the emotional vulnerability and social anxiety that afflict people planning a formal wedding. If you love her, shouldnt you spend two months salary on the diamond shes going to wear forever? Would you deny a cherished daughter the same sort of party that all her friends have had?
In a memoir detailing her engagement, wedding, and early married life, Something New: Reflections on the Beginnings of a Marriage, Amanda Beesley describes a moment of clarity in which the economics of her planned event came into sharp focus: she had spent a months rent on her dress, and the deluxe Porta-Johns, with mirrors and running water, that she had selected would have paid off two months worth of my student loan. Setting aside the advisability of buying an expensive dress for anything that is going to involve Porta-Johns, no matter how whiz-bang, the confession is hardly unusual: young people routinely engineer weddings that are well beyond their means.
How did we get here? The idea that the formal white wedding might not be within the purview solely of society types began during the postwar rush to the altar, which saw droves of working peoplewho finally had a bit of money in their pocketshaving weddings more elaborate than their parents. The first American book devoted to bridal etiquette was published in 1948, heralding the notion that one might clip from an entire volume of social convention a single attractive chapter.
The hugely influential 1950 movie Father of the Bride traded on the new national interest in the particulars of this kind of event, and it portrayed the shift toward grander weddings. Although the brides parents are well-off, they were married simply, in your front parlor, Mr. Banks reminds his wife. She is unmoved by this memory or by her husbands pride in having worn a plain blue suit rather than a cutaway. Despite the old mans remonstrations, it is decided that their daughter, iconically played by Elizabeth Taylor, will not follow this family tradition. She will have a different kind of wedding, with bridesmaids and churches and automobiles and flowers and all that. (Although the films wedding provided a specific fantasy for a generation of young women, many of todays brides would turn up their noses at it. Refreshments consisted of finger sandwiches, ice cream, and tea cakes.) Facilitating the new preference for such affairs was the growing availability in the fifties of both mass-produced wedding gowns and rented formal wear for men. This kind of institutionalized formality, however, had a difficult time coexisting with the social upheaval of the sixties, and by the seventies the big white wedding (along with its dud pal, marriage) was in a period of retrenchment. Tricia Nixons 1971 wedding in the Rose Garden was considered by many to be Squaresville itself.
The lights came back on in the summer of 1981, when alarm clocks rang in the dead of night so that millions of Americans could witness Charles and Diana plighting their troth in real time. The doings of the British royal family may constitute a poor template for contemporary American life, but the timing was right. The Reagans had just begun their stylish reign, and lavish entertaining had made a triumphant return. The wedding world changed and has stayed changed.
The problem is that we put the formal white wedding into cold storage for so long that were a little unclear about what, exactly, is involved. Further, the social changes that have so profoundly reshaped American life in the past half century have mowed down virtually every institution that the traditional wedding once sanctified. To stage a white wedding as the form was originally conceived requires a woman young enough that her very age suggests a measure of innocence, the still-married parents who have harbored her up to this point, and a young man of like religious affiliation who is willing to assume responsibility for her keep. Trying to pull off this piece of theater in light of the divorce culture, the womens movement, the sexual revolution, and the acceptability of mixed and later marriages threatens to make a complete mockery of the thing. Its like trying to stage a nativity pageant without a baby and a donkey: you can do it, but youre going to need one hell of a manger.
The modern bride, of course, doesnt dwell on any of this. She is, after all, the daughter of one of the most profound cultural shifts in American history, and this is part of her birthright: the freedom to sample, on an à la carte basis, the various liberties that young womanhood offers. She can gratefully accept a handful of condoms from her guidance counselor and also be assured that no one will laugh when she shows up at her wedding, on her fathers arm, wearing a floor-length beaded white gown. And besides, theres no time to think about all thistheres so much to do! Sending welcome baskets to the hotel rooms of out-of-town guests, learning the precise way to tether a gold band to the ring bearers satin pillow, discerning which participants must be thanked not only with a note but also with a gifttheres no end to it.
Fortunately, in view of this bewildering array of wedding essentials, a standing army of professionals has been quietly assembled during the past two decades, one consisting of salespeople and wedding coordinators and Web site designers and also authors who have flooded the market with wedding books so numerous that they would force the library at Alexandria to resort to auxiliary storage. Most of the books fall roughly into three categories: etiquette books that attempt to pistol-whip the masses into decent behavior; glossy wish books that hope to imbue the readers events with the authors own good taste; and gritty down-and-dirties that address the awfulness of it all head-on, albeit comically.
A faction of renegade brides realizes that the wedding business is a racket and rejects the notion of busting the bank for one 5-hour party. The problem occurs when they try to procure bargain-basement opulence, to cut corners ruthlessly on a fancy party rather than throw a simpler one. The suggestion offered by a bargain wedding expert that one might offer a full bar but issue each guest two drink tickets is just a bad, bad idea. I encountered a description of a Vera Wang sample sale that made the event sound like a little corner of hell, with punchy, exhausted brides waiting in line for hours in hopes of scoring a bit of picked-over cut-rate couture.
Its hard to get it right when it comes to this particular intersection of money and class. No less an authority than Weddings for Dummies sums up the problem nicelyor, rather, Epictetus does: Know, first, who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly. Leave it to one of the ancients to put a fine point on a modern problem: weddings today are often made comical or ghastly by their obvious overtones of strenuous social climbing. The editor in chief of Brides magazine, Millie Martini Bratten, told me that the modern wedding represents a chance to reach beyond your station, and shes right. Class aspiration is nothing new, but there was certainly a time when a girl who aped the ways of rich folk on her wedding day would have won herself more derision than respect.
The wedding merchants know that selling class would set off alarms in most peoples heads, so what they proffer instead is tradition, and the modern bride pays cash on the barrelhead for it, never realizing that the wholesale acquisition of other peoples traditions is an enterprise fraught with pitfalls. (If she put down Legendary Brides for a minute and picked up The Great Gatsby instead, she might think twice.)
Genuine tradition is not for sale, because no one needs to buy it; its moored in the customs of ones own family (remember them?). If Dad feels like a complete chump in his Sir Elegance tux, youve just learned something about your tradition. What the altar-bound of today end up buying from their numberless vendors is a dogs breakfast of bridal excesspart society wedding of the twenties, part Long Island Italian wedding of the fifties. Its The Philadelphia Story and The Wedding Singer served up together in one curious and costly buffet.
When the etiquette experts are asked about these hybrid events, how can they possibly know to which standards the questioner is hoping to hew? Often couples want to throw weddings that will be interpreted as social (WASP classy) but that include whatever ethnic elements look good to them. Miss Manners, by her own admission, tends to become snappish during wedding season, and I dont blame her. When she attempts to construct a firebreak, she gets blasted. She informed one mother of the bride that her daughters plan to carry a money bag with her during the reception constituted nothing less than simple social blackmail. She is counting on the guests forking over under the threat of embarrassment. This is not exactly what we call hospitality. But another Gentle Reader scolded Miss Manners for failing to do some research on other cultures in which such a custom is commonplace: If Miss Manners thinks her uppity manners prevail everywhere, she has another think coming. Emily Postnow in the guise of her great-granddaughter-in-law Peggy Post, in Emily Posts Wedding Etiquettedeals with ethnic variances by abandoning her station and going PC. Peggy lumps the lucrative customsincluding the money dance, which, if successfully completed, results in bride and groom . . . covered with cashtogether with central elements of Jewish and traditional African American weddings in a separate chapter called (you guessed it) Multicultural Weddings.
Bridal salespeople toss around the words tradition and heirloom with a galling vulgarity that is particularly evident in a captivating Learning Channel series called A Wedding Story. Each episode of the documentary-style program follows one couple through their courtship and engagement (as recounted during crosscut interviews with bride and groom), and the cameras tag along to the rehearsal, the ceremony, and the reception. The couples often have solid but not especially high-paying jobs (Wedding Story careers have included hairstylist, nurse, and police officer); they spend what must be a staggering portion of their incomes on these events, and they can often be glimpsed at the very point of purchase.
In one episode an engaged couple, Ivette and Joe, are led into a jewelers inner sanctum to get a first look at the ring they have ordered. But as the salesman relinquishes it to them for inspection, he rattles off a bit of boilerplate: This is the beginning of your familys heirloom. This is what youre going to pass on to your children and your childrens children. It is the thing tha.17;s.
Of course, the woman who long ago branded tradition as a commodity on the American open market is Martha Stewart, and she established a beachhead in the wedding business early on. With her uncanny ability to predictand often to forgethe hottest societal trends, she was on top of the white-wedding craze not long after Princess Diana braced herself and thought of England. Stewarts 1987 publishing phenomenon, Weddings, helped to cement her reputation as one of our most important cultural figures. Its pride of place in the wedding-wish-book canon has been challenged only by the publication of a second volume, The Best of Martha Stewart Living: Weddings.
In fairness, Stewart has always been great at fanning the mini-flames of actual tradition. In the introduction to her first book, Entertaining, she wrote that when she wants the comfort of childhood to come flooding back, she whips up some of her mothers Polish specialties, some nice pierogi or stuffed cabbage. One has long sensed, however, that it is other peoples traditions that she really has her eye on, and the autobiographical sketch in Weddings gives a clue as to whose traditions they are. When she decided to marry Andy Stewart, it seemed appropriate to be married in St. Pauls Chapel at Columbia in an Episcopalian service, mainly because we didnt have anyplace else to go. It sounds like a lovely affair, but surely it would have been appropriate, strictly speaking, for an Episcopalian (ortalk about appropriate two of them) to be married in St. Pauls Chapel at Columbia in an Episcopal service.
The Stewart enterprise is powerful enough and thoroughly enough girded with her unquestionable style (my God, the womans way with simple white daisies) that many absurdities get subsumed in the larger picture. The irony is that many Stewart-inspired events are occasions from which members of the true WASP ascendancyfrugal, abhorrent of excesswould flee as fast as their skinny little legs could carry them. The WASPs whom the wedding merchants hope to conjure are more on the order of the robber barons and their familiespeople like Alva Vanderbilt, who managed to fuse her daughter Consuelo to the Duke of Marlborough and celebrated the familys new acquisition in an explosion of pink and white flowers in St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. Or theyre WASPs as imagined by Hollywood screenwriters: Katharine Hepburns Tracy Lord invited 506 guests to the reception after her second wedding in The Philadelphia Story. Couples who think they are striking a classically American chord with their tuxedo-clad swing bands and galaxies of trumpet lilies might consider the sentiments of the super-WASP poet Elinor Wylie (who left her husband for a married manno wonder we look to these people for wedding day guidance): Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones / Theres something in this richness that I hate.
If class confusion is the order of the day at many white weddings, these occasions are also chock-full of conflicting messages regarding the brides sexual experience. The white dress; the handoff from father to groom; the lifting of the veil, which undresses the bride just a bit; and the presence of flowers and small children (evoking the fertility that will soon be unleashed) are all popular componentsin various combinationsof the modern wedding.
Perhaps most representative of this ambiguity is the kiss that concludes the wedding ceremony, permission for which is granted only after bride and groom have been legally transformed into man and wife. Often, Miss Manners writes, the kiss draws laughter, as if it were a love scene viewed by an audience of early adolescents. Although few couples would forgo this crowd-pleasing bit of business, many have reshaped its purpose, using it not to mark a newly sanctioned physical relationship but rather to give a peek at one that is already red-hot. More than once during the rehearsals on A Wedding Story, I have seen the officiant instruct the intendeds to approach this moment with a bit of decorum. What patsies these poor clergy members must feel like, forced into the role of a sexual naif primly instructing a young man who has been living with his girlfriend for the past three years that he may kiss the bride. Well, why not? Hes been doing God knows what else to her since the night they met at the softball league happy hour.
To pick up an issue of Brides magazine, which has been instructing American women on weddings since 1934, is to find this confusion writ large. In one respect Brides harks back to a time when womens magazines never mentioned sex at all and the advice on offer was of a most genteel nature. A recent issue is full of the kind of pointers that well-bred mothers have given their daughters for generations: write the thank-you note as soon as you get the gift; send the announcement to the newspaper several weeks before the wedding. The advertisements (and they are staggering in number) feature brides so demure that many of them cant even look us in the eye; they gaze off in deepest repose or trail clouds of tulle through the marble lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City. The reader of Brides, it seems, is meant to make an imaginative leap, to enter a world of untouched ladies preparing chastely for their most special day.
And yet. Im not quite sure what to make of the young miss who writes that a few months ago, my fiancé and Ifiancé: old-fashioned word, isnt it?started watching porn together, which has caused the couple a specific problem that I had no idea was within the purview of Brides magazine. Then theres the unfortunate woman who seems to have spent down her sexual capital a little too early in the game: I promised my fiancé that once we were engaged, Id do anything he wanted, sexually speaking. Now hes suggesting a threesome. (This is one of the reasons those unliberated but canny girls of an earlier era didnt put out until after they had tossed the bouquet: they didnt want to have to put the kibosh on icky sexual fantasies before theyd established joint checking.)
The problem of introducing drama to the wedding night is a big one, and Brides tackles it unflinchingly. Its uphill all the way. The bride should consider packing her honeymoon suitcase with a bunch of sex-research books and two highlighter pens in two different colors. Call Dominos and pass the No-Doz; its gonna be an all-nighter. If shes absolutely determined to unveil a new trick, the bride might consider a suggestion that involves a thirty-six-inch strand of acrylic pearls, preferably strung on nylon, and some water-based personal lubricant, although she is cautioned (in what may be the issues single best piece of advice) to be careful with the necklaces clasp.
In one sense all this is in line with the kind of information to be found in many magazines aimed at todays young single womenpublications that have supplemented frank information about reproductive health with step-by-step sexual instruction. (A typical copy of Jane makes the Kama Sutra look like a compendium of calisthenics for senior citizens.) It seems in todays climate that only prudes and religious fanatics suggest that young women ought to forgo sexual experience before marriage. Very few grooms, certainly, are troubled by a brides colorful past. Marry Me! is a book by three professional guys who share the secrets of snaring one of their elite confraternity (and any woman hell-bent on becoming the helpmeet of an orthopedic surgeon, an accountant, or a lawyer should by all means pony up the $13.98 for Amazons overnight-shipping option). Along with some repeatedand to my mind rather pointedadvice along the lines of Never comment in any way about your mans penis being small (italics not my own), the brain trust informs readers how many men they can sleep with and still end up married to a CPA: ten. Youre not necessarily out of luck if you worked your way through most of Sigma Chi during junior year, but you are going to have to lie about it.
But the sexual experience (or, rather, sexual ennui) of the contemporary couple accounts in no small part for whymuch to the delight of caterers and banquet hall operators everywheretodays wedding receptions seem never to end. With only a dispiriting and possibly dangerous interlude with acrylic pearls awaiting them in the bridal suite, there is nothing to hurry the principals off the dance floor. The couple are far more interested in boogying down at the opulent party theyve orderedafter all the hard work, a chance to have some fun!than in attending to the drudgery of consummating the marriage. There was a time when a wedding wasnt just a fancy party, when it commemorated an occasion of tremendous moment, as true ritual always hasin this case the beginning of a womans sexual life. The reception was once marked by a particular kind of shared anxiety, which fostered a genre of American humor that is now all but lost: the wedding night joke. The clanging of tin cans tied to getaway cars struck a primal note that nobody failed to locate and that no amount of Ritz-Carlton catering can ever reproduce.
Today a wedding unites a couple who may or may not spend the rest of their lives together and who may or may not have nullified the spirit of their every promise with an ironclad prenuptial agreement. Usually the sexual union has already occurred, and oftentimes cohabitation, with its disappointments and indignities, is in full swing. A brides beautiful white gown and her flock of flower-bearing attendants may constitute nothing more than an enduring female attraction to the sort of thing that would make Betty Friedan lean her old gray head against the keyboard and weep. Or they may be part of a frantic and terribly expensive effort to infuse a wedding with some small measure of the meaning it once had.
Nearly forty years ago, Joan Didion reported, in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, on the Las Vegas wedding industrywhich, she found, was not based solely on the premise that marriage, like craps, is a game to be played when the table seems hot. She found instead that the Vegas wedding chapels, with their wishing wells and stained-glass paper windows and their artificial bouvardia, were in fact selling niceness, the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it.
Todays children do know where to find proper ritual. They find it in a thousand showrooms and expos and trunk sales; they skip out on student loans to pay for it; and when they need more cash for the limos, they transform their bridal registries into complicated money-laundering operations (a place setting of Lenox is, after all, a liquid asset). One cant help thinking that they would trade every bit of it for one simple, elusive assurance: only death will part us.
Copyright © 2006 by Caitlin Flanagan