catherine ingrassia
The first time I saw Martha Stewart's Weddings, I was standing in a Chicago Kroch's & Brentano's bookstore in 1987 entranced by Martha's smile and the towering wedding cake beside her. A graduate student who couldn't even afford to buy the $50 book, I leafed through the oversize volume imagining how I could someday fashion my own wedding with the same WASPy patina of privilege and effortlessly worn elegance. The pages characterized a wedding as “monumental,” “the richest…of all the events in the course of a human life,” “the most magical, most fanciful event conceivable”—lofty terms for a basic union. Though I had just met the man who would become my husband, weddings were not necessarily on my mind. Nevertheless the preoccupation with that ritual and the seeming inevitability of someday getting married made the book very seductive. A few years earlier, I, like 750 million other people, had indulged my fascination with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in July 1981, watching all three networks on three different televisions simultaneously (just in case one of them got a different angle of “the dress”). It was a wedding to which we all could aspire.
Stewart's book and Princess Diana's wedding became touchstones for an entire generation of women and created specific expectations that still influence weddings. Never before in the history of the world has more time, energy, and money been spent on weddings. Today, the average American wedding costs $26,800 (more than half the median household income), a price that has increased by 400 percent over the last twenty years. At the same time that we spend upward of $125 billion a year on weddings, we have a 50 percent divorce rate, the highest among Western countries. How can we reconcile this ceremonial expenditure and this institutional failure? What do weddings mean in a culture in which 90 percent of the people will ultimately marry, but more than half of those marriages will end in divorce?
As an academic with a focus on women's literature and history, my own relationship with weddings was complicated. The first wedding I was in (and the first I remember with any detail) was my aunt's in 1974. A large, formal Italian wedding befitting both the youngest child and the only daughter in the family, the entire experience, from the size of the engagement ring (two carats) to the venues for the ceremony (Catholic church) and the reception (country club), imprinted on my young brain what a “real” wedding was supposed to look like. What impressed me most, perhaps, was the Italian wedding cake: five towering layers of cannoli cake, each supported by a battalion of white porcelain cupids with an illuminated green fountain in the first layer. (Inexplicably, I still have one of the porcelain cupids.) The ivory dress, adorned with seed pearls, was preserved, and the pictures of the wedding hung on my paternal grandmother's wall for nearly twenty years.
Despite my early fascination with my aunt's wedding, I got married in pink. I saw the Demetrios dress in a magazine, tried it on at the same Italian bridal shop where my aunt had purchased her dress, and never looked back. I had a sapphire, not a diamond, engagement ring, I never considered changing my name (nor did my husband consider asking me to), and I ended up with a wedding that was a bit of a religious and cultural pastiche. I really wanted to be married in a Catholic church, a desire thwarted by the fact that I wasn't actually Catholic. In 1990, my husband and I were married in an unadorned Unitarian church under a chuppah, with “Ave Maria” playing as a tacit nod to Catholicism. The wedding and the reception (complete with sit-down dinner for 150), for which my parents paid for everything, were grand. But, like the weddings of many people who get married in their twenties, it was really my parents' party, not mine. I never created an album of wedding pictures, never hung the “wedding shot” on the wall, and, I think, never really felt ownership over the experience.
As women marry later—the average age for the bride is twenty-seven, twenty-nine for the groom—the bridal couple increasingly assumes the financial responsibilities for the event. Currently, nearly a third of couples pay for their own weddings, and less than 25 percent of brides have parents who pay for everything. Couples go into debt to throw a wedding and fall victim to the power of the wedding industry, which repeatedly tells them the importance of the event and its centrality to their own lives. Yet how important is it, and what meaning do we invest in the traditions associated with it?
The original ceremony of marriage has rather humble beginnings. While the first marriages were basically a form of kidnapping (an act that instituted the practice of groomsmen to help the groom keep the bride's irate family at bay), most unions between a man and a woman created alliances between two groups. The exchange of a valuable object— the bride, money, livestock—solidified that relationship. The term “wedding” itself originally meant “to pledge, wager, or stake”—with a very specific reference to the financial vow made. A bride was, if not purchased, then offered as an item in exchange. The husband and his family, in essence, bought the bride and the property (dowry or goods) she brought with her. In fact, in the eighteenth century, British newspapers published the amount of a woman's dowry with the wedding announcement. When a father gave away his daughter, he contractually entered into a financial union, not a romantic one, and as a result the chastity of the bride was of paramount importance to ensure an appropriate line of inheritance.
Many people assume that the white dress, now standard in most American weddings, symbolically represented the bride's virginity and was always a central part of wedding customs. Actually, that's a retroactive (and erroneous) myth. Though white gowns were occasionally worn by brides in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the white dress did not become a wedding tradition until after Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding, which, like Princess Diana's, had a profound influence on wedding practices and popular traditions. The original wearing of white coincided with a class-based desire to make the wedding an opportunity for public displays of wealth. White is an incredibly impractical fabric to sew or wear, and a white dress would have been owned only by those who wouldn't risk getting it dirty.
During this period, even fabulously rich brides—including Queen Victoria—typically had their wedding dresses remade as evening gowns. In the nineteenth century, the average American woman got married in her best dress or had a dress made that would then become her best dress. Blue (associated with constancy and virginity) and yellow were favorite colors for wedding gowns, although many a bride (especially on the frontier) would have been married in black, since it was a more practical color. The inevitable obsolescence that now characterizes wedding dresses would have been unheard of in earlier times. So would the average amount of $800 spent on a dress today.
Many other popular “traditions” of the American wedding are a product of marketing and commercialism. The diamond engagement ring? De Beers Diamonds, which was founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1888 and became the world's largest diamond mining company, organized a marketing campaign that equated the diamond with engagement rings, culminating in the 1948 tagline “A diamond is forever.” Wedding veils? Roman brides typically wore brightly colored veils to ward off evil spirits (not to demonstrate modesty), but the practice of wearing a veil did not emerge again until the late nineteenth century with the cultural preoccupation for feminine modesty and decorum. White, multilayer wedding cakes? While the symbolic breaking of bread had long been part of a wedding ceremony, the many frosted white layers that now signal “weddings” were not even technologically possible until the beginning of the twentieth century. The development of white sugar paste frosting (1888) and the ability to tier the layers with pillars (1902) created the precursor of the modern wedding cake.
Should it matter to us that these popular traditions are relatively new? As a culture we make meaning of weddings through white dresses, wedding cakes, and veils; they're the lens through which we read romantic unions. So, like all traditions, they're as real as we make them—which is to say, very real indeed. That reality became apparent to me when I finally got my copy of Martha Stewart's Weddings. I recently found a used copy on the Internet for $3.54. I thought that it would strike me as outmoded, some sort of time capsule providing a window into a moment that had passed. Rather the opposite was true. Though happily married for sixteen years, I still found the images as appealing as I had years before—perhaps more so because they provided a vehicle for remembering my own wedding and anticipating my daughter's wedding. (Okay, she's only seven, but a mother can plan ahead….) It may be the same reason that the people who most often cry at weddings are married; witnessing the act of public intimacy that characterizes all marriage ceremonies and hearing the vows that, in any form, promise the same thing remind us of the powerful commitment we've made to another person and to ourselves. The familiarity of the white dress and the cake help us—as individuals and as a culture—find comfort in rituals and process the change a wedding represents. As we celebrate unions together, the ceremony, whether simple or elaborate, provides a sense of order and continuity. When our wedding echoes those of our mothers and grandmothers and perhaps anticipates our daughters', it reminds us of the community of generations that surrounds us. It also helps anchor us. Though perhaps some of us work to balance our professional and personal roles in a time when women's lives are more complicated, we can be secure in our knowledge of what it means to be a bride. So, upon reflection, I've decided that Martha had it right. A wedding is an incredibly rich, magical, and monumental event that allows you to transport yourself into a story that is at once familiar and also completely unique.