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Kamy
Wicoff Susan
Shapiro Barash Susan
Maushart Rachel
Safier Marg
Stark Elizabeth Freeman An academic deconstructs the wedding Eva Unger Bowditch and Aviva Samet on how to survive your mother-in-lawStephanie Rosenbaum Lisa Miya-Jervis Nancy Cott Sheryl
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t h e i n d i e i n t e r v i e w : e l i z a b e t h f r e e m a n
by Priscilla Yamin January 2003 | Does a wedding always imply a legal marriage? Not necessarily, argues Elizabeth Freeman in her new book, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Beloning in Modern American Culture (Duke University Press, 2002). Exploring the role of weddings in US history from the antebellum era to the present through American novels and film, Freeman shows how weddings are important not because they lead to marriage but because they are public performances of pageantry and celebration. Beginning with debates about same-sex marriage and queer politics, she goes on to analyze the work of such authors as Carson McCullers, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as films such as Father of the Bride, The Deer Hunter and the Godfather. Rather than understanding weddings as the grand finale leading to marriage, Freeman, an English professor at the University of California at Davis, examines them as an opening, a chance for acknowledging relationships and attachments (such as family, religion, friendship and consumption) that have nothing to do with the couple getting married. Where does the title of the book come from and what does it mean? I meant it as a pun. The wedding industry is like a machine, a vast system of commercial enterprises (there are even "wedding complexes" like conference centers, running simultaneous weddings, and Disney theme weddings). Also, when you see the antics of many brides-to-be, the wedding can seem like a psychoanalytic complex, a set of symptoms or "hang-ups." But my title is also about the complexity of the wedding, the fact that it is messy and complicated -- aesthetically, historically, and in terms of the personal emotions it evokes. In fact, on the internet I recently came across an operetta called The Wedding Complex, written by Marc Abrahams and performed at Harvard, in which scientists use complexity theory to plan a wedding between their friends ¨ this plot confirms the hunch I had for the third part of my pun, that the details of the wedding create all kinds of wacky connections and disconnections between people. Why did you choose novels and films as your areas of analysis? I trained as a literary critic, with all the limitations and possibilities that suggests, though I often wished as I wrote the book that I also had a J.D. and two other Ph.D.s in anthropology and history. Literary criticism has a whole history of examining the way the "marriage plot" unites social and aesthetic form, with comedies and novels of manners pairing people in various combinations and then eliminating everything but heterosexual marriage -- the wedding stands for the end of the story and the right ordering of society. But I kept coming across failed weddings, weddings that took over the whole plot of a story or wouldn't end or failed to secure a marriage or produced a less compelling social order -- the best example being Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, where a tomboy falls in love with the idea of the wedding itself instead of with a potential partner. What is the relationship between a marriage and a wedding? A wedding is supposed to enact or secure a marriage, but it's not necessary to have one. In fact, marriage is a civil contract overseen by state courts, and the making of a couple in U.S. states must be supervised by some combination of witness, officiant, and registry with the state (in other words, you can get rid of the familial, religious, or commercial aspects of a wedding and still have a marriage, but you can't get rid of the legal elements). Yet people do have weddings, even second and third marriages and beyond, and the wedding industry is booming, with some $70 billion spent on weddings each year in the U.S. This suggests that the wedding does things marriage law can't. One important thing it does, in addition to signaling the bride and/or groom's loyalty to extended family, religion, or culture, is to display people connected to the couple in other ways besides marriage -- when else in your waking life are you going to have everyone from the various periods and parts of your life in the same room? Why in your book do separate the wedding from the idea of marriage? Well, simply put, because weddings have those other people in them in the form of bridesmaids, maids/matrons of honor, best men, flower girls -- and marriage is exclusive, "one man and one woman." Many of the connections featured in the wedding (especially between friends and across generations) do not translate into legal kin categories, i.e., the ones that the state recognizes for the purposes of letting you visit one another in the hospital, inherit property, and so on. And the traditional white wedding actually contains all kinds of gestures toward historical moments when marriage was not controlled by the state, but by fathers or by the church, and in the present moment, by shopping. For example, the father giving the bride away relates to familial control, but the kiss relates to the church's interest in the couple's consent, and the theme colors suggest that all the guests are interrelated. Each of these domains -- family, religion, shopping -- has different ways of defining links or relationships between people such as in extended families, religious and spiritual communities or niche markets. None of these relationships are absolutely couple-centered. So in a strange way the wedding shows us something beyond state-sanctioned monogamous couples even as it seems to legitimize them. In separating the wedding from marriage, I saw that. In what ways are weddings more than just about the couple? Take the domain of shopping, for example. When the commercial wedding industry began to take shape from the late nineteenth century onward, first via department stores and later through national magazines like Bride's, it connected women to one another as shoppers. So while weddings feature all kinds of liaisons or senses of belonging, the state really has a pretty narrow conception of how humans might be intimately connected: either as spouses or as a mass of citizens. I'd recommend historian Nancy Cott's excellent book Public Vows for a really sharp look at how the U.S. government has actively promoted monogamy and linked it to citizenship. Can you talk about the history and role of Bride's Magazine? Bride's magazine first appeared in 1934 as a newspaper advertising insert called So You're Going to Get Married! In a column entitled "To the Bride," it stated its mission to "collect and bring the entire bridal market to her feet ..." It grew from there into a magazine with a regional subscription base and finally a national one and so marks the emergence of a national wedding market. Like the earlier women's magazines of the nineteenth century, it made women feel like part of a particular subculture, even though it told them that marriage was the most important element of their life. The magazine allowed women to write in and respond to one another as brides, and even to vicariously participate in the wedding by giving advice, fantasizing, or even buying wedding products, or to feel like brides as long as they wanted to subscribe. What have been the most historically enduring factors or elements of the wedding ceremony? The kinds of wedding ceremonies we have now draw from many different historical models -- the father giving away the bride, the kiss and "I do" at the center, the license, the tchotchkes. Old English marriages were basically contracts between men, and the ceremonies typically focused on the betrothal, with gift-giving and ceremonies indicating that the bride was being transferred to a new family -- though between the 4th and 10th centuries couples began to seek religious blessings, these did not make a marriage valid. When Catholic priests began to take the role of officiant away from fathers between the 10th and 12th centuries A.D., as part of the Church's move to gain control over marriage and thus over inherited lands, the Church reintroduced the Roman law that the couple's consent made the marriage valid, so the kiss and the statement "I do" became the center of the ceremony. Beginning in the early 1500s, Protestants insisted that marriage was made valid by the state, instead of the Church and so beyond the couple's mere consent. In the North American colonies especially, they enforced rules about requiring parental consent and notification to the county clerk, public announcement, and registration with the state. These elements are still with us today in licenses, announcements and the state registration process. The Victorian era was when the "white wedding" took shape; elements like matching bridesmaids, veils, and flower girls were brought into vogue or simply invented by businesses wanting to sell things. The modern wedding industry adds more and more of these (like monogrammed wedding favors or more recently, the unity candle). What is different and what is the same about a wedding today compared to the past? Depends on which past and what we're looking at. The historian John Gillis has written a wonderful book called For Better, For Worse about how the big, lavish wedding emerged, died out, and was reclaimed in Britain from 1600 to the 1980s. But I suspect that one distinguishing feature of weddings today might be that, as the existence of Indiebride suggests, weddings express an individual self (usually the bride), or one's social world as a whole, as much or more than they express the merging of identities or the idea of "forsaking all others." What's the same? The fact that people have weddings; everything else is a mix of continuity with and change from particular historical moments. What's the best wedding story you've ever heard? Predictably, I suppose, it's about a wedding that didn't create a marriage -- one I wasn't invited to because I didn't yet know the brides, but I saw the photo album. They were twin sisters, and they held a ceremony just between themselves, with dresses and a cake and an overnight hotel stay. I loved this not only because of its thrilling kinky lesbian incestuous aspects (not that I know anything about their relationship at all!), but also because they saw it as a declaration to one another that they came first to one another, before any potential spouses. Any advice to Indiebride readers who are planning an alternative wedding? Well, hilariously, I thought at first that "Indiebride" meant brides who were throwing their weddings independently, solo without a groom. That's one way to go alternative -- to make a real statement for single women. There was a recent article in the New York Times about couples throwing mock weddings as performance art pieces, and I definitely support that, along with commitment ceremonies. But I would also advise heterosexual brides to consider whether what they want is a celebration and/or a bunch of presents, or a set of legal privileges accorded to them even while gay sex is still outlawed in some states. If you do use your wedding to legally marry someone, then consider donating some of your wedding gifts to gay organizations or services for single parents, or otherwise contributing to the lives of people who aren't given the special rights accorded to spouses. ----------- Priscilla Yamin is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the New School for Social Research in New York. She is writing her dissertation on marriage policy in the United States. ----------- Buy The Wedding Complex at Amazon.com ----------- |
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