Customer Reviews

Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a folklorist and someone involved in alternative relationships, I looked with great interest upon this book, espescially since I am very interested in the current scholarly examination of the primarily het-white-wealthy wedding (and the current Third Wave feminism's dubious obsession with weddings.) Overall, the book provided a great deal of food for thought, espescially upon examination of the current wedding narrative that each (het/white/wealthy) couple fulfills; ie, that they are kooky and delightful, which makes their marriage even more darling--a story that is played to by manufacturers, retailers and the wedding industry.I also admire how Geller elegantly deconstructs the overstuffed, high-priced personalized wedding and the process of creating a het-white-patriarchal fantasia white wedding. However, Geller slips into a very vitriolic, classist tone, espescially when describing lower-class women and weddings, who I would think would be the primary dupes of the wedding frenzy. This really turns an innovative and important work into something that is at times very difficult to read, even from a sympathetic audience member. Likewise, as a former graduate student, I find her graduate school pastorale to ring just as false as wedding magazine promises of castles, fairytales and buttercream icing.I was also disturbed that there seemed to be no room in reexamining weddings for examining any type of romantic relationship. I would have also liked to see what happens when groups that do not normally get the white wedding veneer of privilige appropriate the traditions and tweak the proverbial nose of the white wedding.(It's this anger and classism that keeps me from giving the book 5 stars; the ideas are strong enough for 5, but the execution only leaves it at 3) Still, I suppose the great success of this book is that its ideas do linger and provide interesting context and thought long after the book is closed. I do, however, wish that Geller had toned down her anger--it detracts from a book that with a bit more editing would have been a masterpiece on par with Jessica Mitford's _The American Way of Death_ and severely limits the audience to an academic one when the ideas really should be further disseminated. My hope is that Geller keeps writing and is able to balance her ideas and her style and keeps writing--perhaps her next book will be able to build on this foundation.

In _Here Comes the Bride_, Jaclyn Geller attacks modern "wedding culture", from staged proposals to thousand-dollar white gowns to the forced sexiness of the honeymoon, and ties modern traditions back to the marriage customs of old, in which women were a commodity sold between father and husband. She asks us, why do we still get married, when the institution is a relic of a sexist past? Why do the invitations still hint at the bride being "given" by her parents? Why do brides get so many gifts lavished upon them? Many good questions are raised. However, for several reasons, the book left a sour taste in my mouth.

First, Geller seems too close to her subject, perhaps a bit too personally bitter about it. Maybe she should have left out the personal anecdotes--she comes off sounding like she is just mad because her married friends are drifting away from her, and because nobody is throwing her a spinsterhood shower and giving her loot. There's a good point here. Married folks are much better off if they hang on to their old friends and don't retreat into a cocoon of coupledom. And maybe we'd all be better off if our relatives helped us get started in our first "place of our own", whether we entered it as single or married people. It's just that she sounds so shrill on these points that it makes her polemic sound more like a personal whine than a political statement.

Second, and this didn't jump out at me at first, but was pointed out in a wonderful review on Salon.com, Geller doesn't interview any brides! She never asks any engaged or married people why they're taking this step, whether they feel "oppressed", etc. (In my own experience, most people who marry have already been living with their lover for years, and get married to please the parents. They already consider this person the most important in their lives; the ceremony is just an antiquated formality. This puts the lie to Geller's thesis that marriage artificially creates closeness between husband and wife.) Her lack of personal stories makes the whole thing ring rather hollow, in retrospect. When Betty Friedan wrote _The Feminine Mystique_, she interviewed many housewives and quoted them to show their discontent.

And so, without any personal testimony on the subject of marriage, Geller is left analyzing pop culture. She lambasts self-help "get-a-man" manuals, bridal magazines that recommend lavish and expensive nuptials, and the fascination with celebrity wives, who are always asserting that they're "traditional" wives and mothers despite the fact that they have full-time nannies and probably never even *see* their kids unless they have a photo shoot together. All of this stuff, I agree, is obnoxious as heck! But what Geller never challenges is the assumption that these things reflect the true feelings of the average woman. Most women I know, married or otherwise, think big weddings are just displays of wealth, that "celebrity wife" stories are sexist and annoying, and that dating manuals are the best way to ruin your relationship by analyzing it into oblivion. In _Backlash_, Susan Faludi exposed the "nesting" culture of the eighties as something cooked up by the media, not an actual trend among regular people. What if this marriage culture is the same way? Geller never finds out, since she doesn't talk to the brides themselves, whether women getting married really feel the way she thinks they do.

This book is a remarkable expose' of the marriage culture, but really doesn't say a darn thing about actual marriage. So go ahead and toss those bridal magazines, but don't let this book sway you too much about whether to tie the knot at all. That's up to you. Geller says it's not OK to be married, but we never do find out why.

While I found the book to be witty, and at times insightful, I couldn't quite escape the notion that these were not the women that I knew. Women who register (if they do, in fact, register) at the local "Bed Bath and Beyond" alone (or with husband-to-be) with a scanner and a tablet of paper. Women who buy dresses from catalogues or at the same store where they bought their prom dresses years ago. Women, in other words, who live in the middle and lower classes. Women who have worked for years, living on their own terms. Women who are paying their own way -- including for their own weddings.

More and more women (and men) that I know have found that the expectations (often from guests) as to what is a "proper" wedding have made formal wedding harder to have, impossible to enjoy. More and more have chosen small family affairs, or less showy ceremonies and receptions because the difference between spending 5 thousand on a wedding and using that money to put down on a house (you can still buy a house with a 5K downpayment in most of the country) is just too stark.

Again, the social history was interesting, but I do wish we could, as feminists, realize that just because we can (and always seem to) make sweeping generalizations, doesn't mean any of us speak for all women.

I read Geller's book with interest and found many of her ideas significant, accurate, and downright common-sensical.

Her central argument is that American society has become wedding-obessessed without deeply analyzing the problems inherent in the institution of marriage. She insightfully points out that while the wedding industry booms and women of all ages seem to be embracing a kind of Cinderella attitude toward their weddings, never has the divorce rate been higher in the U.S.

This is a message of enormous importance, it seems to me. Unfortunately, however, Geller weakens her own credibility by delivering her ideas in a tone of tremendous personal anger, frustration, and bitterness. This emotionalism detracts from her ability to deliver a clear-headed, reasonably-argued, persuasive point. This is a shame because Geller's ideas do deserve to be heard.

To put it simply, I will never look at the people around me in the same way again. Since reading this book, I've begun to notice the ways that marriage affects people and the price that people pay for buying into the institution. Before "Here Comes the Bride," my views were mildly anti-marriage. Something about wedding bands, bridal showers, and white gowns gave the hives, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Jaclyn Geller remedied that quandry. Her argument against marriage was succint, well-informed, passionate, intelligent, insightful, and innovative. I've rarely read a non-fiction book that was such a page-turner. The ideas contained within "Here Comes the Bride" are powerful and life-altering. Do not read it if you aren't prepared to see male/female relationships in our society in a wholly different light.

This first book (by a grad student at NYU) issued by a small publisher, lacking any significant ad or promotion budget , - (and if the truth be told, egregiously copyedited , with typos galore) -is getting a high-decibel spontaneous buzz.. Barely two months after publication, HERE COMES THE BRIDE is already an almost-famous book..

The reason is obvious. It raises questions that should have been raised many times in many books, but weren't., - questions that are long overdue for public discussion, but that up until now have remained almost unmentionable. It's not that the author is against marriage, but given the drastically changed and changing roles of women in our culture , she wonders exactly what the purpose of marriage is today. Understandably, many people find this book upsetting, but just about everyone finds it provocative and for some ( particularly those who are instinctively wary ) HERE COMES THE BRIDE can be a source of comfort and revelation.. For those who do marry , as most will, the realities that this book illuminates may increase their chances of making it a success. .. Alix Kates Shulman captured the spirit of HERE COMES THE BRIDE in her enthusiastic : blurb: "Like a gust of fresh air Jaclyn Geller blows away the perfumed fog of romance and illusion that obscures the nature of matrimony in the West."

We all enjoy romance and illusion-- in their place, but do we really want to gamble our lives on it?? That is the central question at hand.

I am one of those giddy brides Ms. Geller was writing about--and I could have been one of her friends from the dorm who spent her college years developing wonderful relationships with friends from college and eventually graduate school, only to "give it all away" to get married. I admit that I am enjoying being engaged, I am enjoying weighing the pros and cons of china patterns and the cathedral veil vs. the fingertip one, and while I do recognize that I am caught up in an enormous cultural and societal machine that strongly favors marriage to remaining uncoupled, I do not see how that is something I should avoid--something standing in the way of my personal, individual happiness.

There were a number of reasons why I was not convinced by the author's very readable and provocative book. The primary one, though, is that while she offered scathing observations of the overblown, highly commercial wedding industry, she just didn't explain in adequate detail why getting married today is bad news for every woman. I don't see marriage as being anti-intellectual at all--or at the very least, it does not require giving up intellectualism. Although I enjoy the occasional Modern Bride, a guilty pleasure as much as reading Cosmo at the hairdresser's is a guilty pleaure, my bookshelfs continue to swell, and the relationships I cultivated in college and grad school, many of which had an intellectual basis, still exist, just in changed form. And my fiance is not some random, keep-the-little-woman-down patriarch: he treasures me for my independence and we both spend plenty of time thinking and reading on our own. It is nice to have a life partner with whom I can share such passions.

Admittedly, getting married has been a huge commercial free-for-all, with gifts and advertising and huge quantities of tulle being thrust at us both, but that sort of stuff hasn't change who we are--or who we are to each other--at all. I've enjoyed the attention, but it has not made me want to give up my soul and become a Scarsdale housewife.

I do agree that favoring marriage over being single or over alternative types of families is not fair, fundamentally, but I still don't see how marriage is bad for the people for whom it suits. Because marriage came about during a highly patriarchal time doesn't necessarily mean that a male-female partnership recognized by the state has to be patriarchal. Our culture, in my opinion, continues to be patriarchal, just in more subtle ways than in previous eras discussed in the book. Individuals, however, have the freedom to make their marriage, if not their culture, what they will of it.

A bride-to-be myself, I picked up "Here Comes the Bride" while looking at wedding guides in a bookstore. It definitely should have been in the Women's Studies section.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't find this book imensely interesting. And I did buy it expecting to read a critique on the marriage industry in the U.S. But I was not prepared for how anti-marriage Geller is.

This book is half dissection and half rant. Perhaps if she had stuck to dissecting, the book would be easier to stomach--not to mention easier to follow. Examination of the wedding dress turns into a 10 page list of reasons why any woman has to be insane to walk down the aile.

My fiance has spent the last week harboring fears of me calling off the wedding after skimming through this book. But I will say this, anyone who still wants to get married after reading Geller's attempts at brainwashing is probably getting married for the right reasons.

After years of teaching women's studies and researching in the field of post WWII U.S. women's history, I expected to love this book. However, the snide, judgmental, and condescending tone of this book renders it almost unreadable. The disdain that the author has for all women who engage (pun intended) in the institution of marriage pervades her entire analysis. It is reminiscent of the anti-woman tone of WITCH's 1969 Bridal Fair protest. In 30+ years, haven't we found a way to critique patriarchy and its institutions without bashing women? Admittedly, this model is endemic to higher education and Ms. Geller is a doctoral candidate, but it is unfortunate that she could not focus instead on her insightful comments about the bridal industry, compulsory heterosexuality, and the marriage mystique. I would be concerned about using this text in an undergraduate course with students who might lack the critical thinking ability to separate the chaff of Ms. Geller's editorializing from the wheat of her solid scholarship.

Like a lot of other people who are in their 20s and have seen divorces left and right, I've always been cynical about the whole idea of marriage. I never understood what the point was or just how self-centered a couple would have to be to have one of the monstrous weddings I often witnessed in the South within a year of my college graduation.

However, I was asked to be a bridesmaid for the first time last fall, and in the last eight months, I have witnessed so much of what was discussed in this book first hand that it's not even funny--the search for the "perfect" wedding site, the search for the "perfect" wedding dress (and someone competent enough to alter it!), the pressure from family and friends to conform to outdated, if not flat-out ridiculous, traditions just because "that's how it's done," etc.

Needless to say, I was thrilled to read "Here Comes the Bride." It blows a whistle on the one industry that seems untouchable, the one that capitalizes on women's lifelong hopes and deepest dreams. It criticizes the smug wedding gown saleswomen and the whole idea of having themed showers in an attempt to have friends and relations outfit every aspect of a couple's life.

Granted, the author seems to have a near obsession with the need to make friendships recognized in the eyes of the law, and the press that published this book could really afford to hire a proofreader or two (or ten). But, I congratulate them both for having the guts to research, write and publish this book.

"Here Comes the Bride" throws all of the unchallenged ideas about marriage into our society's face, screaming "Why is a practice that so blatantly undermined the power of women still embraced as the ultimate goal for and, more disturbingly, by them?" If I hadn't already shown my disdain towards modern weddings before, this book would put me squarely on the anti-marriage side of the fence. Of course, I'll still have to wear a plum taffeta separates with the shoes dyed to match next weekend. Luckily, after reading about where such wedding customs come from, I will NEVER ask the bride to return the favor.