I've had a lot to deal with this week, so instead of pushing myself to write something new by the end of today, I'm going to re-post a blog from not quite a year ago.
I promise I will have an update on what project will come next at some point, but now that looks to be later rather than sooner.
Importance of Ceremony: Weddings (Post from May 23, 2016)
My boyfriend’s sister got married this weekend.
I’ve been through a lot of weddings: notably my sister, my best friend, and my boyfriend’s best friend.
I think it’s important to commemorate special events in life with ceremonies and rituals. But as a writer, and a history buff, I also find myself at these ceremonies thinking about the why, the history, and all that.
Why the white dress?
Have you ever been to a wedding where the bride didn’t wear a white dress? Unless you’ve been to a wedding that was of a different (non-Western) culture, odds are you haven’t. Why? Well, everyone goes on about the whole history and tradition of the white gown, how it stands for purity and all that.
But what most people don’t know is that the white wedding dress goes back less than 200 years. When Queen Victoria got married in 1840, she chose white for her wedding gown and started a trend that is still going today. Yes, that’s right, this grand tradition, that is pretty much a cultural imperative at this point, really only exists because a young political figure wore something people thought looked cool.
Somewhere along the line, this got tied into the symbolism of white = purity. But for much of Western history, your wedding dress was just whatever dress you happened to own that looked the nicest. Yeah, you might make or commission a new dress for your wedding, but it would be something you’d wear again after the event. In 1888, Laura Ingalls Wilder got married in a black dress – it just happened to be the nicest and newest dress she owned.
What really irks me is reading or watching a period piece that goes into great detail about the bride’s white gown and veil at a time or place that one or both would have been an odd choice at best, or even in some cases inappropriate. White actually is (or has been) the color of mourning in many countries and cultures. For much of medieval European history, blue was actually the color associated with purity and was a popular color for wedding dresses.
(Me personally, I would love to get married in a red dress, because I look smashing in red and not-so-great in white. When the time comes, I probably won’t get married in red, simply because of cultural norms.)
Why the veil?
The modern wedding veil is a vestige of a time when arranged marriages were common and the bride and groom often did not even meet until the day of the wedding. This is also where there superstition about it being bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding comes from.
The veil was partly there to show that no man had even looked upon the bride, let alone touched her, prior to the groom. How much of this was actually believed, and how much of this was just for tradition’s sake varies widely by time period and country. Obviously in a place and time where girls were married much younger, as young as their early teens, and emphasis on avoiding premarital sex was much stronger, this was something that was a lot more believable than a 30 year old woman walking down the aisle in a white dress and veil. No one even thinks about the symbolism behind the father of the bride lifting his daughter’s veil when she and the groom have known each other for years prior to getting married.
So how does all this tie back into writing, as opposed to just being a rant about an industry that has grown up around a an important ritual (like the commercialization of so many holidays that people love to complain about…)? I guess for me it’s finding the best balance between historical accuracy and the symbolism readers look for.
If you’re writing a strict historical piece, what can you inject in to show that this is a different time and culture without the reader saying, “what the heck is this weirdness?” Depending on how familiar the culture is, or how much you’ve built the world, it could be as easy as saying, “I was wearing red, as was appropriate to wear for a celebration.” Or you might have to build it up a little. “My father draped my head with a flame-colored veil. The bright colors were intended to confuse and frighten any evil spirits who might be nearby. My sisters led me through the town, scattering herbs to further purify the air and keep me safe, while friends and family lined the street and chanted hymns of protection.” The latter – a longer description of an unfamiliar ritual – might be better for either a time period that’s less familiar, or for a world that you have completely created, such as a sci-fi or fantasy setting.
For that matter, how far from the recognizable can you get before your audience doesn’t see any parallel between the modern Western marriage and the ceremony in the world you’ve created? I have a piece in mind where a child of the first humans to land on another planet marries one of the native aliens. How to handle that ceremony? How do the people of this planet symbolize binding a couple together? At the moment, what I have in mind for the ceremony involves the couple’s hands, arms, or possibly their whole torsos, being wrapped in a rope made many strands of string, each strand having being given by a member of the community. In addition, instead of rings, the palm of your dominant hand is tattooed with the symbol of your spouse’s family (so that when you clasp hands, the symbols touch). Is that enough to get the idea across of a meaningful ceremony of joining? Well, eventually I will write the rest of the story and we will find out! : D