Chelsea Clinton, you may have heard, is getting hitched. And because we, the public, know basically none of the details, you may also have heard that we're obsessed—with the wedding, with the fact that we know nothing about it, and with the fact that we're obsessed. A photo of a woman emerging from a Vera Wang shop, her face artfully hidden beneath a wide-brimmed floppy hat, graced the cover of Women's Wear Daily yesterday, and was splashed around the Web. Could the lady be she? The cover is pretty, but it's also a nice symbol of the Chelsea Wedding Story: the human at the center of it all obscured, walking into media speculation about her consumer choices (in this case her wedding dress), and flanked by a bar code.
Does it say something horrible about us that we desperately desire to see Chelsea's wedding? I don't think so. Weddings, as Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz writes in "Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual," are rituals of astonishing complexity that "incorporate a variety of codes (e.g. liturgy, music, food, clothing, and objects)." When someone famous, to whom we are already used to looking for clues, subtle and not-so-subtle, about how to navigate our material and social worlds, has a wedding, it is as if everything meaningful they have to teach us has been magically corralled into a single space, a cauldron of societal mores.
Our natural curiosity is the lighter side of our fixation, of course. The darker side is supplied by both the multibillion-dollar wedding industry and our belief that we in some way have a right to Chelsea's special day. The two are not unrelated. In "The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture," Elizabeth Freeman briefly sketches the millennium-long history of marriage in the West:
Marriage has been regulated—and weddings officiated—by an overlapping sequence of institutions. Before the Christianization of Europe, fathers, families, and community customs regulated marriage, to be followed by priests and the church, then by magistrates and civil law, now inflected by a commercial industry, with the couple’s authority over the formation of their own marriage waxing and waning alongside these institutions.
Today, the couple is much more at the center of the marriage ceremony than it was five hundred years ago, but weddings are inherently both private and public affairs. The couple is still subject, as Freeman notes, to the authority of various institutions, not least of which is the commercial wedding industry (brilliantly delineated by our Rebecca Mead in "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding"). We can surmise from Chelsea's (probable) presence at the Vera Wang store that she is as subject to the authority of that industry as the rest of us. But she is also, as a famous person, a major part of that industry—of how it sells itself—and this is why we think we have a right to her. We are told that we must copy the weddings of Chelsea and her ilk, and therefore it seems to us that in gawking we are simply obeying—that we have a right because we have no choice.
And perhaps we don't, so long as spectacles of glitzy celebrity ceremonies dominate our view. Here's hoping that more famous brides and grooms, instead of allowing the media to become yet another authority at their weddings, drop big floppy hats over the entire affair.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/07/chelsea-getting-married.html#ixzz0v646IZUU
