Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Wedding Bell Blues

In my research this week I've been revisiting the diaries and drawings of Sophie du Pont, daughter of gunpowder magnet E. I. du Pont and caricaturist extraordinaire in preparation for doing more writing about the sketches.  While reviewing my notes, I found a section of diary in which Sophie discussed the impending 1832 wedding of her friend Mary Black. "We have talked," wrote Sophie
over the wedding, bridesmaids groomsmen, white kid gloves, &c &c &c &c till I can scarce think of anything else...When I saw all Mary's preparations - a sense of sadness stole over me - I thought of her quitting forever the home of her childhood & of all the cares she was taking on herself, &c &c"
Clearly, to Sophie at least, weddings were not all kid gloves and roses.  In her 1825 diary, Bostonian Anna Cabot Lowell voiced similar concerns about the wedding of her cousin and childhood companion Georgina.
I never knew any body who seemed to be more deeply affected than she was at the awful change which was going to take place in her situation.  For several days before she was very serious & looked extremely pale.
Anna continued on to discuss the terrifying lead up to the wedding and her description of the morning of the wedding could be exchanged with that of the morning of an execution with fairly little effort.
I busied myself as much as I could in arranging the flowers that were to adorn the supper table & in other preparations of the kind...At 9 o'clock, Mrs Eckley came  & fixed her hair...After she was dressed we sat in profound silence in her chamber waiting the appointed hour.
While beheadings usually involve fewer flowers and less attention to coiffure, clearly Anna saw wedding as no less dramatic, traumatic, or final.  In her description of the ceremony, Anna wrote
When Uncle Charles said... 'I pronounce you a married couple, whom God hath joined, let no man put assunder,'  I could see that Georgiana trembled & I am sure I felt almost as if a death-blow had been struck.
These were not the wedding responses I'd expected to find. As a material historian of young women, I like the idea of weddings. They encapsulate both a transitional moment in the lives of my subjects (the transition from the child-y side of young womanhood, to a more clearly adult status) as well as a thing-a-palooza. Trousseaus! Items for going "to housekeeping"! White kid gloves!  What's more, weddings allowed the young women I study to write and think and talk, in great and endless detail, about stuff.  What could be better?

The grim alarm, though, with which Sophie and Anna greeted the weddings of their confidants also, I think, reflects on material matters.  While afraid of being separated from their friends (by physical distance, by social status, by redefined identity as married women, etc), Sophie and Anna both also emphasized material separation.  Their friends had to leave behind their homes, their girlhood things and pursuits (and people?) to take on a new domestic world.  Their marriages mean that they gained access to, and responsibility over, material worlds that their unmarried friends did not truly inhabit.

Nor, in the case of Sophie at least, do they want to.  In her letters and drawings and diaries Sophie was outspoken in her distaste for domestic obligations.  Marriage, in her eyes, meant the taking on of 'cares.'  Anna, too, upon visiting the now married Georgina, wrote that she did "the business of her house with ease, dignity and propriety" after which Anna the adult blacked out the following lines, presumably unsatisfied with her discussion of Georgina's new role as mistress of her own home.

I look forward to returning to Boston, where the archival collection housing Anna's diaries also includes the courtship letters exchanged by Georgina and her sweetheart, as well as reading more late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century accounts of weddings.  Will the marriage terror continue?