“The Evil of Elaborate and Showy Weddings”: Taste, Power, and Consumption at the Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century
by Vicki Howard
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As the
ritual practice that led to marriage, itself a public institution with immense
political and social implications, weddings carried vast cultural meaning.[1] To some, the wedding ritual was immutable,
a mark of civilization. An elite New
York society wedding of the 1870s might seem to be a rite that “belong(ed) to the dawn of history.”[2] But by the early twentieth century, weddings
were becoming consumer acts. As
consumer capitalism transformed the more communal, face-to-face wedding of the
past, getting married was not such a simple affair. More and more people were able to and chose to have a big,
elaborate white wedding. In the late
nineteenth century, prescriptive literature appeared to instruct women on the
rules of etiquette for every aspect of
wedding preparation and celebration.
When people turned to experts for information on “tradition” it was a
sure sign that those traditions were not as unchanging as they purported to
be. The prescriptive literature on
weddings was a sign of social change and shifting marriage practices. In response to these transformations,
critics began loudly condemning conspicuous wedding consumption and denouncing,
in the words of a 1912 magazine article --“The Evil of Elaborate and Showy
Weddings.”[3]
In the
late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, etiquette writers and cultural
critics condemned those who spent “beyond their means” to celebrate a marriage.
Opposition came from different perspectives.
Both working-class and middle-class consumption was the object of
criticism, but for different reasons.
Middle-class attitudes toward work, leisure, and consumption were changing
in the late nineteenth century.
Proponents of Victorian genteel culture felt threatened in the face of
an expanding world of goods, new urban leisure activities, and an emerging mass
culture.[4] While working-class men and women overturned
Victorian moralism by "putting on style," going to public hall
dances, and visiting beaches and amusement parks together, others set a
different standard.[5] Adopting a moralist position, ministers,
college teachers, reformers, and editors set the boundaries of nineteenth-century
public discourse on consumption. They
emphasized hard work, self-restraint, and character and associated consumption
itself with corruption and profligacy.[6] This perspective lay behind a debate over
gift rituals, and led to the call for simple weddings. In a world where the appearance of social
position could be hired for an evening, simplicity gained cultural valence.
The
writings of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, on the topic of taste and
social distinction are useful when thinking about wedding consumption. According to Bourdieu, consumption conveys
class in subtle ways, legitimizing unequal social relationships. Looking to
find the social and economic nexus of taste, Bourdieu states simply that taste
"classifies the classifier."[7] The ability to understand what is tasteful,
to be able to define it, comes out of what he calls “cultural capital,”
something which in turn establishes class differences. For the purposes of
discussing middle-class and elite wedding consumption, the concept of cultural
capital is especially useful. As
markers of taste and status, weddings laid claim to a particular identity. Following established rules of etiquette,
consuming within the bounds of accepted good taste, displaying one’s sense of
the rightness of things was power to assert one’s vision of things over others,
to define the dominant discourse.[8] But what constituted a tasteful
wedding? The answer to that has varied
over time and is situated in a particular historical context.
***
Weddings
were layered with conventions that reproduced social hierarchy. Correct wedding consumption was a means of
establishing one’s social position.
Consumption established class boundaries but could blur those boundaries
as well. In a newly urbanized industrial
society, where many were recent immigrants or migrants from rural regions in
the United States, the middle class achieved social distinction by having
correct and tasteful weddings. This
middle class must have constituted the main audience for the numerous etiquette
books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that dealt with
correct social form for weddings. These
works sought to regulate wedding customs, setting social boundaries of taste and
decorum that would include some, and exclude many. Such rules of etiquette often required a large expenditure on the
part of the bride, groom, and wedding guests.
They outlined the necessary material aspects of the correct wedding,
including engraved wedding invitations, gifts for bridesmaids, maid of honor,
best man, and ushers, gift from the groom to the bride, wedding presents from
invited guests, a personal and household trousseau, flowers from the groom to
the female members of the wedding party, and so on. Such prescriptive literature helped weddings entry into consumer
culture. In later years, etiquette
books would have a direct link to commercial venues, such as women’s and bridal
magazines, and serve their interest.
Consumer
rites, such as the convention of giving and displaying gifts, reproduced class
and gender hierarchies. In the late
nineteenth-century and early twentieth century, a discussion of the proper
execution of these rituals appeared in magazines, fiction, and prescriptive
literature. This discourse on gifts was
part of a larger critique of wedding consumption. During this period, after gifts were received at the bride’s home
they were put on display on long, cloth-covered tables, sometimes with name
tags indicating the giver. Gifts of silver, china, jewels, and even furniture
were put out for invited guests to admire.[9] Newspaper announcements that recounted
society wedding present displays sometimes noted the designer or manufacturer
of gifts, names such as Minton, Dresden, and Tiffany. Gift-viewing could be downplayed, with guests just catching a
glimpse of presents on display in an upstairs room, or they could be the focus
of attention and scrutiny.
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An early
critic voiced opposition to the excesses of the practice. In 1870, the famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher,
published an article aptly entitled “Wedding Bazaars,” in which he argued that
changes in society called for the end of this practice. In earlier times, he noted it had been
necessary to set up a young couple in housekeeping. Beecher writes: “But as wealth increases, and new manners prevail
in refined society, it is no longer an aim to furnish the lodgings of love’s
young pilgrims. The custom of giving
presents remains, but the motive changes; and unless great caution be used,
such custom degenerates, and becomes offensive.”
Debates
over such wedding practices show how power relations were embedded in the
performance of taste. Henry Ward
Beecher’s critique of the custom condemned its undemocratic nature. Beecher himself seldom “took pleasure in
looking at the wedding treasure chamber “
He worried about the “humble cousins, the poor young men wishing to
stand well in society, the outside friends that dare not come without gifts
when all are expected to give.” Such a
custom shored up social hierarchies.
When each gift was marked with the givers name as was the custom then,
the ability to pay was on display.
According to others in later years, the practice merely skirted the
boundaries of taste. A 1909
publication, Etiquette for Americans,
noted the difference of opinion: "To go through them bores some persons
tremendously, and they are not always allowed to skip the process. It delights
others."[10]
Wedding
conventions such as the present display were exercises in power, a fact that
early twentieth-century writers used to mirror larger issues. In Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel, Age of Innocence, the debate over the
appropriateness of displaying gifts signals the rule-bound world of 1870s New
York society that constrains the hero, Newland Archer, from finding happiness
with his true love, the unconventional Ellen Olenski. As Archer is about to marry May Welland "A stormy discussion
as to whether the wedding presents should be "shown" had darkened the
last hours before the wedding.” Wharton
understood that gift display merged the public with the private, something
itself of questionable taste for the middle class who valued such a
separation. Such public performance
held one’s belongings up for inspection.
For example, the mother-of-the bride, Mrs. Welland, refused to have her
daughter’s presents displayed: nearly in tears, she stated that she
"should as soon turn the reporters loose in (her) house." Wharton uses this discussion over the appropriateness
of showing gifts as one more example of the ways that society’s conventions
trapped the hero. The groom, Newland
Archer wonders at the fact “that grown-up people should work themselves into a
state of agitation over such trifles"[11] While Archer was critical of the details of
the wedding, overall he was unable to break free of good “Form” and those like
the character, Lawrence Lefferts, who patrolled its border. Archer was doomed to carry on and enter into
a limited marriage unless he was willing or able to sacrifice his position in
society.[12]
Gift
rituals, like those depicted by Wharton, were also embedded in an unequal
system of gender relations. Wedding
presents and the materialistic rituals surrounding them underlined the economic
necessity of marriage for women.
Wharton depicts the present display in her 1905 novel, House of Mirth. The heroine, Lily Barth, who admires the
bridal jewels on display and covets “the life of fastidious aloofness and
refinement” they represented, saw the gift display and the wedding itself as a
painful reminder of the limitations of her social position as an aging, single
woman.[13] Marriage was necessary for social status
and economic security for middle-class and elite women. Weddings were thus more important for women
than for men, who were conspicuously absent from records of wedding
preparations and were not included in the host of consumer rituals surrounding
the celebration. Letters between
turn-of the century brides and grooms before their marriage show women
concerned with the details of setting up a new house. For example, the letters that bride-to-be Mary Paul wrote her
future husband, Howard Bland, in 1905 were filled with detailed, elaborate
descriptions of the presents pouring into her home. Mary Paul openly acknowledged the pleasure they gave her: “It is
too much fun getting presents--I adore it and they can’t come too many or too
often for me!” she wrote. At one point,
she wrote “We have 200 presents.”[14] In contrast, her husband wrote more about
his public life and his love for her rather than about the wedding itself.[15]
Etiquette
writers and others used gendered language to regulate gift rituals, showing
some discomfort with practices that linked marriage with commerce. In 1904, one etiquette writer called on the
bride’s discretion, noting that
"the showing of the wedding gifts is left to the taste of the bride. She
need no longer exhibit them on the day of the wedding, ticketed and labeled
with the names of their givers, like dry goods in a shop window unless she so
chooses."[16] To be associated with the hands-on business
of making money lowered the social standing of women among some groups. The bride, who in Henry Ward Beecher’s 1870
account “does not shrink from calculating the probable gifts” and takes “an
account of stock”after “the wedding bazaar” was no better as this language
suggests, than a businessman turning her wedding into a masculine
profit-making venture.[17] Similarly, in House of Mirth, Wharton criticized the money-making aspect of
weddings when she described Grace Van Osburgh’s gift display with accompanying
namecards as “bridal spoils.”
***
For a long
time, the formal white wedding was the purview of elites like those
fictionalized in Wharton’s novels. When
more and more people, however, had celebrations with all the trimmings--the
white gown, multiple attendants, flowers, a church ceremony, and large
reception--the costly wedding came under attack. In the early twentieth century, expensive, elaborate weddings
were suspect when they were not in line with the class background or wealth of
the bride and her family. Different
budgets were supposed to determine whether one chose to marry in a civil
ceremony at a court house, marry quietly in the parsonage, have a formal hotel
wedding, or have a wedding breakfast at home or in church buildings. Etiquette writers warned against wedding
consumption out of proportion with one’s means. According to one in 1913, when costliness was the goal the effect
was “vulgar.” The financial standing of
the bride’s family was supposed to determine the degree of elaboration: “the
carrying of it beyond their means may bring criticism upon both parties
concerned.”[18]
Emulation,
however, was considered a problem. The
danger, according to one 1912 article in Suburban
Life, was that "once the rich set the pace for these social functions.
. .the rest of the world must needs ape the results” as the “poor are quick to
follow the example set them by their more fortunate neighbors.” Big weddings held by non-elites were
wasteful, and likely not in good taste. Those of the wealthy also were suspect
from this perspective, as they drew attention to gaps between the rich and
poor. The display of luxury by the rich
could foment social discord "when the wretched poverty-stricken father of
a numerous family hears that his rich employer has bought 5,000 orchids from
overseas at a dollar apiece, to grace a banquet."[19]
The ability
itself to have a big wedding, however, did not directly correlate to social
status. In a society where mobility was
theoretically possible, taste served as a means of classifying oneself and of
being classified by others. Wealth
might allow one to own the material goods and space needed to host a ball or a
large wedding reception, but it was no guarantee of social standing. Age of
Innocence demonstrated this distinction.
For example, the fabulously wealthy Beauforts “had been among the first
people in NY to own their own red velvet carpet and have it rolled down the
steps by their own footmen, under their own awning, instead of hiring it with
the supper and the ball-room chairs."[20] And yet, they did not rank among the very
elite of Old New York society.
Simplicity was depicted favorably in her account of 1870s society. Wedding consumption served as a touchstone
for shifting values. May Welland’s
engagement ring, "a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws" met
with mild disapproval by her grandmother,
who called it "Very Handsome...very liberal,” but noted that in her
time “a cameo set in pearls was thought sufficient."[21] Wharton’s novel, published in 1920,
coincided with a major shift in attitudes toward spending and consuming. A document of the post World-War I era, the
novel exhibited a nostalgia for a time when tastes were simpler, before a
commercial ethic came to the fore.
Increasingly,
in a consumer society commercially produced goods and services made it possible
to have a wedding reception beyond one's means. Unlike the Beaufort’s in
Wharton’s novel, most who had large entertainments, including the wealthy, turned
to commercial services to provide at least some aspect of the celebration. Catering businesses were one of the earliest
wedding industries. If one did not own
the elaborate silverware and china necessary for the multi-course meals popular
in the nineteenth century, caterers would provide it. In the 1860s, the New York confectioner W. H. Barmore offered to furnish wedding parties "entire
with silver, china, etc." and would send waiters at short notice, along
with "pyramids, mottoes, games, etc." Also a "Ladies & Gents Restaurant," they were
prepared to furnish weddings, dinner parties, and evening entertainments."[22] In the 1880s, caterers, such as S & J
Davis in Newark, New Jersey, offered multi-course meals, a range of wedding
cakes made to order, china, glass, silverware, awnings, and "floor
crash" as well as "waiters and cooks sent out at short
notice." Their clientele included
German-speakers, as they made a special notice that they were opening a
"fine line of German Mottoes and Favors."
Critics of
costly weddings idealized the "simple" Protestant home wedding
reception. In the early twentieth
century, popular sources that represented a mainstream native-born,
middle-class Protestant viewpoint, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal or the Boston
School of Cooking magazine, assumed an audience interested in receptions in
private homes when they provided recipes for wedding cake and menus for home
receptions. In reality, while the
church ceremony was the norm for Protestant
Americans by the end of the nineteenth century, reception location
varied widely according to religion, class, ethnicity, and region.[23] By the 1920s, when home receptions were
still prevalent among native-born Protestants, Emily Post elevated the wedding breakfast held in a
private house, stating that it had “greater distinction than the most elaborate
collation in a public establishment.”
Public spaces lacked “sentiment” and a “‘home’ atmosphere.”[24] Favored by Jews and working-class Catholics,
public spaces like halls and even hotels were viewed through the nativist’s eye
with an element of disdain.
The
elevation of the simple wedding was part of a larger naturalization of
"middle-class simplicity" going on in women's magazines at the turn
of the century.[25] The ideal wedding, according to such
criticism, had Puritan roots, and thus was supposed to be characterized by
restraint, decorum, and simplicity.[26] Anyone could have a big wedding is the
implication, but only those with cultural capital could have a truly tasteful celebration,
a simple wedding. Not only were
celebrations that stepped outside the boundaries of middle-class refinement
tasteless, in this view, they were potentially ruinous. Popular magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal published stories that showed how spending
beyond one's means to impress the neighbors with an elaborate wedding reception
could destroy a family.[27] The 1912 Suburban
Life article criticized big, costly
weddings from an older producer-oriented perspective. In this account, female
consumption threatened to bankrupt the father, who had mortgaged his house to
renovate and enlarge it for the wedding of his daughter.[28] The writer criticized the bride as selfish
and spoiled. She had driven her family
to near-ruin with the bills of "dressmakers, milliners, tailors, and
tradesmen of different kinds" . Raising the spirits of "our Puritan
fathers," the writer questioned "the reckless and extravagant use of
money" and reminded her readers that "in the beginnings of our common
wealth, men and women were required by law to live within their
incomes." Such "ostentatious
display" was reprehensible because it overshadowed the "sacredness of
marriage." This ambivalence about
the wedding's connection to the market was part of a larger concern over status
and middle-class boundaries.
From a
working-class perspective, however, middle-class simplicity left something to
be desired. Home ceremonies needed upper middle-class settings to achieve
ritualistic splendor. The spectacle or
pageantry of the formal, white wedding was difficult to create in an
apartment. A home wedding in a small,
dingy apartment, witnessed by only a few people, was not “respectable,” in the
eyes of one immigrant bride in a short story written by Abraham Cahan in
1898. Frank Norris’s novel, McTeague, written in the same year
depicts a similar attitude toward small weddings. When Norris’s heroine, Trina, married her dentist groom in a San
Francisco apartment, she was haunted by the “cursory, superficial” nature of
the ceremony, which appeared to leave something out.[29]
Moreover,
such a small wedding did not allow for the full expression of working-class and
immigrant communal values. Big weddings
in public urban spaces, such as rented halls, were community affairs,
expressions of class and ethnic identity.
The big public hall wedding with hundreds of guests, a huge wedding
feast, music, dancing, and drinking was an important part of urban life at the
turn of the century. According to a New
York Settlement Society report in 1899, weddings celebrated in public halls
“displayed the collective social spirit which plays so large a part in holding
people together within a fixed geographical limit.” At the turn of the century, on the East Side of New York alone
there were more than fifteen such public halls. Two of these, the New Irving Hall and Liberty Hall, could
accommodate from 500 to 1,200 people.
New Irving Hall could be rented for thirty dollars a night for a
wedding. Generally, the parents of the
contracting parties rented the hall, hired an orchestra, provided refreshments,
and divided the expense. Weddings were
closely scheduled. Liberty Hall saw
three weddings a night.[30] Halls were one response to city life, a
means of bringing a community together in a place where homes were not large
enough to have more than a family party, if that.
Big
immigrant weddings brought the risk of debt, but they were supposed to bring
much needed material aid to the new couple.
Large celebrations might be beyond one’s means, but the community was
supposed to rally their sense of reciprocity.
Fictional depictions of big immigrant celebrations explore these
cultural values that were so different from the middle-class native-born
emphasis on taste and simplicity. In
“A Ghetto Wedding,” Abraham Cahan’s 1898 short story about Yiddish New York,
wedding expenses nearly lead to the downfall of the hero and heroine. Nathan, who works as a street peddler of
china dishes, wants to marry his sweetheart Goldy, who is a seamstress, but she
refuses to do so until she can stand under the bridal canopy not as a “beggar
maid.” She wanted “a respectable
wedding,” not its antithesis, “a slipshod wedding,” which was “anything short
of a gown of white satin and slippers to match; two carriages to bring the bride
and bridegroom to the ceremony, and one to take them to their bridal
apartments; a wedding band and a band of at least five musicians; a spacious
ballroom crowded with dancers, and a feast of a hundred and fifty covers.”[31] Goldy delayed the marriage asking that they
save enough to establish themselves comfortably and furnish an apartment. After two years of hard work and savings
when they were no where near having the “respectable wedding” as well as the
nicely-furnished apartment, Goldy conspired to solve the problem by spending
all their money on the celebration, hoping that gifts would supply their
household needs. In fact, Yiddish
etiquette manuals warned against this practice, calling for the bride and groom
to “stay within their means.”[32] Nevertheless, Goldy tells Nathan, “Let us
spend all our money on a grand, respectable wedding, and send out a big lot of
invitations, and then--well, won’t uncle Leiser send us a carpet or a parlor
set? And aunt Beile, and cousin Shapiro, (etc.) won’t each present something or
other, as is the custom among respectable people?”[33] They hired a hall, sent out over a hundred invitations, and waited for
wedding gifts to arrive at their rented rooms.
As only a few gifts came trickling in and few accepted the invitation,
they began to realize that the worst had happened. Their wedding came during hard times when many of their invited
friends were out of work, without presentable clothes to wear to the
celebration, and unable to afford the expense of the required present. The simple tale ends with Nathan and Goldy
returning to their bare rooms after the pathetic wedding celebration,
forgetting their material woes, happy together and in love. Consumption is not mercenary here; instead,
the materialist dreams of Goldy are supposed to represent the immigrant dream for a better life. The inability of their community to fulfill
their obligations to the new couple was not the fault of the immigrants or the
result of Americanization, but rather the result of the economic hardships they
faced.
The
communal customs of the big immigrant wedding are shown to be out of place in
the industrial city by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle. The novel opens with the wedding of Jurgis and Ona, two
recent Lithuanian immigrants who work in the slaughterhouse industry in
Chicago. They host the Lithuanian veselija, a communal wedding
celebration, which could cost more than a year’s income for immigrants who
worked in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, and yet was deemed absolutely necessary
for the proper celebration of the rite of marriage. The expense and risks involved in having such a celebration were
a key to its meaning. Spending a year’s
income in a single day proved that one could be “the master of things” and
allowed one to “go back to his toil and live upon the memory all his days.”[34] The wedding scene that opens this socialist
protest novel stands in stark contrast to the wrenching depictions of poverty
and despair that dominate the rest of the narrative. The opening scenes of feasting and Lithuanian dancing, however,
also foreshadow the horrible fate that awaits the young hero and his new
wife. The veselija was “a compact”
between members of a village community in which each helped contribute money to
pay for the wedding day festivities by dancing with the bride and giving a
donation according to one’s ability to pay.
The novel shows the custom was in decline as guests came to the wedding
feast and then attempted to shirk their duty to help shoulder the cost of the
celebration. Sinclair envisioned a
selfish individualism destroying the web of obligation and reciprocity that
held together village life in Lithuania.
Just as Jurgis and Ona must bear the burden of their wedding costs on
their own, they stand alone with a make-shift family to face the dehumanizing
force of an urban, industrial order.
To some
nativist critics, immigrant consumption in public spaces itself was
suspect. Progressive reformers
criticized immigrant dance halls, the profit-motives of those who ran them, and
the working-class drinking that took place in such locales. Progressives recognized their social
function, but argued they were also “often debased to the most vicious uses.”[35] Big wedding receptions in public halls,
moreover, involved dances and customs that challenged middle-class notions of
restraint and decorum. Unlike the
“private affair” or the simple home reception, big hall weddings fulfilled
different cultural values, allowing for inclusion, hospitality, and
reciprocity.
***
Romance and
commerce were supposed to be at odds.
Weddings did not enter consumer culture, without opposition, or at least
some negotiation. This debate, as we have seen, took place in a variety of
places--in literature, etiquette books, and magazines. Businesses themselves at the turn of the
century expressed concern for the propriety of directing their selling efforts
specifically at brides. As if
department stores were reluctant to make June brides “a fair mark,” trade
writers encouraged the practice. They self-consciously
noted the appropriateness of such business as long as it was conducted in a
“dignified” manner: “Just now it may not be strictly within correct form to
seek business from prospectives” warned the Dry
Goods Economist. “A little
sentiment, however, ‘is a dangerous thing’ in business, and one must up to a
certain point shut their eyes and take chances.”[36]
[1]For a good
recent synthesis of marriage in the United States, see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the
Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[2]Edith
Wharton, The Age of Innocence: Complete Text with Introduction, Historical
Contexts, Critical Essays, ed. Carol J. Singley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2000), 154.
[3]Margaret
Woodward, "The Evil of Elaborate and Showy Weddings," Suburban Life 14 (June 1912). At the end
of the nineteenth century, social critic Thorstein Veblen condemned costly
entertainments. While not specifically
addressing weddings, he viewed balls or large entertainments as conspicuous consumption,
demonstrating a typical late-nineteenth century uneasiness with new market
relations. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic
Study of Institutions, with an introduction by C. Wright Mills, (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1899; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1953), 64-5.
[4]For a
synthesis of the literature addressing these transformations, see Daniel
Horowitz, The Morality of Spending:
Attitudes toward the Consumer Society, 1875-1940 (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1985), 68-69.
Also, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No
Place of Grace: Anti-modernism and
the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981).
[5]Many
scholars have documented the rich oppositional youth culture at the turn of the
twentieth century. For example, see
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements:
Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1986). John Kasson, Amusing
the Million : Cony Island at the Turn
of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); Nan Enstad, Ladies of
Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics
at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
1999).
[6]Daniel
Horowitz, The Morality of Spending,
6. As Horowitz shows, this moralist
reaction to consumer culture continued throughout the twentieth century along
different avenues. For example, see
John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent
Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd: a Study of the Changing
American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); and
Christopher Lasch's The Culture of
Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978).
[7]Pierre
Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1984), 6-7.
[8]Pierre
Bourdieu, 12-13. Capital is the "the set of actually usable resources and
power," including economic, cultural and social capital, p. 114.
[9]Wedding
Scrapbook, newsclipping, Caldwell-Chrisman wedding, n.d. McFaddin Ward House,
Beaumont, Texas.
[10]"A
Woman of Fashion," Etiquette for
Americans (New York: Duffield & Company, 1909), 109.
[11]Edith
Wharton, Age of Innocence, 156.
[12] "Few
things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against
"Taste," that far-off divinity of whom "Form" was the mere
visible representative and vicegerent." Wharton, Age of Innocence, 24 His
opposition to convention leads him such sarcastic remarks, and occasionally to
actions, as when he pursues Ellen Olenski, the unconventional object of his
true love, but only to a degree.
"Lawrence Leffert's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over
the invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony"
(Archer's wedding) p. 156.
[13]Edith
Wharton, House of Mirth, with an
introduction by R.W.B. Lewis, (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 85-6.
[14]Mary Paul
to Howard Bland, 13 September 1905; Mary Paul to Howard Bland, 1905, box
3, Bland Family Papers, University of
Maryland, College Park.
[15]For
example, Howard Bland to Mary Paul, 10 October 1905.
[16]Anne
Randall White, Twentieth Century
Etiquette (n.p., 1904), 278.
[17]Henry Ward
Beecher, Godey’s Ladies’ Book, 80
(March 1870), 295.
[18]Edith
Ordway, The Etiquette of To-Day (New
York: George Sully and Company, Inc., 1913).
[19]Margaret
Woodward, "The Evil of Elaborate and Showy Weddings," Suburban Life 14 (June 1912), 418.
[20]Edith
Wharton, Age of Innocence, 28.
[21]ibid., 35.
[22]Receipt,
W. H. Barmore, Confectionery, box 1; Advertisement, W. H. Barmore,
Confectionery, box 1, Warshaw Collection, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
[23]Ellen K.
Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of
Courtship in America (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1973), 78.
[24]Emily
Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1923), 375.
[25]For
example, the simple life was promoted by Edward Bok, editor of Ladies' Home Journal from
1889-1919. For a discussion of the
history of this concept, see David E. Shi, The
Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 181, passim.
Also see Jackson Lears, No Place
of Grace, 74-83.
[26]This
cultural ideal, however, elevated a past that scholars have shown to be more
complex and strikingly less "Puritan." David D. Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 210-211.
[27]For a similar
condemnation of wedding consumption and parallel story of its dangers, see
Edward Bok, "His Daughter's Wedding," Ladies' Home Journal, (June 1904), 20. Cited in Ellen M. Litwicki,
"Showering the Bride: a Ritual of Gender and Consumption," Paper Presented
30 May 1998 at the Conference on Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebrations, and
Public Display, Bowling Green University, Ohio. Manuscript in the possession of the author.
[28]Margaret
Woodward, "The Evil of Elaborate and Showy Weddings," 418.
[29]Frank
Norris, McTeague: A Story of San
Francisco (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1899; reprint, New York:
Penguin Books, 1964), 130.
[30]John
Oskinson, “Public Halls of the East Side,” University
Settlement Society of New York Report, 1899, 38, 39.
[31]Abraham Cahan,
“A Ghetto Wedding,” in Yekl and the
Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York, with an
introduction by Bernard G. Richards, (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company,
1898; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 226.
[32]Jenna Weissman
Joselit, Wonders of America: Reinventing
Jewish Culture, 1780-1950 (New York: HIll and Wang, 1994), 24.
[33]Abraham
Cahan, 228-9
[34]Upton
Sinclair, The Jungle, (New York:
Doubleday, 1905; reprint, New York: Signet Books, 1980), 18.
[35]Daniel
Horowitz, The Morality of Spending,
63.
[36]“June
Brides a Fair Mark,” Dry Goods Economist
(8 June 1901), 43.