Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding

The fabulous gown, the multitiered cake, abundant flowers, attendants and guests in their finery. The white wedding does more than mark a life passage. It marries two of the most sacred tenets of American culture--romantic love and excessive consumption. For anyone who has ever wondered about the meanings behind a white dress, a diamond ring, rice, and traditions such as cake cutting, bouquet tossing, and honeymooning, this book offers an entertaining and enlightening look at the historical, social, and psychological strains that come together to make the lavish wedding the most important cultural ritual in contemporary consumer culture. With an emphasis on North American society, Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck show how the elaborate wedding means far more than a mere triumph for the bridal industry. Through interviews, media accounts, and wide-ranging research and analysis, they expose the wedding's reflection--or reproduction--of fundamental aspects of popular consumer culture: its link with romantic love, its promise of magical transformation, its engendering of memories, and its legitimization of consumption as an expression of perfection. As meaningful as any prospective bride might wish, the lavish wedding emerges here as a lens that at once reveals, magnifies, and reveres some of the dearest wishes and darkest impulses at the heart of our culture.

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Title of ebook: Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding
ISBN: 9780520901605
parent-ISBN: 9780520236615
Publisher: University of California Press
Internet download file size: 2869 kb
Published: 08-2003
Released online for download: 08-27-2003
Author of eBook: Otnes, Cele
Author of eBook: Knott, John Ray
Author of eBook: Pleck, Elizabeth H.

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Cinderella Dreams

THE ALLURE OF THE LAVISH WEDDING

Chapter One

THE ENGAGEMENT COMPLEX

Given the amount of detail involved, the lavish wedding obviously does not happen overnight. Engagements in the United States now last an average of thirteen months, a far cry from Emily Post's admonishment in 1922 that "A long engagement is trying to everyone.... It is an unnatural state, like that of waiting at the station for a train." Of course, in case the bride and groom are unsure of how best to use this time, bridal magazines and etiquette books provide detailed checklists of goods and services that must be acquired, altered, maintained, and stored for the wedding, according to a month-by-month timetable.

But just what does it mean to be engaged? In Western countries, where couples choose their own mates without parental influence or supervision, it means two romantic partners who have created a "love match" openly declare their intention to marry in the near future. The event that marks the official beginning of the engagement is th ... read full excerpt from Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding ebook

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