Dreaming is a Girl's Best Friend

Abstract

Dreaming is a Girl's Best Friend Sarah A. Leavitt (bio) First, full disclosure: I was married in a white dress. And though I do not usually refer to my wedding as a "binge" (3), I can certainly bear witness to the claim raised by authors Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck: the lavish wedding is flourishing. Reading Cinderella Dreams brought back memories of dozens of weekends spent with friends and family affirming one of America's most treasured rituals. From the Las Vegas strip to a Manhattan social club; from beachside California to a backyard in upstate New York; from historical mansions and botanical gardens to a ski resort, my friends' weddings clearly conform to the same set of rules presented in this book. And that, in essence, is the point: most of its readers will find here something familiar. As the authors reveal, close to 90 percent of adults in the United States will get married in their lifetimes (5). Otnes and Pleck try to explain that universality in this engagingly written book that is well grounded in academic thought. The basic argument of the book is that "people want lavish weddings because they want to experience magic in their lives" (12, emphasis in original). Otnes and Pleck suggest that modern couples see the wedding as a transformative event in which ordinary things become magic. Candy-covered almonds are not inherently special, but wrap them in tulle and place one on everybody's plate and voila!—something magical occurs. Although to some readers, "magic" might not seem to be a good enough answer, the careful explanation here of how, for example, bridal salons manage to turn an ordinary dressing room into sacred space, guides readers through the steps of realization that, though the magic is in some cases manufactured, it is also quite real to its devotees. Otnes and Pleck, professors of, respectively, business administration and history at the University of Illinois, state quite clearly that their purpose is "not to evaluate the rights and wrongs of the lavish wedding" (23). The authors address the historical background of each wedding tradition while at the same time challenging the assumptions that because something is middle class and materialist, it is also meaningless to its users; or that because something is a fairy tale it cannot also be real. This simple idea of "magic" is a refreshing departure from much of the recent academic writing on weddings. Sociologist Chyrs Ingraham's White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (1999) presented the wedding as an exercise in society's heterosexual performance. English professors have tackled the subject: Jaclyn Geller's Here Comes the Bride: [End Page 114] Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique (2001) was joined by Elizabeth Freeman's The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern Culture (2002), which considers centuries of wedding fiction and film and finds that weddings—deemed "queer" in part because of their focus on lace, jewelry, and clothing—are often more about pageantry than heterosexual love. Popular treatments include writer Carol Wallace's look at the history of weddings in All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding (2004). These works complement the work of Cinderella Dreams, but Otnes and Pleck are interested in different issues. This book takes weddings as "democratized portals" (15), magical rituals that have meaning to millions of people, rather than as troubling social constructions with hidden meanings only few understand. The authors respect the agency of modern brides; indeed, one of the most important contributions of Cinderella Dreams is the way in which it acknowledges the "ability of consumer culture to generate meaning" (19) and takes that concept seriously in a world where many academics would call it into question. The book is filled with interviews and evidence from online sources, but sometimes reads as if the authors had queried their friends about their own experiences. Such sentences in the chapter on bridal showers as "One invitee in her twenties, who rarely cooked, was stymied by the hostess's request to bring her favorite recipe" made me wonder if I was reading anecdotes or scholarship (74). Similarly, such statements as "by the middle of the...