Dennis Hall

Modern and Postmodern Wedding Planners: Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society (1937) and Blum & Kaiser’s Weddings for Dummies (1997)

Wedding guides are a literary undertaking singularly useful to an understanding of American popular culture, for these conduct books are literary fictions. While not belletristic in the conventional sense, they are, nonetheless, narratives which people employ to make sense of their lives, in the manner proposed by as Frank Kermode. In a comparative analysis of Emily Post’s classic counsel on the conduct of a wedding enunciated in the late 1930s and that of a current favorite, Weddings for Dummies, published in the late 1990s, we get a sense of two distinct narrative structures and approaches to the cultural necessity of sense making.

Wedding planners, like retail catalogs, are, indeed, among our most compelling conduct books, suggesting not so much what one ought or ought not to do as what one might do, what one could aspire to. They define a utopia, the perfect wedding, and so are paradigmatic narratives, structures of possible rather than actual actions and relationships, and, as such, are taken, as are all literary fictions, as “consciously false,” embraced or discarded for their utility rather than for their adherence to something called “reality” or “truth.” These guides, moreover, provide the cultural materiel, a selection of possible rites, the ritual moves, out of which a wedding may be constructed.

The people who resort to these books—presumably couples and their parents, but functionally brides and their mothers—are likely not from the upper classes, who either already confidently possess this knowledge or hire and willingly follow a consultant who does, nor are they likely from the lower classes, who either do not care or have very few choices. Rather, they are members of the ubiquitous American middle classes, the same people who need insurance, have some choices, and suffer from marginal self-confidence, from a need for self-determination, and from the do-it-yourself syndrome. As Frank Kermode describes the resort to literary constructs of this kind, these people find themselves under the compulsion of cultural necessity, in a world of contradictory sensations and exposed to the assaults of a hostile world, and in order to preserve themselves are forced to seek every possible means of assistance (40).

Moreover, I want to argue that it is useful to see Emily Post as a modernist fiction and Weddings for Dummies as a postmodernist fiction, a distinction, which perhaps says more about our understanding of weddings as cultural rites than about fiction.

With the revised and enlarged third edition in 1937 of Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, “Illustrated with Photographs and Facsimiles of Social Forms,” Emily Post (1872-1960), still carefully identified on the title page in parentheses as (Mrs. Price Post), confirmed a process of becoming synonymous with etiquette, which began in 1922 with Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. While it is impossible to date such matters with any precision, to consult Emily Post was for the American middle class to confer with the undisputed authority on social probity at least through the early 1960s,¹  and, as a consequence, the reliable guide for the conduct of that crucial domestic rite, the wedding.

Emily Post clearly seeks to be read, not simply consulted. This book has a controlling ethos and voice; we get to know Emily Post the person, her patterns of speech, her singular taste for directive irony, her habits of mind. She aggressively espouses a theory of etiquette enunciated in her book’s preface “In Answer to a Letter,” in such chapters as “The True Meaning of Etiquette,” “Modern Man and Girl,” “The Only Real School of Charm is Home,” “The Growth of Good Taste in America,” and in asides which are often brief narratives with dialogue, involving such characters as Mrs. Nobody, Mr. and Mrs. Worldly, Mr. and Mrs. Squire, and a charming girl named Cynthia²  —these inserted within directives and process analysis on such various topics as “Greetings,” “Restaurant Etiquette,” “Manners for Motorists, “The Well-Appointed House,” “Teas and Other Afternoon Parties,” “Formal Dinners,” “Funerals,” “Christenings,” “The Country House and Its Hospitality,” “Invitations, Acceptances, and All Engraved Forms,” “All Formalities of Correspondence,” to mention but a few of the fifty chapter titles.

While Emily Post’s aim is to be comprehensive, and to be reasonably authoritative, rather than authoritarian, about particular practices, she knows she cannot be exhaustive. The formalities and studied informalities she describes are bound in an axiom worthy of Alexander Pope: “Rules of etiquette are nothing more than signposts by which we are guided to the goal of good taste”(858). Her essay on etiquette recognizes that her readers need to consider first principles, need to be involved in what might now be call the meta-discourse of etiquette. Etiquette, in her view, is a process of reflection as much as a set of directives, just as an ethical habit of mind is the source of specific practices in codes of conduct, an analogy which she draws explicitly (2, 858, 771-72) and which operates implicitly throughout.³  In sum, her vision of etiquette is a shadow of her vision of society as a hierarchically and intimately integrated whole. It is no accident that the chapter immediately following “The Day of the Wedding” is devoted not to the new bride making her way into the community or simple entertaining, topics discussed in some detail elsewhere, but to “Christenings.”

Emily Post’s wedding directives make most sense when considered in reference with everything else she says. Our grasp of her understanding of a wedding depends upon a knowledge of her views on, among other topics, “Greetings,” “Conversation,” “Balls and Dances,” “How a Young Girl is Presented to Society,” “Popularity, Fraternity House Party and Commencement,” “The Vanished Chaperon and Other Lost Conventions,” “Modern Man and Girl,” “Engagements,” and “Letter Writing.” So, while there are two hefty chapters on weddings—”First Preparations for a Wedding” (388-429) and “The Day of the Wedding”(430-476)—much of what one needs to know, what perhaps goes without saying, but needs to be said by way of reminder on this special occasion, is found elsewhere in the volume: in sections on formalities of correspondence and engraved forms, on managing house guests and arranging their transportation, on dining conventions and luncheons, breakfasts and suppers, on the clothing of a gentleman. One, of course, can find this information in a fragmented way by consulting the full column of references to weddings in the index (876), but one can engage the reality of a wedding this text constructs, really only by reading, perhaps repeatedly, the whole “Blue Book of Social Usage.”In the 1960s, marriage itself, much less weddings seemed to be out of fashion. This whole matter of social usage for many people simply dissolved, sometimes surviving in quiet embarrassment, as social formalities, especially the more elaborated variations wedding guidebooks revel in, became the sign of social, economic and political conservatism. When in 1972 The Godfather indulged in the mother of all cinematic weddings, the move was taken as a sign of a reactionary nostalgia. But a host of cultural changes in the 1970s and the ‘Eighties, seriously spiked by Princess Diana’s wedding in 1981 (Flanagan 12, 114), coupled with the economic boom of the nineties ushered in a new interest in etiquette and social ritual, as evidenced by the popularity of Judith Martin, the voice of the widely syndicated Miss Manners column and author of Miss Manners on Painfully Proper Weddings (1999). Weddings are now very much in vogue.

Caring and feeding this interest is, of course, a major industry in the United Sates, far larger one suspects in percentage terms than in Emily Post’s time.⁴  And in the 1930s, there were fewer voices of advice. Today every newsstand overflows with such bridal magazines as Martha Stewart Weddings, Brides Magazine, Kentucky Wedding Pages (market segment publication by Bride & Home Magazine), Modern Bride, Bridal Guide, to name only a few, and the bookstores are filled with wedding guides. Caitlin Flannagan trenchantly summarizes the current wedding scene and the conduct books that fuel it, demonstrating how the “wedding merchants capitalize on the emotional vulnerability and social anxiety that afflict people planning a formal wedding” (113).

Among the most popular of these books is Weddings for Dummies (1997), written by Marcy Blum, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and principal of Marcy Blum Associates, professional event planners, and Laura Fisher Kaiser, a senior editor of This Old House Magazine, assisted by a truly impressive list of collaborators (ix-xi).

The first notable characteristic of Blum & Kaiser’s book, and that of virtually all such books and magazines currently available, is their narrow focus; they devote all of their twenty-four chapters and 390 pages just to weddings, and they really get into the details; the book aims to be exhaustive, leaving no alternative undescribed. The For Dummies enterprise,⁵  offers separate books for many of the topics covered in Post’s more comprehensive book: Bartending for Dummies, Dating for Dummies, Entertaining for Dummies, Etiquette for Dummies, Business Etiquette for Dummies, and Home Decorating for Dummies, for example. The vision of the For Dummies universe, however, is severely segmented, if not fragmented, compared to that of Emily Post.

The Dummies universe has, to be sure, a unitary appearance. All the books have jolting black and yellow covers with “for Dummies” in a kind of primitive lettering across the front and a consistent format, all resembling the computer “documentation” and software “Help” programs from which they were spawned: lots of white space and rules and bullets and check marks and “information” boxes and tables and charts and big headings for short paragraphs and a quirky line drawing style and lots of action in the margins. They all use icons to highlight portions of the text; Weddings uses a money bag for “Value Tips,” wedding bells for “Plan Ahead,” a bomb with a lighted fuse for “Caution,” a drawing of a google-eyed nerd for “Technical Stuff,” to mention only four of the ten. The Introduction explains the “Tip” icon—an arrow hitting a bull’s eye—with: “Take it from us—you’re about to read some information you can really use” (4). While the Dummies universe is formulaic in its accidents, it remains multi-voiced and partitioned at its diffuse core.

There is a breezy informality to Weddings for Dummies’ treatment of social forms. Each of the six sections opens with a Rich Tennant cartoon. Cute section and chapter titles abound: “The Glass Slipper Fits—Now What?”; “And the Bride Wore . . . Whatever She Pleased”; “The Main Event: The Ceremony”; “Nuts and Bolts and Loose Screws”; “Ten Tacky Temptations We Beg You to Resist.” The writing is in a very chatty style. Both the book’s style and ethos are captured in the explanation for the “Game Rules” icon, a picture of google-eyed woman, hair up in a bun, looking a lot like Edvard Munch’s The Scream:

Yes, we realize that your Aunt Myrtle graduated with honors from the TJTWID (That’s Just the Way It’s Done) Etiquette Academy, but we’re here to tell you that times have changed and so have certain ironclad rules of decorum. When you see this icon, expect either an alternative way for handling a sticky wedding situation or simply a heads-up on making everyone feel comfortable. (4)

While Weddings for Dummies generally indulges in a lot of that bracketing and winking, self-reflexivity, and cheap irony that has become associated with postmodernist texts of all kinds, the real irony of this and all of the books in the Dummies universe is that they are not purchased or used by unintelligent or uneducated people; rather they seem to be the choice of the smart, the busy, and the well-heeled. Real dummies probably drown in the plethora of brides’ magazines. The For Dummies books have become immensely popular, largely by word-of-mouth, because they really do help people move through the fragmented worlds of postmodern culture. Readers want and get information about a segment of life, and they want that information in encyclopedic form, in quickly accessed chunks. Furthermore, they do not want to know what may be done; they want to know what can be done; they want to know what the options are and they want the instrumental knowledge needed to exercise those options. And this interest in alternatives in the world of weddings is not limited to invitations and dress and venues and music and food, but extends to the variety of religious rites and rules with accounts of Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Orthodox, Protestant (Episcopal & Mainstream), Quaker, Roman Catholic, Shinto, Sikhism, Unitarian-universalist, and something called “Express Yourself” practices. Here a blow has been struck more for personal choice than for cultural diversity. Chapter Six seems to leave no option unexplored as it deals with “Other Aisle Styles” with sections on “getting married again (and again),” same-sex unions, military weddings, and, in a section called “Theme Me Up Scotty,” such theme weddings as Phantom of the Opera, Country and Western, Golf, Holiday, Lounge Acts, New Age, Renaissance, and Victorian. Possible worlds within the universe of weddings!

The Introduction’s chunk on “How to Use This Book,” makes its orientation clear:

We did not write Weddings for Dummies as another book filled with strict rules of “weddiquette” or ways of having the perfect wedding (on your 200-acre estate with a dining room that seats 300). Weddings for Dummies is both a reference book and a users’ manual guaranteed to be dog-eared by the time you walk down the aisle. This book can be picked up at any stage of your wedding plans. Look up a specific facet or read the book cover to cover if you are just embarking on your planning journey. (1)

The disclaimer couched in the ludicrous definition of wedding perfection notwithstanding, Weddings for Dummies does indeed have its eye on the perfect wedding, in the same way Emily Post does, by providing the cultural materiel out of which readers may design and execute a wedding as perfect as their means and inclinations allow. But information is not integration, and while Weddings for Dummies is a reference book which might be read as a whole, Emily Post is a treatise “On Social Usage,” which may be used as a reference book.

Perhaps the most telling difference between Emily Post and Weddings for Dummies, is in their understanding of the nature of the materials they provide in the social practices described and in their understanding of the options. In Emily Post’s universe all that is “social” has form in degrees, descending from highest to the lowest acceptable, these depending principally upon such theoretically accidental elements as the physical circumstances and the means of the people involved. The goal here is to know that world so that one can secure a place in it, so that one can secure one’s identity as a part of it. The essential elements of any social behavior in Emily Post’s view are defined and most clearly comprehended in the highest most refined forms; so, informal dining is a shadow of the formal dinner and the wedding in the parlor of one’s parent’s home is, if you will, a microcosm of the elaborate church wedding. All observances of the defining formality along this hierarchy render one respectable, serve to legitimate the participants. The choices that Emily Post describes for her readers, then, are really matters of degree rather than kind. The genuinely informal, indeed, amounts to the a-formal, a condition without form, the chaotic. The culture/nature binary switch is at work here, and at her back Emily Post always hears the winged chariots of the barbarians at the gates, these driven by “Modern youth,” who play loose with the social usage that defines and sustains her world.⁶  And the painful irony for Emily Post’s middle-class readers is that the lower the level of formality, the greater the amount of care that must be taken with any social rite, for the legitimating form is more difficult to discern in those social practices which are within their means. The security of formality and insecurity of informality the Blue Book of Social Usage describes may help to explain why reading Emily Post can generate a modernist paranoia worthy of J. Alfred Prufrock.

While the scope of Weddings for Dummies is singular, its attention is plural. The aim here is to create a profusion of possible weddings. The book provides a grid—I’m tempted to see it as a spreadsheet—of almost interchangeable alternative elements from which the reader is continually invited to mix and match, to construct her own wedding. Truly impressive is the book’s taxonomical elaboration; here are more categories and concerns than many people would think of without the stimulus of the text. And the choices within them are many, and very often equally weighted in value.

Apart from a diffuse, thirty-something sensibility and the desire to make everyone feel comfortable, a controlling premise or theme is assiduously avoided. Within that universe, the legitimating function of the wedding falls hard upon the choice of which wedding and which self the reader will construct out of these materials. Weddings for Dummies provides the raw materials and facilitates the creation of alternative scenarios and asserts the freedom to create many more; this book’s reader may try on multiple roles and identities, and thus get to experience something of that much discussed postmodernist schizophrenia (see Flanagan 114). If the difficulty facing the reader of Emily Post is getting it right, the difficulty facing the reader of Weddings for Dummies is getting it done at all. Emily Post reassures readers that a beautiful and socially efficacious wedding is possible whatever one’s means; Weddings for Dummies reassures its readers with “Do not freak out” (1).

Emily Post exhibits characteristics of modernism, most especially in its interest in form and hierarchy and selectivity and determinacy and in its tendency to induce paranoia. Weddings for Dummies exhibits characteristics of postmodernism, most notably in its anti-formality and almost anarchic profusion of options and openness to combination and recombination and indeterminacy and in its flirting with schizophrenia. Useful in understanding these texts are the formulations of Brian McHale in his account of the move “From Modernist to Postmodernist Fiction”(3-25). He suggests that the dominant element of modernist fiction is epistemological, that it engages and foregrounds such questions as “‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?’ . . .What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it and with what degree of certainty?”(9). The Bluebook of Social Usage has this epistemological bent; these are precisely the questions that readers bring to Emily Post and that the book answers. McHale further suggests that the dominant element in postmodernists fiction is ontological, and given over to such questions as “‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ . . . What is a world?; What kind of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?”(10). This ontological bent infects all of the Dummies books; and these are precisely the questions that readers bring to Weddings for Dummies and that it answers.

Both works seek to satisfy those basic human needs for sense making that Kermode notes as the functions of paradigmatic fictions, but in different ways. And I think this distinction is significant because it says something important about contemporary ritual practice. Emily Post, on the one hand, clearly describes a rite of passage,⁷  one that finally seeks to incorporate people into society. It is one thing for people to be married, particularly given the sexual mores at the dawn of the new millennium, while it is quite another to be properly identified and accepted as members of a social group. The wedding in this account is, to borrow Catherine Bell’s expression, more clearly a rite that transforms “physical inevitabilities into cultural regularities” (94). The nature of the rite in the Dummies universe, on the other hand, is far less clear, looking a lot more like a rite of exchange, in which people make offerings “with the practical and straightforward expectation of something in return” (Bell 108)—in this case, the expenditure of time and physical and psychic energy and money is offered in exchange for status or to repay social debts, to secure fellow feeling and personal reconciliation, for personal pleasure, or even for gift goods. Or possibly it is a rite of feasting; “in these rituals people are particularly concerned to express publicly—to themselves, each other, and sometimes outsiders—their commitment and adherence to basic . . . values” (Bell 120)—a competitive feast, a potlach.

Dennis Hall

Department of English

University of Louisville

Louisville, KY 40292

Notes

¹Soon after the 1937 edition of Etiquette, Emily Post became an industry. “The Blue Book of Social Usage,” at the time of her death in 1960 had been revised ten times and was in its eighty-ninth printing. She had a radio program and a daily column syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. “In 1946 Mrs. Post founded the Emily Post Institute, where problems of gracious living were to be studied.” (New York Times obituary). The OCLC World Cat lists 126 Post books, many of them the more specialized books, including wedding planners, now common. The “Emily Post” franchise is now carried on by her great granddaughter-in-law, Peggy Post, whose Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette is now in its fourth edition (Flanagan 115). Not at all incidentally, Bartleby.com, “Great Books Online,” published (12/1/99) the complete text, with illustrations, a hypertexted subject index, and a selection of notable quotations, of the 1922 first edition.

²The tone and narrative practice in this regard are remarkably similar to that in William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), as is the goal of punctilious observance. As New York Times obituary attests, Emily Post was also wrote novels Flight of the Moth (1904) Eagle’s Feather (1910), Woven in the Tapestry (1908), Parade (1925), and The Title Market (1909). She also published short fiction in such magazines as Scribners and Colliers.

³Her New York Times obituary quotes her as having said, “Etiquette is the science of living. It embraces everything. It is the code of sportsmanship and of honor. It is ethics.”

⁴A web site called “sellthebride” suggests the enormity of this business. More than 2.2 million couples marry annually. Eighty percent are performed in churches or synagogues. The median age for the first marriage is 24 for women and 25.9 for men. Median age for remarriage is 34.2 for women and 37.4 for men. The wedding industry is estimated to generate $35 billion in sales from wedding rings, wedding apparel, flowers, receptions, honeymoons, gifts and other related expenses. There is a 43% chance of a marriage ending in divorce. Source: Direct, October 15, 1998 <http://www.sellthebride.com/tips.html#Anchor-Wedding-60362 >(9/27/01). Another source suggests a $35 billion handle in 1996 or $16,000 per event, excluding the cost of a honeymoon. (Money Magazine June1997 26:6 160). In February 2001, Caitlin Flanagan reports that the industry amounts to $70 billion annually, with $19 billion of that devoted to gifts.

⁵The Dummies books began with DOS for Dummies and exploded to nearly 1,000 titles in print in three general categories Technology, Business, and General Interest, which includes over 400 titles ranging from Allergies and Asthma for Dummies through Dating for Dummies to Wine for Dummies. See http://www.dummies.com/ (9/27/01).

⁶The oft-mentioned “Modern Youth” of the 1937 edition are less of a genuine threat than a convenient foil, a stark difference that serves to define by obverse iteration.

⁷Lili Corbus Benzer provides a detailed narration of the traditional wedding in terms of Victor Turner’s account of rites of passage, as recorded by the indispensable wedding photographer and fixed in the structure of the wedding album.

Works Cited

Bell, Catherine. Ritual: Perspective and Dimensions. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Lili Corbus Benzer. “‘Divine Detritus’: An Analysis of American Wedding Photgraphy.” Studies in Popular Culture 18:2 (April, 1996) 19-33.

Blum, Marcy, and Laura Fisher Kaiser. Weddings for Dummies. New York: IDG Books, 1997.

Flanagan, Caitlin. “The Wedding Merchants,” The Atlantic Monthly Feb. 2001: 112-118.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen,1987.

New York Times. “Emily Post Is Dead Here at 86; Writer was Arbiter of Etiquette.” [2/27/1960] <http://nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1002.html> (10/8/01).

Post, Emily. Etiquette. 3^rd ed. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937.