Bridezilla Consciousness

Cinderella Dreams asks, what is the allure of the lavish wedding? Authors Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Peck's reply is simple: Brides, grooms, and their families spend so much money on weddings for the magic, perfection, memories, and romance. Their answer could easily serve as a marketing pitch for what sociologist Chrys Ingraham calls the "wedding-industrial complex."¹ Cinderella Dreams thus breaks ranks with other recent critical works on weddings by coming down on the side of the consumer-bride, even and perhaps especially if she's what several cultural observers describe as a "Bridezilla," the bride whose intense pursuit of aesthetic perfection knows no bounds.²

For the most part, the authors confine their argument and its theoretical underpinnings to the book's introductory and concluding chapters. For the meat of their book, Otnes and Pleck develop a holistic approach to the wedding by piecing together a descriptive quilt of practices and their histories, such as diamond-ring proposals, bridal showers, bachelor parties, rehearsal dinner toasts, white bridal gowns, wedding ceremonies, reception fare and entertainment, and honeymoons. In each instance, the authors trace the origins of present-day U.S. practices back in time—sometimes as far back as Victorian England, sometimes only to the 1980s—and devote as much space to description of the present as to the past. The eight chapters that form the core of the book have an almost encyclopedic feel, providing detailed treatments of dozens of interrelated topics.

The authors' handling of many of the disparate social practices covered by Cinderella Dreams is expansive. Take their discussion of the honeymoon as just one example. Otnes and Pleck locate the honeymoon's origins in Victorian England, discuss the significance of the bride's sexual initiation in former times, and go on to include a lengthy description of the rise and fall of popular honeymoon destinations in recent years. They write of the heyday of Poconos resorts, with their heart-shaped tubs of the sexual revolution, as well as their fall, when "rising incomes and rising ages at marriage" (145) allowed for the development of more luxurious honeymoon hotspots, like tropical-island resorts with ocean-side pools with swim-up bars.

The authors' treatment of honeymoons, like their discussion of other aspects of weddings, attends to multiple dimensions of the phenomenon, from historical roots to social functions to depictions in Hollywood films. As Otnes and Pleck apply this rich descriptive strategy to each of their central topics, along the way they provide brief glimpses into the worlds of family, romance, children's play, consumption, business practices, marketing, travel, fashion, photography, gift giving, and public speaking. In addition, the authors offer a history of Hollywood films about weddings, tracing the upscaling of weddings over time.

The lavish wedding, Otnes and Pleck argue, may have a tendency to exclude and marginalize some—those without sufficient financial resources or culturally sanctioned romantic legitimacy—but also has a tendency to be appropriated and adopted by those whom it Others. They point out, for example, that blow-out "encore" weddings for the previously married have been increasingly normalized of late. Otnes and Pleck also describe as evidence of adaptability the globalization of the white wedding, gay and lesbian lavish weddings, interfaith weddings, and politicized "protest" versions that downplay the lavishness but amplify the individuality to achieve feminist or environmentalist messages.³

Rather than staking the book's claim to fame on its impressive command of a wide variety of wedding-related subjects, the authors argue that what distinguishes Cinderella Dreams from other works on weddings is its underlying argument: that the lavish wedding fulfills women's dreams of Cinderella-like magical transformation and time-stopping romance. They make compelling points, but their methods do not allow them to argue these points convincingly, in my view.

Cinderella Dreams seems to be based on several kinds of research. The authors cull material from secondary sources, some...