The Bride in American Media: a Feminist Media Studies And
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THE BRIDE IN AMERICAN MEDIA: A FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS, 1831-2012 by EMILIA NOELLE BAK (Under the Direction of Janice Hume) ABSTRACT This dissertation examined the figure of the bride in American media. Today, the bride is a ubiquitous figure. She graces the covers of magazines, websites are devoted to her, and multiple television series star her. This study aimed to understand the American bride contemporarily and historically by examining magazine media from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as today’s reality television programming. Pulling from feminist media studies and critical cultural studies and proceeding from the standpoint that representations matter, portrayals of the bride were analyzed in terms of gender, class and race for ways in which these representations affirmed and/or resisted the dominant ideology. The bride was examined in media targeted at women to understand how media meant for women talked about the bride, a uniquely female figure. The nineteenth-century women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, the twentieth-century women’s magazine Ladies’ Home Journal and today’s most notorious reality bride show, Bridezillas, were all examined. INDEX WORDS: bride, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies’ Home Journal, Bridezillas, feminist media studies, cultural studies, wedding THE BRIDE IN AMERICAN MEDIA: A FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS, 1831-2012 by EMILIA NOELLE BAK AB, University of Georgia, 2007 MA, University of Georgia, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 © 2013 EMILIA NOELLE BAK All Rights Reserved THE BRIDE IN AMERICAN MEDIA: A FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS, 1831-2012 by EMILIA NOELLE BAK Major Professor: Janice Hume Committee: Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Peggy Kreshel Valerie Boyd Patricia Richards Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2013 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to all of the women in my life. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support, guidance, wisdom, love and friendship of women. I would like to especially dedicate this work to my mother who taught me early that being a woman meant much more than being a bride, that it meant being brave, being strong and building bonds with other women to work toward a better world for women and for men. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest thanks to my major professor, Dr. Janice Hume. Your patient guidance has been invaluable to me. You pushed me to do better work than I thought I could do, the mark of a great teacher and advisor. Thank you for your support through the difficult work of writing a dissertation and a difficult time in my life. I have tremendous respect for you and am grateful to have worked with you on this dissertation. To Valerie Boyd, thank you for your mentorship and friendship. You have helped me so much as I navigated through the Ph.D. program, and it’s been a reassurance throughout the years knowing you were in my corner. To my additional committee members, Dr. Peggy Kreshel, Dr. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and Dr. Patricia Richards, thank you for your time and your guidance. I have learned so much from each of you and cannot imagine a better committee! To everyone who has helped me with this project along the way, librarians, friends, classmates, reviewers, thank you. Thank you to everyone in the Grady College that I have had the pleasure to work with and learn from, including the faculty, staff, my classmates and my students. v To Dr. Springston, I would not have pursued graduate school if you had not taken the time to sit down and talk with me when I was a senior in college, unsure of my next step. Thank you. To the University of Georgia and all the people who make it the amazing place that it is: It’s been ten years and three degrees, and I am not the same young woman who stepped foot in Brumby Hall all those years ago. I grew up in Athens and will carry it with me always, but I am finally ready to walk under the Arch. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………..….v PREFACE……………………………………………………………………… …..….viii CHAPTER 1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………..1 2 The Evolving Bride in Godey’s Lady’s Book……………………………………13 3 “Back Comes the Bride:” The Brides of the Ladies’ Home Journal, 1930- 1955 …………………………………………………………………….40 4 Modern Bride: Monster Bride? The Bridezillas……………………………..70 5 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….102 EPILOGUE ………………………………………………………………………….117 ENDNOTES ………………………………………………………………………….119 REFERENCES………………………………………………………….……………...130 vii Preface “Friday is Bride-day on TLC,” the TV booms. Cue eye roll. Bride-day. Really? But I don’t change the channel. In fact, I stay stuck to the couch for not one, but two episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. While a part of me disdains the modern media’s bridal culture, I find myself far from free of its pull. Not only am I guilty of watching bride shows, including but not limited to Bridezillas, Four Weddings, Say Yes to the Dress, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? and Bulging Brides, but I judge. Not just the brides’ often tacky behavior, but their bridal choices. That’s the dress she’s going to buy? Those are her wedding colors? These thoughts, and other less flattering ones, bang around inside my head, before I launch into daydreaming what my own white wedding will be like. Wintertime. Formal. A fitted gown with a sweetheart neckline. Live music, of course. So, while I’d like to think I’m completely unlike the brides I see on TV, my wedding fantasies suggest I’m not. *** When I started this dissertation, I was in a long-term and serious relationship of more than four years. Friends, family and even strangers would ask when we were getting married…constantly. We would shrug off the questions with smiles. I was working on a Ph.D., so no time for wedding planning, and we lived together and were committed to each other. What was the rush? I didn’t feel like I needed to be a bride to know we were forever. It would happen when the time was right. I also wasn’t immune to the hypocrisy viii that I could marry if I chose to, but my younger brother, a gay man who’d been with his partner for even longer than I’d been with mine, couldn’t. Finally, I wasn’t like those women on TV or even some of my friends and sorority sisters. My life wasn’t oriented around having a wedding and being a bride. I was a little more evolved than that. Then the unthinkable happened. My boyfriend left me. I was blindsided and heartbroken. And then it got worse. He married someone else two and half months after walking out on me. I thought I might die of a broken heart. (I didn’t.) I cried for what felt like years over losing the man I thought was the love of my life, but I noticed I was crying about something else too. I realized I was crying over the wedding we would have had. On the cold floor of the bathroom I spilled tears over a mermaid-style lace dress I’d never worn. I also caught myself wondering if I’d ever be a bride. I was 28 and single. According to some of the media I examined for this dissertation, I was beyond even a spinster. I was a spinster to the 10th power or something. I’d catch myself calculating if I met “the one” right now, I could still just barely get married by 30. Sick. Clearly the culture of weddings and the desire to be a bride had gone to work on me more than I’d ever realized. *** Despite the bride obsessed media and growing up in the South, where we marry young (and divorce young, some of the weddings I’ve attended were second tries at matrimony), marriage in America is on the decline, an interesting juxtaposition to the explosion of bride and wedding-themed shows.i You’d never know matrimony was down from watching TV. The bride shows don’t talk about this, and do appear to be mostly ix insulated from the public and heated debate over gay marriage. According to the bride shows, all is well in traditional marriage land. Men marry women, and all women want to look like Cinderella on their wedding day. So what’s actually going on in these bride shows? And why is the media so bride obsessed? Has it always been so fixated, and is it just the reality genre that makes it feel so in-your-face? These questions and others, including what these shows say about women, tug at me while I watch from my couch, and I’d be lying if I told you that my break-up hasn’t given me an even more critical eye toward what these bride shows are peddling. Women have a ways to go toward equality, but I question how far along the path we are when looking like a princess for your wedding day is touted as a woman’s most important life goal (note, having a healthy marriage is not the emphasis, just a perfect wedding) or when women put each other’s bodies down during dress fittings. It’s to these questions I’ll now turn, but to truly understand our modern media bride, we’ll first look to the past.