The Wedding Underdress

BY LAURA FERRIS

A friend once told me the most romantic gift a boy could give her would be the perfect engagement ring. Considering the limited scope of what an engagement ring is, her wish reveals to me the inherent quixoticism of modern marriage: how to uniquely be like everyone else. The highest expression of devotion a man can make to a woman, taking her to wife, is also the most intense expression of conformity to a certain kind of social ideal that makes her as herself deeply irrelevant: the woman you love will take your name and lose her own. Considering the historical reality of what this ideal is, it’s no wonder that so many men are intensely nervous about getting married, and so many women share and reinforce a collective obsession with the idea that legitimizes the compulsive mistreatment of themselves, their lovers, their families, and their friends. This is a disingenuous distraction from the traumatic reality of how men and women have treated each other throughout time, giving up and taking control of choices that can only belong to another person.

The reality of marriage underneath the dress, and I think the sacrality of marriage as well, consists in this: a woman is not given in marriage, not by her father, not by the church, not by the law of the land or the goodwill of her family and friends. The sort of Christ who wins a wife for a man is not a God you can pray to while ignoring the woman before your eyes. A woman gives herself in marriage. And it is a man who receives her. And when this truth is ignored, men and women get hurt. I think it’s inappropriate to continually refer to some other authority when you have a woman in your arms, instead of taking your instructions on honorable behavior towards her from her. It is my observation that as the man enters the body of the woman he would wed, she is the officiant and no one else, regardless of what theology, convention, law, and other sayings of words may suggest. In marriage, there is no church but the church of your wife. This is good news. What a relief to believe that men are not responsible for women’s sexual choices, able to be the hero or the villain by a single step or misstep, subject rather to invitation or dismissal. What a matter of honor and delight, for a woman who takes a man to bed is doing so because she wants and loves him!

In a real relationship, there are two people actively making decisions rooted in their embodied experience. Marriage is finally a parallax. What to a woman may be an act of power, drawing a man towards her on her own terms, may, from a man’s point of view be a woman who is particularly attentive and receptive to his advances, before which she gives way. The woman who from her perspective indulgently praises and fondly supports the man through various trials he cannot always articulate, enfolding him in her arms at night, may, from the man’s perspective, be a woman he indulgently shares himself with and zealously shields from harm she sometimes can’t see, holding her fast in arms his at night. We catch glimpses of these differences, misunderstand them: they disturb us, amuse us, intrigue us, drive us once again into each other’s arms looking for answers, to find only the bodies of our lovers. We forget about the existence of questions for a time. At daybreak, the search continues, the inevitable return also.

Any woman, whether physically virgin or not, married in the eyes of the law or the church or not, has the power to allow and deny this joining, marriage, a power that she may invoke at her discretion. This is the unveiled face of chastity, I think, not following rules or delaying gratification or focusing on a mark that will most soothe and quiet the tumult of one’s heart, whether one lives in a state of celibacy or monogamy or debauch. A chaste woman is one who will not deny or forget what’s she’s worth independent of what the world thinks of her, what men have done to her, what other women ask of her. A chaste woman does not deny the wholesomeness of the female body. This virtue is at the root of her decisions about with whom she will share a bed and share her life and in what ways, and it is as evident and feared a virtue in the life of a cautious and thoughtful girl who has done everything right according to the dictates of Christian religion as it is in the life of a great-hearted and generous girl who has had many loves and boyfriends because no one ever told her to wait.

I think this way of looking at things could ease the suffering of countless women of good conscience, women of any conscience and feeling at all, really, who have been cast outside the sexual narrative in which their identity has been cultivated by circumstances outside of their control. While the pain and grief of varied losses of community and relationship take time to resolve, the exile may end this very instant and every instant following this instant if she would hold onto her identity beyond identity itself, her beloved body. What wonderful things her body means about who she is and what’s possible for her, always, till death parts her from this world, the bride, the maiden in the springtime flush of a first love, the goddess clothed in white always available to her: those forms of life and fashion, the veil, tiara, and gown, are manifestations of the beauty God wrought in women from the beginning! There is no shame in allowing a man you desire and respect and love to delight in who you are, no matter what anyone else thinks about your timing. Covered by law, covered by crosses and steeples, only a woman can choose the time when she will be uncovered. The rest is fancy dress.

In Ephesians 5, Saint Paul speaks as though in a reverie about the mystery of marriage, of Christ and the Church, and says that in marriage, a wife’s body no longer belongs to her but rather to her husband, and a husband’s body no longer belongs to him, but to his wife. I think this could refer to the depths of an unconditional love, and bears a direct relationship to Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The most direct way of reading this divine injunction is not simply to love everyone as though they are you, but rather refers to the human precondition: we are finally inaccessible to ourselves, and no representation or psychology can remedy this lack. So we feel a yearning to love and be loved, but cannot ourselves be an object of our own love, because we can’t see or hear or touch ourselves the way another person can. So God in his mercy has given us each other, as a substitute for what we never had and never could: a self-contained world sustained by perfect self-regard and self-reference. God observed that it is not good for man to live alone, and made woman. A couple, then, a loving pair, is characterized by a friction caused by the fact that one simply can’t keep track of oneself while at the same time dwelling intensely upon the character and qualities of the other. How dare you distract me with your love and regard for me, when that leaves me less of you to love and regard for the duration in which I must suffer your scrutiny and commentary! Don’t pay attention to me, be with me, you impossible glorious creature!

This attraction and disconnect in the dynamic of a true couple, a back and forth, deep to the point of nonsense, underpins fights and even separations, inspires the most touching or hilarious exchanges of words and tokens of esteem and censure, and provokes the most comforting and passionate sessions of lovemaking. A woman’s identity is not lost and dissolved in the man’s, nor does it become a cross for him to bear, a double-weighted oppression that forces him to greater material or moral development, but it is perhaps the case that when in love, one’s individual priorities are suspended now and then in some ancient rhythm one can’t help slipping into, like the overawed and effervescent feelings, respectively and alternatively, that flow freely in an expressive partner’s dance between the lead and the follow. In this sense, marriage is uniquely being like everyone else. This is the humility and humor of romantic love. This is the condescension and radical innocence of wives and husbands.

Notes:

1. When I completed a draft of this essay, it was over 4,100 words long. This essay is a condensed version of the final draft, in four parts, entitled “Say Maybe to the Dress,” which you can read on my WordPress blog – Part 1: Do you take this dress?, Part 2: Undercover Marriage, Part 3: Chastity and narcissism, Part 4: True Love. This version, though similar to the above essay, is more informal, contains more qualified statements, wider-ranging speculations, and jokes. My blog, Artemisia, is also where you can read other essays, reflections, and reading responses of mine that will be similar to my column on the Unknown Blog, but more eclectic: expect Shakira, theories about giant robot armor and Sailor Moon, solemnly and irreverently imprecise uses of psychoanalytical terms, and very intense thoughts about the music of Sufjan Stephens.

2. My interpretation of “love your neighbor as yourself” was inspired directly by a short story in The New Yorker: “Backbone” by David Foster Wallace. My meditation on this command has recently been informed by the psychoanalyst and critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek. My thinking on outcast women, discussed in more depth in “Say Maybe to the Dress,” has recently been heavily informed by the essay “The Sobbing Girl, Or, On Hysterical Time” in Hatred and Forgiveness (2010) by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva.

3. In this essay I only spoke of heterosexual marriage as a given for stylistic simplicity and elegance, and because I wanted to make some specific points about heterosexual unions and embodied sexual difference. I imagine that many of my statements could resonate with members of either gender or any orientation or gender identity. I would rather address and process my thoughts and observations about other kinds of marriages and sexual relationships more slowly than attempt to address everything every time I write about marriage. In my desire to include and support, I do not want to undermine and efface difference when finer and hopefully increasingly thoughtful distinctions may pay greater homage to the beauty of many forms of love. 

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