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The Wedding Present: Domestic Life beyond Consumption
Louise Purbrick. Ashgate, 2007. 197 pp., 45 illus., £50.00, cloth. ISBN: 978 0 7546 4472 9.Louise Purbrick has provided a timely and thoughtful study of consumption, gift giving and domesticity in Great Britain since 1945. Taking as her topic the modes of giving, the possession and meanings of gifts and the types of gifts bestowed upon couples upon marriage, Purbrick explores how the acts of exchange and possession embrace and endorse a given newlywed couple's union and, more generally, how these social practices maintain the meanings of home.
It is somewhat surprising to realize that scholars have generally ignored wedding gifts as a topic of study. Anthropologists since Marcel Mauss have provided potent theories about the gift in many of the world's cultures. (Mauss's 1923–24 Essay sur le don is truly the scholarly gift that keeps on giving.) On the other hand, historians in the West have chronicled the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next through marriage, but relatively few have engaged with the traffic in and meanings of the material goods occasioned by marriage. Scholars of material culture have undertaken biographies of heirlooms passed at marriage from one generation to the next and, finally, accessioned into museum collections, but these studies generally emphasize the aesthetic value of these objects. Since the 1980s, several historians and sociologists have concentrated on the commercialization of the ‘white wedding’ through studies of the ‘wedding industry’. Abetted by royal and celebrity extravaganzas, wedding day festivities have become big business and the stuff of popular culture, perhaps culminating in the indulgent (or moralizing, or misogynistic) depiction of ‘Bridezillas’ on British and American television. (Honestly, I watch the show for research purposes only.)
The Wedding Present: Domestic Life beyond Consumption is thus a much-needed contribution to scholarly understanding of household creation through consumption and the play of gifts in securing social relations and the meaning of marriage. Purbrick, with another investigator, wrote a section of the 1998 Mass-Observation survey, ‘Giving and Receiving Gifts,’ dedicated to wedding presents. The Contemporary Mass Observation Project, begun in 1981, resurrected the 1937 ‘people's ethnography’ project called Mass Observation. Throughout the book, the reader is treated to lengthy extracts of participants’ words as they list and describe wedding gifts and the circumstances of their receipt. These testimonies reveal how memory is invested in certain objects (more often by women than by men), how taste factors in the way owners relate to the gifts over time and how social relations are confirmed, tested or severed through these objects’ use, display, disbursement or destruction.
Purbrick's study, as any employing material culture, requires interdisciplinary analysis; she writes that she is ‘an historian just trying to "think with" anthropological theory’ (15). After an explanation of the survey and its methodology, Purbrick devotes the introduction to a necessary discussion of the scholarly treatment of production and consumption across several disciplines, as well as a consideration of the assumption that objects define the self. Wedding gifts problematize this assumption: these objects, as belongings acquired at marriage, ‘are always bound up with [recipients’] wider social realities’ (21) and serve to ‘authorize and even institutionalize domestic consumption practices’ (23). She returns to theories of consumption in chapter 5 to consider the case study (as defined by Mass Observation) within other methodologies in examining consumption in everyday life.
The book's first four chapters begin with an exploration of the scholarly literature related to its topic. Theories of gifts and gift giving and actual practice constitute the focus of chapter 1. Purbrick qualifies several types of giving, remarking that many respondents proudly kept and used their wedding presents (giving as well as keeping thus serves as a means to incorporate the giver into the new household). Money, a popular form of gift, cannot perform the same function, but it does share with objects the endowment of approval of a given marriage. That approval was in turn acknowledged through the practice once known as ‘a show of presents’ (39) in which gifts were displayed at the bride’s parents’ house. These exhibits (several reproduced in photographs), Purbrick argues, favour the argument that ‘wedding presents reflect the economic and social position of the whole family rather than just an individual’ (43). Academic theory, she finds, does not match the ‘practical logic of giving a gift’ (48).
Domestic ‘practices of preservation’, little studied in relation to exchange and display, form the topic of chapter 2. Here, the traditional gift of wedding china, highly prized, protected, rarely used and often displayed, is contrasted to its ‘anti-thesis’ Pyrex: ‘resilient not fragile, used instead of displayed, functional rather than decorative and modern as opposed to traditional’ (70). This reinforced glass, cheap and mass produced for food preparation, service and storage, was praised by many informants who reveal that they sought to preserve, rather than use up and replace, these gifts. Design and decoration aside, the market imperative to buy anew every season is countered by the quotidian practices of cleaning, caring and storing these objects. Rather than consider the household as only sites of consumption, Purbrick argues that scholars would do better to consider the home as a ‘storehouse’ (81).
What happens to those gifts forsaken by their recipients is explored in the third chapter. Contextualizing her argument within anthropological debates about the meanings of objects, Purbrick examines the processes of change in domestic material culture by comparing her survey results to those of another in the Mass Observation Archive that concerning ‘Objects about the house’ undertaken in 1988 and revisited in 2003. This chapter, in particular, is dependent on a careful interpretation of respondents’ multiple writings, seeking to find what in a given home is discarded, neglected, forgotten or preserved and what those actions mean for the meaning of things. How the meanings of objects shift is, in many academic studies, dependent on context. Yet Purbrick tentatively proffers that some wedding presents have a ‘power of their own’ (118) to overcome time and space.
The commercialization of weddings and its impact on gift giving is investigated in chapter 4. The wedding list, once a private record created by a bride and her mother and shared with families and friends upon request, has been made public through registries at department stores and other retail companies. Purbrick finds that the practice of making and distributing such a list was a class-based practice until the last decades of the twentieth century; working-class respondents noted that it was "bad taste" (124) to do so, but the wealthy in the 1950s had adopted the practice of registering their wishes at a retail establishment. Purbrick links the acceptance of the commercial gift list to the rise of bridal magazines in Great Britain in the 1990s. And she notes that this has altered the meaning of the gift. ‘With the publication of a gift list,’ she concludes, ‘the gift becomes a sign of an individual's own assessment of their value and its ability to express relationships between people, to negotiate value, is superseded’ (149).
Purbrick undertook her study at a time in which cohabitation, rather than marriage, has become a viable option for (heterosexual) couples in Great Britain. Though statistics reveal that cohabitation is more often temporary and less likely to result in marriage, this phenomenon allows her to consider, somewhat preliminarily given a very small sample, how the practice of gift giving and its concomitant meanings may be altered by these forms of household. An afterword on this topic offers tantalizing glimpses of the meaning of objects in such households, proposing that, although cohabitation and married domesticity may be similar, the former is ‘much more messy, materially and socially, and its meanings are consequently less secure’ (179).
The social and the material worlds in which humans circulate are indeed messy, but Louise Purbrick has offered an insightful guide to tidy our understanding of our material lives. The book itself, though, is a bit messy—typographical errors interrupt the pleasure of reading. Nevertheless, The Wedding Present interrupts, pleasantly and substantively, our thinking about consumption and asks that we consider anew our assumptions of consumers and things.
Kent State University
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