“To You—The Bride

“Soon you will reach that day for which you have planned and dreamed since you were a little girl….Your Wedding Day!!  What wonderful dreams you have had….about the home you would share…about the children you will have some day….Now, all of those wonderful dreams are about to come true.  And you are about to assume the most important role of your life….The composite role of sweetheart, wife and mother.  May you bring to this new role the great tolerance and understanding that will make your marriage a success….May you take your fragile, young love and mold it into a sturdy, ever deeper affection.  May you go through your whole life with shining eyes and singing heart…never relinquishing your dreams but striving, ever harder, to make them come true….

“These are our wishes for you…May they all come true and may your life follow the pattern of the old story books in which “they all lived happily ever after.”

The Editors”  (Hurst I).

            Thus begins the worst cookbook I have ever encountered.  I call it a cookbook because the majority of the contents are recipes, although there’s a significant amount of text dedicated to “how to make your man happy because that’s all that you are good for.”  This patriarchal monstrosity was a gift to my sister at her bridal shower the other day.  As I ranted and raged about how oppressive and offensive the text is, several people reminded me to “look at the copyright date, then look at a calendar.”  Okay, yeah.  So it was published in 1956.  And yeah, we’ve made great strides in gender equality since then.  But that patriarchy has lasted in such a strong way for so long? Not cool.  And that is what I was protesting as I flipped through the book, finding each idea forced upon young women worse than the last.

Initially, I wanted to include this text to have another forum in which to bash it.  The connections to fairy tales, of course, carried some merit as well.  But I thought about it some more, and realized that it connects pretty directly to Anne Sexton’s life.  She married in 1948, was married eight years when this book was published.  So she likely would have been held to the standards of matrimony touted in To the Bride.  The editors paint a rosy picture of Happily Ever After, but Sexton describes the same concept as “a kind of coffin, / a kind of blue funk” in “The White Snake” (15).  These societal standards and Sexton’s scornful opinion of them may have influenced some of her discontent with her life.  “Many are the deceivers:” Sexton states in “Red Riding Hood” (73).  She lists some of these deceivers:  “The suburban matron … Two seemingly respectable women … And I.  I too” (Sexton 73-74).  Sexton does not believe the images projected to the world, not even her own.  She describes herself as being “Quite collected at cocktail parties,” and claims the housewife yearns to fly away from her life to have an affair (74).

  Although they are expected to simper and serve their husbands and take joy in their subservience, Sexton claims that women are not truly happy with these archaic roles.  She uses “Red Riding Hood” to call out society on its false fronts.

Ed. Dorothy Hurst. Milwaukee: Wisconsin Cuneo Press, 1956. Print.