anyone could cry at their wedding. That’s the happiest day of one’s life. I couldn’t believe that some of my best friends couldn’t make it to my wedding. So I started out to the church with all these little things I always thought would not happen at my wedding going through my mind. I broke down—I cried going to the wedding. I thought, “Be happy for the friends, the relatives, the presents.” But I finally said in my mind, “Hey, people aren’t getting married, you are.” From down the long aisle we looked at each other’s eyes. His love for me changed my whole being from that point. When we joined arms I was relieved. The tension was gone. From then on, it was beautiful. It was indescribable.
A psychiatrist might respond to this roughly as follows: “On the face of it, the young woman seems anxious. In her anxiety, the rules seem overcathected (unduly important to her). The cause of her anxiety may lie in her ambivalence about marriage, which might be related to childhood impressions of her own parents’ marriage or perhaps to the sexual aspects of it. I would need to know more to say for sure.”
A sociologist would look at the wedding from quite another point of view. To begin with, he or she would consider the ceremony as a ritual event of significance to the assembled witnesses as well as to the bride and groom; attention would be paid to where various relatives and friends sat and how involved each person seemed to be. But the sociologist could also be concerned with what happened in the realm lying between feelings and the external events of the ritual—the realm of feeling rules and emotion management. In preparing for and participating in the wedding ritual, the bride assumes the right and obligation to experience a certain skew of vision and a certain elation. Rights and obligations also apply to her outward display of joy and radiance.* Drawing on her understanding of the general rules for how brides should see and feel and seem, the bride makes herself up. She acts like a bride. When everything goes well, she experiences a unity between the event (the wedding), the appropriate way to think about it (to take it seriously), and the proper way to feel about it (happy, elated, enhanced). When that happens, the ritual works.
But for the bride considered here, the ritual almost fails. As she sees it, she should feel beautiful but in fact she doesn’t. She should feel happy but in fact she feels depressed and upset. The “ought” of the feeling struggles with the “is.” Her notion of a bride’s-way-of-seeing a wedding and a bride’s-way-of-feeling about it is for a time unhinged from the factual role of bride and detached from the occasion of the wedding. What she imagined or hoped might be her experience of the wedding (“the happiest day of one’s life”) made her privately miserable.
Almost any emotional convention makes room for lapses and departures. Thus while the bride may aspire to feel central, beautiful, and happy at the supreme moment of marching down the aisle, she can usually also tolerate temporary anxiety or ambivalence and feel fine about that. In fact, some anxiety is prescribed, for it shows how seriously she takes marriage.
Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to “be happy.”* Precariously and for the moment, but without falseness, this seems to work; her emotion work leads into emotion. She probably thought little about how appropriate her feelings were at the time or about how her private feeling rules matched some publicly shared code. She simply disliked what she felt. She wanted to feel differently, as a private and individual matter. If she admitted to having feeling rules, she would probably say that she made them up herself; after all, it was her wedding. Yet in one sense, it was not her wedding. The throwing of rice is a medieval fertility rite, the wearing of white a Victorian addition, and the very idea of a father but not a mother giving away a daughter but not a son derives from Saxon times, when a father would sell his daughter for her labor, (Only after the Crusades, when women exceeded men in number, did the father come to “give her away”) It was her wedding in the sense that it was her borrowings from culture, as well as her borrowings from public notions about what she should inwardly experience on such a day.9
To get the emotion-management perspective clear, we have ignored two other principles that organize social life. The first of these, considered primarily by psychiatrists, is pain avoidance. The bride may try to struggle out of her depression not because it is proper to be happy but because she wants to avoid the unspeakable ache of being depressed. The second principle, which Erving Goffman and other sociologists take as primary, is advantage seeking in the social arena. The bride may try to be happy in order to win the affection of her in-laws, to attract the envy of her unwed girl friends, or to provoke jealousy in a former suitor. As principles, avoiding pain and seeking advantage explain patterns of emotion management, but it is important to note that both operate within a context of feeling rules.
The virtue of the focus on feeling rules lies in the questions it opens up. How, for example, does a change in feeling rules change the way brides experience weddings? In a society in which there is a rising divorce rate and a growing sense of contingency about the idea of marital commitment, the bride may get inadvertent reminders from her friends to take a rather nonchalant attitude toward the ceremony and to behave more as she would at an informal party. If she has any feelings about the religious solemnity of the occasion, she may be asked to keep them to herself; and, indeed, if she is to indicate that she shares the feeling rules of her modern friends, she will have to try to express a certain de gree of shame about experiencing her marriage in a more old-fashioned way. Even while pain avoidance and advantage seeking stick as fixed principles of emotional life, feeling rules can change.
MISFITTING FEELINGS
A feeling itself, and not simply the way it is displayed on face and body, can be experienced as misfitting a situation in a surprising number of ways. We can suggest a few of them by considering how one might feel at a funeral.
A funeral, like a wedding, symbolizes a passage in relationships and offers the individual a role that is limited in time. The role of mourner, like that of bride, exists before and lives on after the rite. But rules about how to feel during the rite are linked to an understanding of the rite itself and of the bond it commemorates.
A funeral is ideally suited to inducing spontaneous sadness and grief. This is because the ritual usually reminds the bereaved of the finality of death while at the same time offering a sense of safety and comfort in this realization.10 In response, the bereaved generally senses that this is the right time and right place to feel grief and not much else. Yet in a wondrous variety of ways it is possible for a griever to misgrieve.
One way is not to feel sad, as at the funeral recalled by this woman, now thirty-one:
When I was around nine or ten, my fourteen-month-old sister died. I had one other sibling—a sister who was three years older. I remember feeling important telling people my baby sister had died; I enjoyed the attention. At the funeral our immediate family was sitting in a special side room separated from the other guests by a transparent curtain. At the point when the rabbi drew the curtain open, the whole family simultaneously blew their noses. I thought that was quite funny and started laughing, which I masked into crying. When my piano teacher [who came to our house to give me lessons] asked why the mirror was covered (a Jewish custom), I nonchalantly told her that my little sister had died, at which point she became hysterical and ran to express her grief to my mother. Of course I was aware that I was supposed to be sad and grieving … but my parents were so aggrieved and preoccupied that I was just brought along [to the funeral] and not dealt with individually. My status of youngest child was back, along with more attention from my parents, and my little sister hadn’t developed a great personality yet, so there wasn’t much to miss. Though I understand the dynamics of the situation in retrospect, I still feel a little guilty, like there’s something wrong with me and I’m exposing myself for not having felt bad. Actually at this point I honestly feel it would be lovely to have a younger sister.
This child felt happy at being more important both because she was close to an event that affected many people and because she had one less rival for her parents’ attention. In this case,
