"My Joan of Arc" copyright John Michael Cooper 2006
Because a ring and a vow are apparently no longer sufficient, today’s bride must undergo yet another test: if you love him, destroy your dress. And take photographs.
Some photos are playful: brides and grooms splashing through waves with the insouciance of a couple that’s never signed a mortgage and didn’t pay for the $1500[1] gown now soaked in salt water. Others prove more insidious—a smirking, shovel-wielding groom leaning over an open car trunk, eyeing a pair of patent-encased feet amid a flurry of crinoline. (Wedding-night jitters, indeed!) Then there’s John Michael Cooper’s “My Joan of Arc,” in which the smiling bride stands, arms extended, as the dress burns from her body. Perplexing and provocative, these “anti-bridals” purport to be oppositional and transgressive, a subversion of tradition, an expression of agency, a complicated engagement with historical narratives. They’re more germane than they initially appear.
We’re trained to cherish our scraps of satin and lace, to seal them away, unscathed, until we bestow them decades later to the daughters we hold as our biological right. But dresses get stained, and daughters remain unborn. And marriage resembles scaling Everest: the ones who make it say it’s the greatest thing they’ve ever experienced. Yet the trek is challenging, and survival’s uncertain.
So perhaps, within its problematic elements, this movement acknowledges something we try to keep veiled: the fact that to marry is to embrace compromise and acquiescence, to agree to stand naked, shorn, and unarmed before your primary object of affection, to eschew all others. We pretend that ever after is inviolable, but the threats are implicit in the promise: there will be others, and they will spark desires we did not imagine we could ever contain. But we have vowed, and we shall remain immobile as the flames erupt around us.
[1] The average cost of a wedding dress in the US, according to the Bridal Association of America.