Abstract
The Wedding Dress presents an epiphanous shift in a couple's understanding of exogamy and commitment when confronted with extended family's clannish expectations. Submitting to and then challenging and destroying this power's hold is symbolized in the wedding dress. As an autoethnography, this story resonates with Sophocles's Antigone, in which choices must be made that challenge the law of the father (King Kreon, Jane-family) and demand the law of nature (marriage rights) to prevail. In Antigone, Kreon's son Heron is engaged to Antigone, who challenges the king's unnatural edict to leave a warrior's body unburied. In the end, Heron chooses Antigone over his father and dies with his fiancé in a tomb - thus shattering the laws of humans while upholding the laws of nature. A story of survival, a fight for autonomy, The Wedding Dress captures marital tensions that arise from forced choices and the triumph of facing them truthfully together.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 397-408 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Qualitative Inquiry |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2009 |
Keywords
- Autoethnography
- Exogamy
- Marital tensions
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Anthropology
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)