The Rural Wedding in George Sand’s The Devil’s Pool (1846): An Example of Historical Ritual

 

            What is a ritual? According to historian Edward Muir, ritual is a collective, repetitive, and standardized social activity that serves as a model or a mirror of social life, the meanings of which are numerous and ambiguous.[1]

As a model, a ritual sets forth standards of proper conduct or “a simplified miniature” of proper social relations.  The handshake is a model in this sense of goodwill; the Fourth of July parade is a model of national, patriotic solidarity. 

As a mirror, ritual makes a statement not about what “ought to be” [as a model does]; rather, it makes a statement about something that “is” or exists. The Fourth of July parade also serves as a mirror: the procession of the mayor and municipal officials in the parade reminds onlookers that these officeholders are the head of the city government.  That the parade can be both a model and a mirror is but one example of the multiple and ambiguous meanings inherent in rituals.

            A marriage ceremony in front of an audience can be seen as a mirroring ritual in the sense that it presents a man and woman as husband and wife.  In another sense, the exchange of vows serves as a model ritual because the vows profess the standards of conduct that are to govern the union.

            Further ways of considering and analyzing rituals in the past include the following:

·        Public rituals are intended to achieve group cohesion and solidarity.  When people participate in the same activity, when they repeat certain acts and expressions, they feel themselves to be members of the same group and to be united.  Often rituals of this kind implicitly acknowledge that there are differences and disagreements among members by creating a collective experience of solidarity in the absence of consensus.

·        Rituals also permit people to enact stories about their own experiences, experiences that do not reflect or create social solidarity.  In this sense, rituals may present stories of resistance—as opposed to compliance—of oppression—as opposed to fairness—of anger and vengeance—as opposed to a social norm of stoic calm or pacifism.  Considered as stories people tell about themselves, rituals offer a way to discover the subject’s point of view, i.e., the historical actor’s outlook, such as the point of view of eighteenth and nineteenth-century peasants as opposed to the views of them by contemporary observers such as Father Bernard, Restif de la Bretonne, and Honoré de Balzac.

·        Rituals evoke the emotions of those that share them, and through repetition rituals establish memories of previously experienced emotions.  Because the participation in ritual is more an emotional experience than an intellectual or contemplative one, the study of ritual can offer possible insights into the emotional life of the past.

To make these abstract ideas more concrete and understandable, call to mind a ritual you have participated in and try to re-experience or recall it.  Consider a  convocation at Mount Holyoke? Your high school graduation?  A rite of passage?

With this background, read and study the ritual of the rural wedding described in detail by George Sand at the end of her novel, The Devil’s Pool.  Here Sand recorded practices that were current in the Black Valley in the 1840s and that she observed herself.  Although story of Germain and Marie is idealized fiction, the description of the wedding reflects actual beliefs and practices.

Questions for Study

1. In what ways was the wedding of Germain and Marie a family matter? In what was it a communal ritual? In what ways did it affirm communal solidarity? Differences of gender? The village social structure?
2. Consider the roles in the community of the hemp-dresser, the gravedigger, and the sacristan (the person employed to ring the church bells) and their roles in the wedding.  Why do you think that the hemp-dresser and the gravedigger—men near the bottom of the village pyramid—were chosen to perform key roles in the wedding ritual?
3. The dialogue between the hemp-dresser and the gravedigger evoked, among other things, a tradition harkening back to the Middle Ages: travelers on a holy pilgrimage seek shelter and sustenance.  The request for aid and the obligation to provide it was a custom upheld by the church as a way of facilitating an act of faith –the pilgrimage to a holy site—and of fostering the ideal that charity was to reign among all Christians.  This custom was known as “hospitality,” which is the origin of the word we continue to associate with the offering of food and or shelter to travelers or strangers—as well as friends.

In the festivities preceding a nineteenth-century rural marriage what do you make of this dialogue?  Of the turn to songs?  If this was “story people tell about themselves,” what was the tale about?  What do you think the battle and capitulation was meant to signify?

4. On the third day of the wedding, a morality play is performed for the village in order to affirm various Christian virtues that were deemed necessary for a successful marriage.  The performance, the roles, the symbols, and the sequence of scenes offer many opportunities for historical and anthropological analysis.  Here are some questions to explore.
1. What responsibilities and expectations were assigned to the husband? To the wife? 
2. What emotions do you think were evoked by the ritual?
3. Who was to blame if the wife were unfaithful?
4. What did the cabbage signify?
5. Overall, what aspects of peasant morality did this ritual affirm or “model”? What emotions were invoked to drive the point home?
6. How did the moral qualities suggested here compare with this portrait by Balzac in The Peasantry?

. . . in family life the peasants have no sort of delicacy.  If the daughter is seduced, they do not take a moral tone unless the seducer is rich and can be frightened.  Their children, until the State tears them away from their parents, are so much capital, or are made to conduce to their parents’ comfort.  Selfishness, more especially since 1789, is the one force that sets them thinking; they never ask whether such a thing is illegal or immoral, but what good it will do them. . . . An entirely honest and well-conducted peasant is an exception to his class.