Cursed wedding ideas

When I was looking for a secular reading for my wedding, I found a lot of the suggested items were excerpts from literature taken rather out of context. And these excerpts, when taken in their full context, were not what I'd consider auspicious for a wedding. For example take this bit from Hamlet, Act 2 Scene 2:

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.

Sounds nice, right? Except it's Polonius, Ophelia's officious father, who is reading a letter from Hamlet to Ophelia out loud to Hamlet's mother to prove that Hamlet has gone mad. And the audience knows that Hamlet has decided to fake being crazy as part of his convoluted scheme to get revenge for his father's murder. It's been a while since I've watched Hamlet but if I recall correctly, it's not clear that Hamlet actually loves Ophelia, or if he wrote this letter on purpose as part of his fake-crazy rouse.

Also, the attentive reader might notice that the full title of the play is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As a quick review, tragedies are plays that end with death, while comedies are plays that end with marriage. So that might serve a hint about how things go for Hamlet and Ophelia.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais. Image is in the public domain. See Wikipedia article on Ophelia.

Yup, that's a painting of Ophelia, dead, after she commits suicide later in the play, largely because Hamlet rejected her. Hamlet also kills Polonius, sort of by accident. And of course Hamlet also dies. Pretty much everyone dies. That's how Shakespearean tragedies tend to go.

I don't know about most people, but this is not the energy I wanted to bring into my marriage.^[1] People also love to quote Romeo and Juliet (spoiler: they both die) and occasionally Wuthering Heights (I don't even know what to say).

Similarly, when it comes to the first dance song people choose for their weddings, there are some pretty wild choices based on complete misreadings and gross misunderstandings of the work. Like, can you imagine choosing Sting's Every Breath You Take as your song? It's about stalking, not love, and it's not in any way subtle. And yet!

Do you want your wedding to be cursed? #

Yet some people make choices about their weddings that make quoting Polonius in your wedding vows seem smart, cultured, and thoughtful.

Did you know that there are people who hold their weddings on the grounds of former plantations? As in, the places in the south of the United States that before the American Civil War used people enslaved in the system of chattel slavery as their labor force? These pretty houses were built by enslaved people. Their wealth was their stolen labor and their stolen lives. The places are soaked in generations of cruelty and suffering. If you are having a hard time imagining what that might have been like, I recommend the film 12 Years a Slave (2013) as a visceral primer.

Last week one of these places, the mansion at Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana burned to the ground. Its current owners ignored the Nottoway Plantation's horrid legacy and instead marketed it as a resort and a place for weddings.

The AP reported that some people were sad about the shitty place burning to ash:

For others, it was a moment of sadness. Nottoway Plantation has for years been a venue for weddings and other events celebrating cherished milestones.

And then went on to say:

But some plantations also de-emphasize or overlook their full histories, foregoing mentions of slavery altogether. That is why the “good riddance” sentiment seemed to outweigh expressions of grief over Nottoway Plantation, which makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website.

As a result of the news, I've been thinking a lot about people who choose a former plantation as their wedding venue. Are they just completely unaware of the context? Is it a decision made out of pure ignorance? Or do they understand the historical context and horror of chattel slavery and think it's not a problem? Even if they don't give a crap about showing some respect and sensitivity, considering how much weddings bring out everyone's latent superstitions, wouldn't they reconsider getting married in a place so soaked with suffering and injustice, just for the selfish reasons, to avoid the potential bad luck?

The best I've come up with is that the generous interpretation is that it's an extreme version of the philistine ignorance that leads to preposterously ill-chosen wedding quotes. The ungenerous interpretation is that it's racism so toxic that they can't imagine the pain of enslaved people so it doesn't even shake their enjoyment of the vapid prettiness of the setting, nor twinge the slightest sense of unease and superstition.