Marcia Seligson calls the wedding dress the “key metaphor” in the elaborate effort to make the American wedding an “idealized departure from reality,” and notes that in the early 1970s, at a time when love-ins, live-ins, and hippie weddings were throwing brickbats at tradition, 94 percent of American brides still chose to be married in white. The color has long been associated with weddings because of its supposed symbolic link to virginity. Commenting slyly on the tradition, Judith Martin (1982) observes that an engaged couple needs to decide “whether wearing a white wedding dress will be worth enduring the sneers of people who believe these must be accessorized by intact hymens.”
Viewed historically, the link between white and virginity (or, as it is sometimes euphemized, purity) is not as absolute as is often supposed. Brides in ancient Rome married in white, but because the color signified joy; they were veiled in a bright orange veil, or flammeum, that suggested the flames of passion. In the western Catholic tradition, too, white has always been the color of joy, and it remains the iconographically correct hue for such jubilant occasions as Easter Sunday. Some traditional societies use white to denote the significance of various passage ceremonies, among them funerals as well as weddings. For example, among the Andaman Islanders, said A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, white indicated simply a change of status; and the traditional Chinese white for funerals was a symbolic representation of hope.
The “traditional” white wedding dress, moreover, is a recent innovation. Barbara Tober explains that its popularity may owe less to the mystique of virginity than to a curious twist of conspicuous display. Most Victorian brides, she says, wore simply their “best finery” on their wedding day, and many wore traditional ethnic costumes. The white dress was an ostentatiously impractical innovation that became popular among the upper classes precisely because of its defects: “Victorian brides from privileged backgrounds wore white to indicate that they were rich enough to wear a dress for one day only.” And throughout the first years of this century, brides from somewhat less privileged backgrounds would trot out the white dress on special occasions throughout the first year of their marriage. The custom of locking the treasure away after the wedding—so that, like a toasting glass, it could never be used for a lesser purpose—is less than a hundred years old.
1. According to the passage, wearing a white wedding dress has little to do with（ ）.
2. From historical point of view, the white color has been associated with all of the following EXCEPT（ ）.
3. It can be inferred from the passage that white dress（ ）.
4. Nowadays, after the wedding white dress for brides from ordinary families（ ）.
5. The best title for the passage is（ ）.
