The Invisible-puberty Rule
This is just as well, as our culture tends to regard children as something of a tiresome encumbrance, and adolescents as a positive nuisance. Adolescents are seen as somehow both vulnerable and dangerous: objects of concern, but also potentially threatening; in need of protection, but also in need of restraint – and just generally troublesome. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that only minority faiths celebrate the onset of puberty in any significant way. The advent of this awkward, embarrassing, hormonally challenged phase of life is not widely regarded as a matter for celebration. The English prefer to bury their heads in the sand and try to pretend that it isn’t happening. The C of E does offer a ‘Confirmation’ ceremony at the appropriate age (traditionally between eleven and fourteen), but this is even less popular than christening, and there is no secular equivalent, so the vast majority of English children have no official rite of passage to mark their transition to adolescence.
Deprived of their rightful rites, English adolescents tend to invent their own unofficial initiation rituals – which usually involve getting into trouble for illegal drinking, experimenting with illicit recreational drugs, shoplifting, graffiti-spraying, joy-riding, etc. – or find other ways of drawing attention to their new sexual status: we have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, for example.
But they are not formally ‘welcomed’ as fully-fledged members of our society until after they have struggled through puberty, when the next official rite of passage, the eighteenth-birthday celebration, marks their transition to adulthood. For some, there is a mini rite of passage at seventeen, when they pass their driving test and get a driving licence, but eighteen is the age at which the English are officially entitled to vote, get married without parental consent, have homosexual sex, watch X-rated films and, most importantly for many, buy alcoholic drinks. Most will have been unofficially drinking, having whatever kind of sex they choose and watching ‘adult’ films for some years; and many will have left school at sixteen and may be working full time, possibly even married or co-habiting, pregnant or with a baby of their own. But the eighteenth birthday is still regarded as an important landmark, and an excuse to have a big noisy party, or at least to get even more drunk than on an average Saturday night.
The Gap-Year ‘Ordeal’
Among the educated classes, the eighteenth-birthday rites are now often followed by the Gap Year, a passage between school and university involving a more prolonged ‘liminal’ period, in which it is customary for young people to spend some months travelling abroad, often incorporating some kind of charity work (helping Peruvian villagers to build a school, working in a Romanian orphanage, saving a rainforest, digging a well, etc.) and generally seeing the Real (i.e. poor) World and having meaningful, character-building Experiences. The Gap-Year trip is seen as a sort of initiation ordeal – a less arduous version of the custom in some tribal societies of sending adolescent males off into the jungle or wilderness for a time to endure a few pains and hardships and prove themselves worthy of official incorporation into adult society.
Among the English upper- and upper-middle classes, this has often already been achieved by banishing one’s offspring to character-building boarding schools for their entire adolescence. Until relatively recently, the upper class and aristocracy were determinedly anti-intellectual (a trait they shared, along with a penchant for sport and gambling, with the working classes), and rather looked down upon the middle classes’ reverence for higher education. Their sons might go to university, but this was not regarded as essential – a spell in the army or at agricultural college or something would do just as well – and academic achievement was even less important for their daughters. Lady Diana Spencer never seemed particularly ashamed of her total lack of academic qualifications, joking cheerfully in public speeches about her dismal O-level results and how ‘thick’ she was. A middle-class girl would have been mortified. These attitudes are changing a little, particularly among the lower or less wealthy echelons of the upper class, whose offspring must now compete with the university-educated middle classes for the best jobs. Upper-class and even aristocratic or royal post-adolescents, such as Prince William, now find themselves bonding, team-building and comparing mosquito bites with middle-class teenagers on worthy Gap-Year adventures.
Gap-Year initiates of all classes are expected to come back from their Experience transformed into mature, socially aware, reliable adults, ready to take on the enormous challenge and responsibility of living in a university hall of residence, doing their own laundry and occasionally having to open a tin of beans when they come back from the pub to find that the cafeteria is shut. First-year university students who have ‘done a Gap Year’ regard themselves as superior to those who have come ‘straight from school’ – more grown-up and worldly wise. They have a tendency to talk rather smugly about how much older they feel, compared to the immature, silly, un-Gap-yeared freshers.
In some less privileged sections of English society, a spell in prison or in a Young Offenders’ Institution at around the same age is regarded as having a similar character-building, maturing effect – and graduates of this initiation-ordeal often exhibit much the same sense of smug superiority over their childish, uninitiated peers. In fact, if you look past the superficial ethnographic dazzle of accent and jargon, the similarities in the talk and manner of those who have ‘been Inside’ and those who have been Gap-yeared are quite striking.
Student Rites
Freshers’ Week Rules
For the privileged university-goers, the eighteenth-birthday rites, A-level exams and possibly Gap-year ‘ordeal’ are followed by another important rite of passage known as Freshers’ Week. This initiation ritual follows the classic pattern identified by van Gennep – pre-liminal separation, liminal transition/marginalization and post-liminal incorporation. The initiates are first separated from their families, their familiar surroundings and their social status as schoolchildren. Most arrive at university accompanied by one or both parents, in cars crammed with objects from their old life (clothes, books, CDs, duvet, favourite pillow, posters, photos, teddy-bear) and specially purchased objects for their new life (shiny new kettle, mug, bowl, plate, spoon, towel and so on).
Once they have helped to unload all this, parents become something of an embarrassing encumbrance, and are dismissed by the fresher with unceremonious haste and impatient reassurances ‘Yes, yes – I’ll be fine. No don’t help me unpack, I can manage. Don’t fuss, OK? Yes, I’ll ring you tomorrow. Yes, all right. Bye now, Bye...’ The fresher may in fact be feeling anxious and even tearful at the prospect of parting, but knows without being told that it is not done – indeed deeply uncool – to display these feelings in front of other freshers.
The fresher initiates barely have time to Blu-tac a few posters to their walls before the ‘liminal’ phase begins and they are hurled into a disorienting, noisy, exhausting succession of parties and fairs and events, staged by a bewildering variety of student clubs and societies – sporting, social, theatrical, artistic, political – all competing to sign them up for an impossible number of extra-curricular activities. These ‘official’ events are interspersed with pub-crawls, late-night pizzas and bleary-eyed, rambling coffee-sessions at three in the morning (as well as endless queuing to register for courses, obtain student identity cards and sign incomprehensible forms). This week-long ‘liminal’ phase is a period of cultural remission and inversion, in which the initiate’s senses are disturbed by alcohol and sleeplessness, social borders and categories are crossed and blurred, former identity is challenged and disrupted, and acceptance in the new social world is sought through pledges of affiliation to student clubs and societies. By the end of the week, the initiate has achieved a new social identity: he or she is incorporated as a student into the student ‘tribe’ – and finally allowed to rest a bit, calm down, and start attending lectures and participating in normal student life.
Students like to describe Freshers’ Week as ‘mad’ and ‘anarchic’ but, like most episodes of cultural remission, it is in fact a rule-governed, predictable, conventionalized deviation from convention. Certain normal social rules are suspended or inverted for the duration of the festivities – talking to strangers, for example, is not only allowed but actively encouraged: one of the many guides to Freshers’ Week produced by student unions reminds initiates that this is ‘probably the only time in your life’ that you will be free to approach and strike up conversation with complete strangers, and urges you to make the most of the opportunity. The subtext is equally clear: after Freshers’ Week is over, the normal rules of Englishness apply, and talking to strangers without good cause is no longer acceptable. Freshers are encouraged to meet and make friends with as many fellow students as possible – a euphemism for ignoring class barriers – but also subtly reassured that friendships formed during the liminal period of Freshers’ Week are not ‘binding’, that they will not be obliged to continue to associate with people from incompatible social backgrounds. ‘You will meet countless new people (many of whom you will never see again after the first two weeks) and drink countless pints (many of which you will see again, the next morning)’ are the instructions in one typical ‘how to survive Freshers’ Week’ leaflet.
Getting drunk during Freshers’ Week is more or less compulsory (‘you will drink countless pints’) and the English self-fulfilling belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol is essential – without it, the inversion of normal social rules about talking to strangers would be pointless, as most freshers would be too shy to approach anyone. Free social lubricant is provided at all of the parties and events during Freshers’ Week, and initiates are expected to over-indulge and shed their inhibitions. In the prescribed manner, that is: there is a fairly limited range of acceptable drunken behaviours – ‘mooning’ (exposing one’s bottom) is allowed, for example, but ‘flashing’ (exposing one’s genitals) would be frowned upon; arguing and even fighting are approved, but queue-jumping is still strictly prohibited; telling bawdy jokes is fine, but racist ones are inappropriate. Among the English, drunken disinhibition is an orderly, well-regulated state – and Freshers’ Week, despite the appearance of anarchy and debauchery, is actually a choreographed sequence of traditional, conventional rituals in which, every October, first-year students across the country shed exactly the same designated inhibitions in precisely the same time-honoured ways.
Exam and Graduation Rules
The next significant transitional rites for students are final exams, post-exam celebrations and graduation ceremonies: the passage from studenthood to proper adulthood. Studenthood can itself be seen as a rather prolonged ‘liminal’ stage – a sort of limbo state where one is neither an adolescent nor a fully-fledged adult. University effectively postpones true adulthood for an extra three years. As limbo states go, this is quite a pleasant one: students have almost all of the privileges of full adult members of society, but few of the responsibilities. English students moan and whine constantly to each other about their ‘impossible’ workload, and are always having what they call ‘an essay crisis’ (meaning they have to write an essay) – but the demands of most degree courses are not very onerous compared to those of an average full-time job.
The ordeal of final exams provides an excuse for even more therapeutic moaning-rituals, with their own unwritten rules. The modesty rule is important: even if you are feeling reasonably calm and confident about an exam, it is not done to say so – you must pretend to be full of anxiety and self-doubt, convinced that you are going to fail, because it goes without saying (although you say it repeatedly) that you have not done anywhere near enough work. Only the most arrogant, pompous and socially insensitive students will ever admit to having done enough revision for their exams; such people are rare, and usually heartily disliked.
If you have clearly swotted like mad, you can admit this only in a self-deprecatory context: ‘I’ve worked my butt off, but I’m still completely pants at genetics – I just know I’m going to screw up – and anyway there’s bound to be a question on the one thing I haven’t revised properly. Just Sod’s law, isn’t it?’ Any expression of confidence must be counterbalanced by an expression of insecurity: ‘I think I’m OK on the sociology paper, but statistics is just totally doing my head in...’
The superstition element, or the risk of making a fool of oneself, may be an important factor before the exam, but the modest demeanour is maintained even after the desired result has been achieved. Those who do well must always appear surprised by their success, even if they secretly feel it was well deserved. Cries of ‘Oh my God! I don’t believe it!’ are the norm when such students receive their results, and while elation is expected, success should be attributed to good fortune (‘I was lucky – all the right questions came up’) rather than talent or hard work. An Oxford medical student who had got a First, and was being congratulated by friends and relatives at a celebratory lunch, kept ducking her head, shrugging and insisting that ‘It’s not really such a big deal in science subjects – you don’t have to be clever or anything, it’s all factual – you just memorize the stuff and give the right answers. It’s just parrot-learning’.
At post-exam celebrations, it is also customary for all students to indulge in moaning rituals about their sense of ‘anti-climax’. At every party, you will hear students complaining about how jaded they are. ‘I know I’m supposed to be feeling all happy and celebrating,’ they say ‘but actually it’s a bit of an anti-climax’, ‘Everyone’s all euphoric, but I just feel like, yeah, OK, whatever...’ Although every student seems to believe that he or she is the first to experience this, the anti-climax lament is so common that students who do feel euphoric and celebratory are in the minority.
The next opportunity not to get excited is the graduation ceremony. Students all claim to be bored and unimpressed by this occasion; none will admit to any sense of pride: it is just a tedious ritual, to be endured for the sake of doting parents. As at the start of the Freshers’ Week rites, parents are again seen as something of an embarrassment. Many students go to some lengths to keep their parents and other relatives away from their friends and from any tutors or lecturers who might be present at the ceremony (‘No, Dad! Don’t ask him about my “career prospects”. This isn’t a bloody PTA meeting...’; ‘Look, Mum, just don’t do anything soppy, OK?’; ‘Oh for Christ’s sake Granny, don’t cry! It’s only a degree – I haven’t won the fu- the flipping Nobel prize...’). Students with overly doting parents adopt bored, exasperated expressions – rolling their eyes and sighing heavily, particularly when anyone they know is within view or earshot.
The last few pages have focused disproportionately on educated-middle-class rites of passage – Gap Year, Freshers’ Week, graduation. This is because there are no equivalent national, official rites for those who leave school at 16 – or even for those who stop full-time education at eighteen. School leavers may celebrate in some way with their friends and/or family, but there is no formal ritual to mark their passage from school to vocational training, employment or unemployment. Yet one’s first job (or dole cheque) is an important landmark, and arguably much more of a momentous change than simply going from school to university. Some schools have special speech days with prizegivings and so on, but no actual ‘graduation’ ceremony (certainly nothing like an American high-school graduation, which is a big event, more grand and elaborate than most English university graduation ceremonies). GCSE and A-level exam results are sent to school leavers by post some months later, so ‘graduates’ would in any case only be celebrating the end of their schooldays, rather than the academic success or achievement implied by the term ‘graduation’. But it still seems a shame that the completion of secondary education, and the passage from school to adult working life, is not ritually marked in some more significant way.
Matching Rites
At the beginning of this chapter, I pointed out that there is little about the format of an average English wedding that would seem odd or unfamiliar to a visitor from any other modern Western culture: we have the usual stag and hen nights (Americans call them bachelor and bachelorette parties); church or civil ceremony followed by reception; champagne; bride in white; wedding cake ditto; bridesmaids (optional); best man; speeches; special food; drink; dancing (optional); family tensions and feuds (more or less compulsory); etc. From an anthropologist’s perspective, an English wedding also has much in common even with exotic tribal marriage rites that would seem odd to most modern Western eyes. Despite superficial differences, they all conform to van Gennep’s basic rites-of-passage formula – separation, transition, incorporation – by which people are ceremoniously shunted from one sociocultural/life-cycle category to the next.
The English make rather less of a big social fuss about the ‘engagement’ than many other cultures – in some societies, the betrothal or engagement party can be as important an event as the wedding itself. (Perhaps to compensate, we make rather more of a fuss over the stag and hen nights, which are often considerably more protracted and festive than the wedding.)
Debrett’s etiquette bible reminds us, somewhat pessimistically, that ‘an important function of an engagement is to allow the two parental sides to get used to one another, and thus smooth out as early as possible any differences and difficulties.’ This tells us a lot about the English attitude to weddings. We know that a wedding is supposed to be a joyous event, but in our usual Eeyorish fashion, we really see it as an ordeal, an occasion fraught with difficulties and dangers (or, as the ever-cheery Debrett’s puts it ‘a minefield for the socially insecure and a logistical nightmare for the organisers’ and, for good measure, ‘a source of inter-family tension’). Something is bound to go drastically wrong, and someone is bound to be mortally offended – and because of our belief in the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol, we know that the veneer of polite conviviality may crack, and the inevitable family tensions may erupt into unseemly tears and quarrels. Even if stiff upper lips are maintained on the day, there will be grumbles and recriminations in the aftermath, and in any case, even at best, we expect the whole ritual to be rather embarrassing.
The Money-talk Taboo
When the tensions are over money, which they often are – not least because weddings themselves tend to be expensive affairs – the embarrassment factor is doubled. Unlike most other cultures, we persist in the notion that love and marriage have nothing to do with money – and that any mention of money would ‘lower the tone’ of the event. It is customary, for example, for the male partner to fork out about a month’s salary on an engagement ring (in America it can be double that, or even more, as an engagement ring is seen as a more overt symbol of the male’s status as a provider) but to ask or talk about how much the ring cost would be offensive. This does not stop everyone making their own private guesses, or asking about the stones and the setting as a roundabout way of estimating the price, but only the groom (and perhaps his bank manager) should know the exact cost, and only a very crass, vulgar groom would either boast or complain about it.
The cost of the wedding itself is traditionally borne by the bride’s parents, but in these days of late marriages is now often met or at least shared by the couple themselves and/or grandparents or other relatives. But whoever has footed the lion’s share of the bill, the groom will usually, in his speech, politely thank the bride’s parents for ‘this wonderful party’ or some such euphemism – the words ‘money’ or ‘paid’ are not used. If the groom’s parents, grandparents or uncle have contributed by paying for, say, the champagne or the honeymoon, they may be thanked for ‘providing’ or ‘giving’ these items – to use the words ‘paying for’ would imply that money was involved. We all know perfectly well that money is involved, but it would be bad manners to draw attention to the fact. The usual English hypocrisies. These polite euphemisms may conceal many petty financial squabbles, and in some cases much seething resentment over who paid for what or how unnecessarily extravagant the whole thing was. If you are hard-up, there is very little point in beggaring yourself to provide a lavishly expensive wedding for your daughter: other cultures might be impressed, but the English will only find it ostentatious, and wonder why you did not ‘just do something simple and unpretentious’.
Humour Rules
Quite apart from the difficulties caused by money, or by the money-talk taboo, there is nowadays endless potential for tension in the composition of the two families involved in the ritual: it is highly likely that at least one set of parents will be divorced, and possibly remarried or cohabiting with new partners, perhaps with children from second or even third pair-bondings.
And even if nobody makes a drunken exhibition of themselves, and nobody is offended by the seating plan or the transport arrangements or the best man’s speech, someone is bound to do or say something that will cause embarrassment. At the first English wedding I ever attended, I was that someone, although I was only about five years old. My parents had decided that my sisters and I should have some understanding of the important rite of passage we were about to witness. My father told us all about pair-bonding, described the wedding customs and practices of different cultures, and explained the intricacies of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. My mother took it upon herself to explain the ‘facts of life’ – sex, where babies come from and so on. My sisters, aged about three and four, were perhaps a little too young to take much interest in this, but I was riveted. At the church the next day, I found the ceremony equally fascinating, and during a moment’s silent pause (possible after ‘speak now, or forever hold your peace’), I turned to my mother and asked, in a loud, piercing whisper, ‘Is he going to put the seed in now?’
I was not taken to any weddings for quite a few years after that, which seems a bit unfair, as I had clearly grasped the essential points, and only got the chronological order of things slightly mixed up. The next one I remember was in America, my father’s second marriage. I was about eight or nine – old enough this time for a lecture on bifurcate merging kinship terminology and virilocal versus uxorilocal postmarital residence patterns, with diagrams. This did not stop me suffering an attack of (mercifully quiet) giggles during the most solemn part of the ceremony. At the time, I felt rather ashamed of myself for being so childish (my father was always telling me to ‘stop being childish’), but I now realize that my urge to laugh was a very English response. We find solemnity discomforting, and somehow faintly ridiculous; the most serious, formal, earnest bits of important ceremonies have an unfortunate tendency to make us want to laugh. This is an uneasy, nervous sort of laughter, a close relation of our knee-jerk humour reflex. Humour is our favourite coping mechanism, and laughter is our standard way of dealing with our social dis-ease.
English wedding receptions – and most other rites of passage – ring with laughter: virtually every conversational exchange is either overtly or subtly humorous. This is not, however, necessarily an indication that everyone is having a happy, jolly time. Some may well be feeling genuinely cheerful, but even they are also simply obeying the unwritten English humour rules – rules so deeply ingrained they have become an unthinking, involuntary impulse.
Dispatching Rites
Which is one of the reasons why we have a big problem with funerals. There are few rites of passage on Earth as stilted, uncomfortable and excruciatingly awkward as a typical English funeral.65
The Humour-vivisection Rule
At funerals we are deprived of our primary social coping mechanism – our usual levels of humour and laughter being deemed inappropriate on such an officially sad occasion. At other times, we joke constantly about death, as we do about anything that frightens or disturbs us, but funerals are the one time when humour – or at least any humour beyond that which raises a wry, sad smile – would be disrespectful and out of place. Without it, we are left naked, unprotected, our social inadequacies exposed for all to see.
This is fascinating but painful to watch, like some cruel vivisectionist’s animal-behaviour experiment: observing the English at funerals feels like watching turtles deprived of their shells. Denied the use of our humour reflex, we seem horribly vulnerable, as though some vital social organ has been removed – which in effect it has. Humour is such an essential, hard-wired element of the English character that forbidding (or severely restricting) its use is the psychological equivalent of amputating our toes – we simply cannot function socially without humour. The English humour rules are ‘rules’ principally in the fourth sense of the term allowed by the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘the normal or usual state of things’. Like having toes. Or breathing. At funerals we are left bereft and helpless. No irony! No mockery! No teasing! No banter! No humorous understatement! No jokey wordplay or double entendres! How the hell are we supposed to communicate?
Earnestness-taboo Suspension and Tear-quotas
Not only are we not allowed to relieve tensions, break ice and generally self-medicate our chronic social dis-ease by making a joke out of everything, but we are expected to be solemn. Not only is humour drastically restricted, but earnestness, normally tabooed, is actively prescribed. We are supposed to say solemn, earnest, heartfelt things to the bereaved relatives, or respond to these things in a solemn, earnest, heartfelt way if we are the bereaved.
But not too heartfelt. This is only a limited, qualified suspension of the normal taboo on earnestness and sentimentality. Even those family and friends who are genuinely sad are not allowed to indulge in any cathartic weeping and wailing. Tears are permitted; a bit of quiet, unobtrusive sobbing and sniffing is acceptable, but the sort of anguished howling that is considered normal, and indeed expected, at funerals in many other cultures, would here be regarded as undignified and inappropriate.
Even the socially approved quiet tears and sniffles become embarrassing and make people uncomfortable if excessively prolonged, and England is possibly the only culture in the world in which no tears at all is entirely normal and acceptable. Most adult English males do not cry publicly at funerals; if their eyes do start to fill, they will usually brush the wetness away with a quick, angry gesture and ‘pull themselves together’. Although female relatives and friends are more likely to shed a few tears, failure to do so is not taken as a sign of callousness or absence of grief, providing a suitably sombre expression is maintained, broken only by an occasional ‘brave smile’.
In fact, many will regard such restraint as admirable. There may have been criticism of some members of the royal family for their ‘uncaring’ response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but no-one was surprised that her young sons shed only the most minimal, discreet tears at her funeral, having maintained their composure throughout the long walk behind her coffin, and indeed throughout almost all of the funeral service. They were commended for their bravery and dignity; their smiles and murmured thanks as they accepted the condolences of the crowds during a ‘walkabout’ were widely praised, and somehow far more poignant than any amount of uninhibited noisy sobbing. The English do not measure grief in tears. Too many tears are regarded as somewhat self-indulgent, even a bit selfish and unfair. Grief-stricken relatives who do not cry, or cry only briefly, at a funeral are likely to be seen as showing great courtesy and consideration for others, putting on a brave face to reassure their guests, rather than demanding attention and comfort for themselves. To be more precise, and at the risk of getting into pea-counting mode again, my calculations indicate that the optimum tear-quota at an average English funeral is as follows:
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