by Kate Fox
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, conventionalised 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 full 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 . . .’
An element of superstition, or fear 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 memorise 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.
School-leaver rites
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 sixteen – 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 prize-givings and so on, but no actual ‘graduation’ ceremony, and certainly nothing like an American high-school graduation, which is a big event, grander and more elaborate than most English university graduation ceremonies. GCSE and A-level exam results do not come out until late August, well after the school year has finished, 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.
Again I doubt that my whingeing had any influence, but I am happy to report that, although we still have few proper graduation ceremonies, this passage is at least now marked, in many schools, by a new, imported ritual: the ‘high-school prom’. In the past decade, American-style proms – complete with hired stretch limos, girls in fancy ballgowns or cocktail dresses and sophisticated hairdos, boys in black tie or smart suits, many months of excited planning, etc. – have rapidly become hugely popular in English schools, over 85 per cent of which now hold them. These glamorous events have replaced the rather dull and half-hearted ‘school discos’ that some schools used to hold at the end of the summer term, but also sometimes at Christmas or at other times, such that they never held any particular significance for the graduating class, who were never given much, if any, special treatment or recognition. Indeed, it is still the case that one does not actually ‘graduate’ from an English school: one simply leaves, and one is called a ‘school leaver’, a depressing term with no connotations of achievement or accomplishment, especially when compared with the more impressive-sounding ‘high-school graduate’. The new proms at least give our school leavers some sense of importance, and some kind of formal rite of passage to mark this socially significant transition.
English media pundits are of course now moaning about the cost of these new-fangled proms, expressing sardonic contempt for all the flashy, glitzy, ostentatious ‘American’ extravagance. They focus on the small minority of parents who spend ridiculous amounts of money on their daughters’ designer outfits or horse-drawn carriages, rather than the majority who buy relatively cheap high-street frocks and club together to squeeze a dozen girls into a hired limo. Tabloid moralists express much virtuous indignation over all the ballgowns and make-up, which they deem too ‘adult’ for teenage schoolgirls – their diatribes invariably printed, with the usual hypocrisy, alongside large photographs of the most titillating examples they can find of scantily dressed prom-goers. They seem to miss the point that transition to adulthood is precisely what this rite of passage is all about, and dressing up in special ‘grown-up’ clothing is an integral part of the symbolic transformation. And although our proms have indeed been largely inspired by American films and television series, most other countries have some equivalent of the US high-school prom – and in many countries these celebrations are long-standing national or regional traditions. Graduation parties and balls are also, almost everywhere, more ceremonial and exciting events than the dreary, meaningless, ill-defined school discos that English teenagers had been enduring until very recently. We fail to mark their passage from childhood to adolescence with any puberty rites, we give them no graduation ceremony to mark the end of their schooldays, and now some would even begrudge them a bit of a festive ritual to celebrate their transition from school to the adult world.
In all the complaints about Americanisation, commentators have failed to notice that our proms do differ in at least one significant respect from the American variety: despite their supposedly slavish imitation of proms as portrayed in Hollywood films and American television series, our teenagers have generally not embraced the US custom of ‘prom dates’. There are some exceptions, but most English school leavers attend their proms in groups – usually single-sex groups – not as couples. American prom photos all tend to feature couples, or rows of couples like animals waiting to board Noah’s Ark, two by two. English prom photos, by contrast, are almost all of single-sex groups, ranging from trios to small herds. They may well end up pairing off during the course of the evening, but they do so in that typically English vague, ambivalent, non-dating manner. They might find themselves ‘snogging’, or even having furtive sex in some uncomfortable and undignified location at the after-party. Indeed, they may have been ‘sexting’ half-naked photos of themselves to each other, and having sex, for some time – but actually asking someone to be your ‘date’ for the prom would be too explicit, too cheesy, too embarrassingly intimate.
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 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. 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 (possibly 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?’