Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/226

214 The foregoing are the general types of the forms of survival in which the party of the bride is represented. We have traced the various stages of disintegration from actual resistance offered by both the men and women of the bride's party, to the offering of such resistance terminated by a surrender of the bride, and then to resistance being offered by the women only. Thence, from feigned resistance evinced by a sham fight, it passed to the mere closing of the house, and finally to the form in which no resistance is simulated. The semblance of hostility to the party of the bride gradually dwindles away till it is reduced to merely tapping the father and mother of the bride on the shoulder with a small stick, as is done by the Samoyeds, or to the pretense of tearing the bride from the arms of her mother, as is the custom in Sardinia. To come down to ourselves, it is very probable that the practice of throwing an old shoe after the departing bride and bridegroom is a last surviving relic of the form of a struggle between opposing parties.

It is difficult to say to what class such ceremonies as that observed by the Mundaris of Bengal, where an arrow is fired through the loophole formed by the arm of the bride as she holds a pitcher of water on her head, and by the Romans, where the bride's hair was parted with a spear, belong; but the use of weapons seems to justify us in regarding them as very disintegrated survivals of our subhead (a). Perhaps the custom observed in Anglo-Saxon marriages, where the father delivered the bride's shoe to the bridegroom, and the latter tapped her on the head with it, is also one.

We come now to our subhead (b). The forms of capture of this class seem to be symbolic of a capture of a woman by surprise or stratagem. In these, though the bride is carried off with real or pretended violence, her friends offer no opposition and feign no grief. It is no longer a struggle between clans, and there is no longer a party supporting the bride.

First of this class is that form in which the girl is carried off nolens volens. The consent of the parents to the marriage has been obtained, and all the preliminaries settled, but in most cases the girl has received no warning of what is about to take place. Sometimes, of course, she may have received a hint, but in this form she is not necessarily a consenting party, and her resistance is violent. Among some peoples it is usual for the bridegroom to be assisted by one or two friends; among others he carries out the abduction alone. The first represents capture by a war party, the second by an individual, but the latter form is comparatively rare.

Of cases in which the bridegroom is assisted by his companions we find examples—1. Among the Mandingo tribes settled along