The Wedding by Dorothy West

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The Wedding by Dorothy West
The immediate actions in the novel The Wedding by Dorothy West take place at the Oval on Martha's Vineyard. The vineyard is specially made for blacks whereby whites could not step a foot at the grounds. Although the novel was published in 1953, the narrator presents the work in flashbacks of history happening over more than one hundred years ago. The wedding preparations are made for Shelby Coles, a daughter to one of the most admired couples in the community. The occupants in the Oval admired people for petty and unreasonable reasons like high social classes and skin color. The narrator reveals racism in the novel whereby everyone in the family shows their distress towards the marriage of Shelby to a white musician except her white great grandmother.
All the members of the Oval community face shock and reality as they prepare for a different type of marriage. Shelby wants to prove the feelings and perceptions of her people wrong by marrying an individual from a different social class and race. Besides, the white jazz musician supposed to become Shelby's husband has not pursued the right profession according to this society. The Oval found it difficult to understand how Shelby, “throw her life away on a nameless, faceless white man who wrote jazz, a frivolous occupation without office, title, or foreseeable future,” (West, 2019, pg. 4). All the people living in Oval believe in better careers not to mention a musician in this case. The perception revealed by this population shows that they come from a high-class community and they don't believe in interacting with people from lower classes. The family giving out their daughter's hand in marriage might have accepted due to the love they hold for the daughter. However, the white great grandmother is extremely happy with her granddaughters' decisions because she sees a near fulfillment of the desire of having continuous generations in the white branch coming true (West, 2019, pg. 6). The poor woman had lost her daughter to slavery and ended up being the only one with a different race in the family. Most people in the community think that the bride had a great opportunity of choosing a better person from their community and not the preferred fiancé. The community represented in the novel values their desires than fellow human beings, especially from different social classes and races.
Many people the Oval are amazed when Shelby decided to marry Mead Wyler as the members fight with the changes occurring to the community. All the individuals in this society grapple at the transformations happening to their norms and beliefs and cannot accept the incoming changes immediately. This aspect shows how the individuals held to their culture strictly and never anticipated any changes especially on the issue of intermarriage from a different race. The narrator reveals that the community had some indigenous whites represented by the bride’s great grandmother. The availability of the white in the previous generations is used to show continuity in the race as the woman could have given birth to a white child. The new weds are not the first individuals to break the culture and rules on interma...