| I remember the giddy excitement that led up to 14 February in the post-war years of my growing up. The teasing questions, the embarrassed mumbles in reply, and the unforgettable stomach-dropping moment of receiving, or not receiving, a token from the one whose admiration one most desired. Had I known that some of my friends’ parents also marked the day, it would have felt, well, not quite right — kind of soppy.
Yet skim to 2008, and I am in a shop devoted to the sale of cards for all occasions. Arrayed before me are valentines from “him” to “her” (girlfriend, mother, daughter, grandmother, wife); from “her” to “him” (boyfriend, father, husband: I cannot recall one to a son) and to “her” (friend); there were generic cards (“to my special valentine”), and even one “from your cat”. This high-street shop was short of any explicitly gay or lesbian cards, though you can buy them elsewhere. The question was not so much whom to choose, as whom to leave out.
I was puzzled. We used to dance for a moment in our culture’s choreography of courtship, and chose our valentine from outside the family and from unmarried-but-marriageable acquaintances. Today, it seems, choice can extend to a much wider range of people (and, remembering the cat, surrogate people) without suspicion of impropriety or perversion.
Yet I confess that I would feel uncomfortable sending a valentine card to my daughter, or to her husband, or to my neighbour’s young child. Am I simply registering a shift in the culture, and a change not necessarily of sentiment, but almost certainly of practice?
There is an instructive history of occasions similar to St Valentine’s Day. The Roman mid-February festival of Lupercalia is often cited as a precursor to our St Valentine’s Day. It clearly has features in common with some, but not all, of the ways in which St Valentine’s has been kept. On the threshold of spring, it involved fertility rites, and, by drawing lots, the pairing of men and women. (“Drawing one’s valentine” on Valentine’s Eve was still common in Pepys’s day).
Pope Gelasius I rebranded Lupercalia as St Valentine’s Day in the fifth century, but it did not have any strong link with romance until Chaucer’s time. It may well have been his allegorical poem The Parlement of Foules that forged the connection. It introduces the “tradition” that the birds gather on St Valentine’s Day before the goddess Nature to choose their mates, and then stages a debate on “the bewilderingly different kinds of love”, in A. C. Cawley’s neat phrase.
Although generally light-hearted, serious matters are clearly at stake — the competing claims of individual desire and the common good. Nature resolves the dispute with a vision of the plenitude of love as a constituent of God’s order, although this eventual preference for spiritual rather than earthly love could be tongue-in- cheek.
None the less, Chaucer’s imaginative conceit was taken up by his companions at court, possibly because it emphasised that unlicenced sexual passion puts the social order in jeopardy. There are political implications to personal inclinations.
In Pepys’s time, to be valentines with someone was to enjoy a “special friendship” for the year. It was one among a number of different intensities of relationship that bound communities together. Yet it could also tear them apart, and the ex-pansion of literacy, printed cards, and the postal service created more opportunities for mischief-making.
The recent BBC series Cranford drew on Mrs Gaskell’s narratives of 19th-century life, and dramatised the upset caused by anonymous valentines. There is a bittersweet comedy in the failure to guess aright, the head being blinkered by the heart’s desire. We have inherited this unhealthy association of affection with anxiety.
The perennial problem with having to play favourites (as the whole Valentine brouhaha invites) is how to balance choosing one against not choosing others, weighing “exclusivity” against “exclusion”. This issue is nimbly sidestepped by extending the field of possible valentines more widely than that of sexual partners, actual or potential.
By including members of the immediate family, friends — and even pets — as well as lovers and wished-for lovers, we moderns can retreat behind a dazzling array of different kinds of love, without clearly specifying which is tied to whom. Card manufacturers reap profit from this: valentine cards are second only to Christmas cards as sources of revenue.
Our society appears more regulated, more straitlaced, than the Victorians ever were: we are acutely aware that our relationships may be inflected, perhaps infected, by sexuality. Fathers refrain from bathing their young children, of either sex. Teachers are circumspect in comforting their students.
The space for displays of tenderness — of making manifest the general lovingness that Chaucer’s Nature insists gives coherence to the Creation — seems to have been squeezed, and is difficult to find, or to recognise even if found. Here, the valentine helps.
Today’s commercial valentines use and re-use a limited repertoire of images. Hearts and flowers are “traditional”, and are joined by
the occasional kitten. But the image that has spread like a rash across
this mosaic of romance is the teddy bear.
In this commercial space, I am struck by how often the bear is associated with the expression “Everlasting love”. I am reminded of the long and complex relationships we have as children with those cuddly creatures that share our beds once we sleep separately, and share our unhappinesses, joys, and anxieties, too.
Consider the teddy bear as a token of the truth, that in all loving relationships, there is a utopian moment beyond sex, beyond sexual difference, when we touch the warmth of being eternally loved, as by a mother, or (dare I say) a father. There is no anxiety here. This St Valentine’s Day, what better sign of our need for affection, or of our urge to express tenderness, than this icon of a child’s unfailing friend?
David Reason is Master of Keynes College at the University of Kent at Canterbury. |
back to Comment
previous story
|
next story 
%231%23.jpg)
.gif "Caris Magazine for girls aged 11 to 16 © site")
