The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls,” circa 1380, and his shorter poem “Complaint of Mars,” circa 1385, take place on Valentine’s Day. The relevant lines in the former are as follows:

  For this was on Seynt Valentynes day,

  Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make.

  [For this was on St. Valentine’s Day,

  when every bird comes there to choose his mate.]

  Comparable lines from “Complaint” read,

  Seynt Valentyne, a foul thus herde I sing

  Upon thy day er sonne gan up-sprynge.

  [On Saint Valentine’s day, I thus heard a bird sing,

  at the time of day when the sun springs up.]

  Chaucer and Grandson both associated Saint Valentine’s Day with birds as harbingers of springtime and love. Two other friends of Chaucer’s—the trilingual poet John Gower (who wrote in English, French, and Latin) and the Welsh diplomat, soldier, and poet Sir John Clanvowe—also wrote Valentine poems with similar references to birds. This shouldn’t surprise us; poets often pick up motifs from one another. What is perhaps surprising—and reassuring—is that these poets, in the midst of a war that pitted some of them against each other, continued to exchange ideas, to praise love, and to take pity on the fate of unhappy lovers, whether they be “englois ou alemens, / De France né ou de Savoye” (“English or German, from France or Savoy”), as Grandson wrote in his “Saint Valentine’s Dream.”

  All these poets promoted the priority of the heart in human affairs. As John Gower put it, “Où le coeur est / le corps doit obéir.” (“Where the heart is / the body must obey.”)

  THE ONE NOTABLE FEMALE POET FROM THIS PERIOD WAS Christine de Pizan, a French woman of Italian origin brought up at the court of Charles V of France. She, too, wrote about Saint Valentine’s Day in a poem that began “Tres doulz ami” (Very dear friend) and in a long verse narrative titled Le Dit de la Rose (The Tale of the Rose). Dated February 14, 1402, Le Dit describes a dream in which the god of love expressed his dismay at the fact that men were no longer treating women with courtesy. To correct that ill, Christine was instructed to proclaim the Order of the Rose and to enlist the support of true lovers on the Feast of Saint Valentine. All of this was supposed to have taken place at the Parisian residence of Louis d’Orléans, one of the sons of King Charles V and the father of Charles d’Orléans, whom we met in Chapter 10.

  A generation later Charles d’Orléans himself would write a dozen Valentine’s Day poems during his long English imprisonment from 1415 to 1440. The one he sent to his wife, Bonne, from the Tower of London, now in the manuscript collection of the British Library, is considered the first known valentine card. In it he addressed his wife as “Ma tres doulce Valentinée” (“My very gentle Valentine”) and assured her that his love for her endured in spite of everything.

  Another poem written by Charles during his English captivity starts out by saying that on Saint Valentine’s Day all the birds assemble to share the spoils of love, each with his chosen partner—Charles, too, obviously knew Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls.” On that day designated for lovers, when the sun shines its “candle” into his room, he rises from bed and hears the birds singing. Then, wiping his teary eyes, he regrets his difficult destiny and wishes that he, like the birds, could share the day’s pleasures with a chosen companion. The envoy—the four-line stanza at the end of the ballad—reads,

  This year the men and women who are

  Lovers choose Saint Valentine.

  I remain alone, without aid,

  On the hard bed of painful thoughts.

  In a later exchange of poems called “Complaints,” Charles’s friend Fredet sent him a verse description of Saint Valentine’s Day in Tours, France.

  … in the name of Love

  They organized a big festival

  In Tours on Saint Valentine’s Day.

  According to custom, they proclaimed

  In all the courts

  That everyone should participate.

  It is hard to imagine a more fitting setting for a Valentine’s Day fête than a fifteenth-century Loire Valley château. After he was released from English captivity and returned to France, Charles had the opportunity to celebrate this holiday in his own Château de Blois, where the festivities were similar to those described by Fredet. Several of Charles’s poems begin by invoking “this day of Saint Valentine / When everyone should chose his partner.” There are even pictures of this Saint Valentine’s Day event in two manuscripts from the 1450s that show scenes of men and women reaching into an urn and drawing the names of their “valentines.” Charles’s special attention to Saint Valentine’s Day was undoubtedly shaped by the poetic tradition he had inherited from Chaucer, Oton de Grandson, and Christine de Pizan, but there is another reason why this particular saint may have appealed to him. Charles’s own beloved mother, who died when he was only fourteen, was named Valentine. Her death occurred at the end of 1408, after her husband had been murdered by the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless.

  TWO CENTURIES LATER THE FRENCH PRIEST AND PROLIFIC writer Jean-Pierre Camus, showed nothing but contempt for Saint Valentine’s Day. In a priggish novel that mixed fact and fiction, published in English under the title Diotrephe, or An historie of valentines, he set out to show how the devil was at work under the auspices of Saint Valentine. The author began by describing a French village church named Saint Valentine near the city of Brianche that attracted bands of merrymakers in the month of February. “It is needless to say the disorders both of belly cheer and dancing… [are] the cause of much evil.” Then he zeroed in on a potentially vice-laden custom.

  “They write upon azure’s paper in gold letters, the name of all the women and maids” and stuff them into a large box. Then, after the names are drawn out of the box by random, “she that thus by lot falls to a man, be she either wife, widow, or maid, is his Valentine.” For the following year he becomes “the servant of this woman, she practicing an absolute authority over her Valentine, and he yielding… as lovers do.”

  Though the French villagers “thinke no harme… in this drawing of Valentines,” the author assured us that the consequences could be catastrophic, especially when married men select their neighbors’ wives or daughters as their Valentines or, reciprocally, when married wives end up with single young men or other women’s husbands. We are told that such extramarital engagements inevitably lead to licentiousness. Falling back upon the heart as a metaphor for legitimate love, the author concluded that “love in marriage is like the heart which cannot suffer division;… it cannot contain the husband and the Valentine… one cannot have two loves in one heart.”

  IN ENGLAND, AS EARLY AS THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, THE word valentine meant at least two things: a declaration of love sent to the beloved, often in the form of a poem, or the beloved herself or himself. Letters preserved from the Paston family, dating from February 1477, suggest that Valentine’s Day was considered a propitious time for love. The Pastons and the Brews were trying to agree upon the dowry that Margery Brews would bring into her marriage with John Paston III. Margery’s mother, Elizabeth Brews, suggested that John visit with her and her husband to settle the matter the night before Saint Valentine’s Day, when “every bird chooseth him a make”—again, words taken from Chaucer. Elizabeth’s letter to John on February 10, 1477, expressed the hope that the engagement would be easily formalized.

  But things did not go as planned. Margery’s father, Sir Thomas Brews, was only willing to offer the sum of one hundred pounds, far less than John had anticipated. So Margery herself intervened to write her intended two letters with references to Saint Valentine that might soften his pecuniary concerns. The letters began by addressing John as her “well-beloved Valentine” and her “good, true, and loving Valentine.” The second letter ended by calling herself “your Valentine.” To the extent that it was proper for a maid to lean upon a suitor, Margery found the appropriate language. “Mine heart me bids evermore to love you /
Truly over all earthly thing.” In the end John Paston III listened to the stirrings of his own heart, and the couple embarked upon what appears to have been a love match.

  BY THE MID-SEVENTEENTH CENTURY THE CELEBRATION OF Valentine’s Day in England had become customary for those who could afford its costly rituals. Affluent men drew lots with women’s names on them, and the man who picked a certain lady’s name was obliged to give her a gift.

  The famous diary of Samuel Pepys gives a colorful picture of this practice among the well-heeled. On February 13, 1661, Pepys and his wife dined at the home of Sir William and Lady Batten, and chose by lot the persons who would be their Valentines. In his diary entry Pepys wrote, “we chose Valentines against tomorrow. My wife chose me, which did much please me.” In his next entry, dated “Valentine’s Day,” Pepys noted that he drew the name of Martha, the Battens’ unmarried daughter, and that Sir Batten picked Pepys’s wife. Pepys had Martha as his Valentine once more the next year, each time with little enthusiasm on his part. Yet on February 18, 1661, he, his wife, and Martha went to the Exchange, a London commercial center, to buy Martha a pair of embroidered gloves and six pairs of plain white gloves for the sum of forty shillings. Mrs. Pepys received even more extravagant gifts from Sir William Batten, as Pepys noted in his diary entry of February 22: “half-a-dozen pair of gloves and a pair of silk stockings and garters, for her Valentine’s gift.” Valentine’s Day was not a one-day affair, and celebrating it in the style of Pepys and Batten was certainly not for the masses.

  THE EARLIEST ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND AMERICAN VALENTINES were little more than a few lines of verse handwritten on a sheet of paper, but as of the eighteenth century their makers began to embellish them with pictures as well. Hearts, birds, flowers, and leaves were drawn or painted on handmade valentines, which were then folded, sealed with wax, and placed on a lady’s doorstep. Some contained complicated puzzles, acrostics, and rebuses (pictures that represent words or parts of words). The Pennsylvania Dutch created highly artistic valentines in either German or English, such as the one on the cover of the book in your hands (Rebus Valentine, circa 1760. Pen and ink on paper).

  The first commercial valentines appeared in England at the very end of the eighteenth century. These “mechanical” valentines were printed, engraved, or made from woodcuts and sometimes colored by hand. They combined traditional symbols of love—flowers, hearts, cupids, birds—with doggerel verse of the “roses are red” variety.

  Individuals who continued to make their own valentines or wanted to add a personal touch to a machine-made card could find help in pamphlets designed for the poetically challenged. In 1797 The Young Man’s Valentine appeared in Britain, and thereafter, throughout the nineteenth century in England and America, other manuals followed, with such titles as Saint Valentine’s Sentimental Writer and Introductory Treatise on the Composition of a Valentine by a Master of Hearts.

  The self-styled Master of Hearts let it be known that he was appalled by the “trashy… coarse and sometimes disgusting productions which soon after Christmas, begin annually to people the hucksters’ shop windows, in the shape of penny Valentines.” As a remedy he proposed that the lovestruck write their own valentines—a task to be undertaken with his help. As he put it, “in writing a Valentine, the very best way of all is to write an original one… nothing can be so telling or so pungent as an immediate emanation from your own heart.” Even if the valentine was only a copy of his text or a rearrangement of his words, writing with one’s own pen was generally considered more personal and more authentic than sending a commercial card.

  Some guides were written specifically for women, such as The Lady’s Own Valentine Writer. An 1848 publication titled People’s Valentine Writer, by a Literary Lady may well have been written by a woman, though one can’t be sure, as sometimes men published under the assumption that a female author, even an anonymous one, would appeal to women.

  That same year, on February 17, the eighteen-year-old American poet Emily Dickinson wrote to her brother, Austin Dickinson, from her room at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary that she would not forget the fun she had had during “Valentine week.” Though she herself had not received any valentines and was still longing for one, many of the other girls had. As a group they managed to send out 150 valentines, despite an interdiction by the Holyoke faculty. Emily remarked that one instructor in particular was adamant: “Monday afternoon, Mistress Lyon arose in the hall and forbade our sending ‘any of those foolish notes called valentines.’”

  Such a negative attitude did not discourage another Mount Holyoke graduate, class of 1847, from entering into the valentine business. Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts, wanted to produce quality cards constructed according to her own design—cards that would raise the artistic level of the genre through the use of embossed and colored papers. Within three years the top floor of the Howlands’ spacious house owned by Esther’s father had been converted into a factory where girls assembled valentines under Esther’s direction. After she had made the initial mock-up, each working girl had a specific task, such as laying out the background or cutting out paper pictures to be pasted on by a third girl. Howland’s exquisite, three-dimensional valentines were minor works of art, comparable to fine embroidery or complex collages. They sold for no less than $5 each and, in toto, filled the Howland coffers with as much as $100,000 in a single year!

  While Howland’s cards favored cupids, flowers, human figures, and birds rather than hearts, the heart icon appeared on many other valentines manufactured elsewhere. One titled “Cupid in Ambush” pictured Cupid aiming his arrow at a winged heart in the sky. The verses on the card read, “MY FLUTTERING HEART / DOTH FEEL LOVE’S SMART.”

  With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, mass-produced Valentine’s Day cards all but obliterated the handmade variety. In 1879, when George C. Whitney bought out the Howland business, he brought in printing presses and cheap paper to reduce costs. His valentines often featured hearts or were themselves heart shaped, just as his Christmas cards often depicted or took the shape of Christmas trees. In time Whitney became the biggest producer of American valentines.

  In the Anglo-Saxon world Victorian valentines varied greatly in price and quality, ranging from cheap paper cutouts to expensive lithographs on embossed paper. There were specialized cards for different trades and professions—for example, a series of valentines for sailors, which portrayed ships at sea and sweethearts waiting for their return: “For she who inclines to a sailor’s own heart, / In the gale of adversity—never will part.”

  One could also buy comic valentines that conveyed a message of derision rather than love: these mean-spirited “vinegar” valentines made fun of skinny spinsters, fat bachelors, female bluestockings, male dandies, alcoholics, overbearing wives, or anyone else you wanted to ridicule. In the United States lower-class minorities including the Irish or free “negroes” were often the targets of such insulting valentines. Printed on single sheets and priced cheaply, at between one and five cents, they were usually sent anonymously.

  But the overwhelming majority of valentines remained sentimental and carried a romantic message. Some of the fanciest contained a piece of real lace or an actual lock of hair. Even the blind were not forgotten; Braille valentines offered embossed figures of birds and hearts accompanying the verse.

  THE FRENCH, TOO, BEGAN EXPLOITING THE COMMERCIAL valentine during the late nineteenth century. The angel-like cupids surrounded by hearts found on French cards circa 1900 (as in Figure 30) had a saccharine quality that was far removed from some of the mischievous, even dangerous, cupids of the past.

  Today in France as well as Italy Valentine’s Day is strictly for lovers and does not extend to a wide variety of family members and friends, as it does in England and America. Frenchmen offer chocolates and roses to their romantic partners or perhaps a dinner out at a favorite restaurant.

  In Japan the situation is reversed. The women give men chocolates on Valentine’s
Day. Such gifts are not limited to husbands and boyfriends but may also be offered to family members and colleagues. Men are expected to reciprocate a month later on “White Day,” March 14, with anything white, namely white chocolates, cakes, biscuits, marshmallows, and candies. Not surprisingly, White Day was an invention of Japanese confectioners. A reliable Japanese source tells me that these days most people do not care about the color but just give sweet things—dark or white—on White Day.

  Valentine’s Day is now celebrated in many different countries worldwide, with many regional variations. But in at least two countries various authorities actually forbid it: Malaysia and Iran. In Malaysia on Valentine’s Day 2011 religious authorities arrested more than one hundred Muslim couples who were celebrating the holiday in defiance of the ban. The same year, in Iran, the printing-works owners’ union issued a directive that banned the printing of any goods promoting Valentine’s Day. The directive specifically targeted “boxes and cards emblazoned with hearts or half-hearts.” I’m trying to imagine what the half-hearts looked like.

  TODAY APPROXIMATELY 200 MILLION PAPER VALENTINES ARE sent in the United States alone, and the rise of e-cards increases that number beyond estimate. Hearts still make their appearance on both paper and e-cards, but they have rivals in images of flowers, loving couples, and, surprisingly, animals. Yes, cuddly animals seem to be the rage in today’s valentine cards, especially those destined for children, who constitute a large portion of American recipients.