Valentine's Day: Of horrid shapes and hideous caricatures
by Jack Neely
Valentine's Day comes back around every year, but rarely offers us much festivity. You've got the cut flowers. You've got the boxes of chocolate. You've got the cardboard hearts, cut in that approved heart shape which bears no particular resemblance to any part of the actual anatomy except, perhaps, for the traditional greeting-card hues of oxygenated blood.
And there you are. You cough up the loot, and it's over. It's not an occasion for a feast, and is not identified with any particular food. It's not generally celebrated with firecrackers or masquerades or midnight masses.
It would be nice, having turned over the cardboard and severed blossoms and useless chocolate, to break into a jolly song of some sort. But with the exception of the melancholy Rodgers and Hart standard, "My Funny Valentine," the day has no music at all. And with its jeering references to weak mouths, questionable intelligence, unGreek figures, and laughable looks, it's not a serenade recommended to the successful paramour.
For many, it's an occasion to go out to eat food alone with one's beloved, the romantic dinner for two that you always hear about. But the irony is that, though Valentine's Day ostensibly celebrates love, it doesn't make much room for the consequences of love. Children tend to be single and find themselves in the company of dozens of other eligible single people in the classroom every day. As a result, they may be much more interested in Valentine's Day than their parents are. Some of them may even have higher levels of certain hormones than their parents do. But come Feb. 14, they're left at home to do homework and watch TV. That is, if the parents are able to locate a sad, lonesome babysitter.
It's a strange and unsettling holiday, this one. But, maybe, it's not quite as strange as it was in 1856. In those days, they shook it up a little.
I picked that date just because, in a spot check of old newspapers, it marked the earliest detailed reference I found to a Knoxville Valentine's Day. After some sleepy backwater years, Knoxville was rapidly modernizing in 1856, with trains coming and going every day, steamboats occasionally, new industry, two combative weeklies, and calls for more gaslights downtown so businesses could remain open late. The Knoxville Brass Band played regularly in the music hall, and a Professor Vegas was offering dance instruction on Monday nights. "Come and trip it as you go," he advertised, quoting Milton, "On the light fantastic toe." Kinsloe & Rice's Steam-Printing Establishment sold greeting cards "in every style."
But it was no antebellum idyll. Around here there was a lot of cussing: about slavery, abolitionism, Catholics, foreigners. They even cussed about the damn profanity in the streets. One man signed an anti-profanity petition with the addendum, "I am a profane swearer. I regard it was a low, vulgar practice, and think it right to be an indictable offense." Of course, some cussed at the anti-profanity movement.
But love was in the air. Just before the big day, the Register ran a wise poem:
Boys, when you court / You must deport
Yourself with circumspection.
It is a sin / To seek to win
And trifle with affection.
Now when sincere / The men appear
In gallantry and wooing,
Can woman jilt / Without the guilt
Of similar misdoing?
Too many court / In thoughtless sport
Nor think when they have parted
On what they've done: / The loving one
Left courted, broken-hearted.
Too many jilt / With equal guilt
Now think, while then they trifle
That men have hearts/ To feel love's darts
Though they their feelings stifle.
In all we do / We should be true
Nor raise an expectation
Unless 'tis meant / To full extent
To meet the obligation.
Then came St. Valentine's Day itself. It was just a little different from the predictable holiday we know. "To-day...everyone is at liberty to make love to, or poke fun at, in a sly way, somebody else," goes the unsigned editorial. "To-day, many a trembling hope will be changed to sweet assurance by some love-winged missive—but there is a dark side to the picture."
I read on, expecting the "dark side" was some reference to the many forgotten on Valentine's Day, those with trembling hopes that weren't changed to sweet assurance, after all.
But it was worse than that. What was really different about the mid-Victorian Valentine's Day was the form in which the "fun" took, perhaps printed at Kinsloe & Rice: "Those horrid burlesques, whose gilded exteriors hold a rapturous promise to the eye but break it to the heart! If any of our staid men of business find something of horrid shape, staring them in the face...a thought of the day will explain the strange visitation...."
What was the "horrid shape" seemingly understood in 1856? It's not clear. Maybe it was, for once, a heart-shaped card that was anatomically correct.
The writer then pictures the famously sheltered Knoxville woman receiving one of these weird pranks: "and if any fair one, after breaking with impatient fingers the delicate seal, shall be confronted by a hideous caricature, she must know that some malicious old bachelor has sent her his ideal."
February 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 7
© 2003 Metro Pulse
| 
