If there’s one day of the year that we are all encouraged to think about romantic love, it’s St. Valentine’s Day. Feeling duly encouraged to do so, let’s celebrate the romance of the day by picking up a classic work of literature that encapsulates romantic love in the spirit of Christian faith.
Here are my three suggestions.
Sense and Sensibility
Nowhere is the Christian spirit of romantic love more evident and more wonderfully evoked than in the novels of Jane Austen. This is so much the case that it’s not easy to pick just one of her novels from any of the rest. All of them showcase true love as being inseparable from that greater love which entails the laying down of the life of the lover for his or her beloved. Since, however, we can only read them one at a time, let’s pick the incomparable Miss Austen’s first published novel for our St, Valentine’s reading.
Sense and Sensibility, as its title suggests, looks at the role of reason (sense) and emotion (sensibility) in the pursuit of romantic love. Which is more important? Should we follow our heads or our hearts? Or is it about getting the balance between reason and emotion right? As we follow the interwoven lives of the two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, we come to see how “sense” in the absence of charity becomes hard-headedness and how “sensibility” in the absence of reason leads to recklessness.
Most important, we come to understand that losing our heads or losing our hearts are not the ways to find true and enduring love.
The Betrothed
If the choice of a novel by Jane Austen might seem obvious, the choice of the second novel for St. Valentine’s Day is less so. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni, a classic of Italian literature, is not as well known in the English-speaking world as it should be. Manzoni was a revert to the Catholic faith when he wrote the novel, which is evident in the doctrinal sense and the devout religious sensibility with which he tells the story of Renzo and Lucia, the betrothed couple. Swept apart by political intrigue and circumstance, the hapless pair find themselves on a seemingly hopeless quest to be reunited.
Lucia is a worthy heroine who shows faithful fortitude in the face of great trials and tribulations. Like Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, she is besieged by the unwelcome advances of wicked men and beset by troubles not of her own making. Like Dante’s Beatrice, she serves as an icon of idealized femininity, worthy of anyone’s love and warranting great sacrifice on the part of any lover who would wish to win her hand in marriage.
In contrast, Renzo is as utterly unworthy of her as Dante is of Beatrice. He is hotheaded, rash in his judgments and rushed in his actions. His lack of prudence and temperance all too often makes matters worse. And yet he is essentially good-natured and stout-hearted, and faithful in his love for Lucia. We can’t help liking him. We wish him well. Ultimately, we wish him success in his quest to find the woman he loves.
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Our final selection is not a novel but a play by William Shakespeare. No, it’s not Romeo and Juliet, which shows how romantic love can destroy both the reckless lover and his equally reckless beloved. It’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the many merry comedies in which Shakespeare shows the triumph of true love. Most of his comedies end in marriage, often multiple marriages, and The Merry Wives of Windsor is no exception. But this particular one has been selected because it is not primarily about young people seeking marriage, such as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood or Renzo and Lucia, but about married couples exhibiting the nuptial love between spouses.
This is indeed appropriate for St. Valentine’s Day. More Valentine’s cards are purchased each year by husbands for their wives, and by wives for their husbands, than are purchased by those courting potential spouses. It is, therefore, only fitting that we should select a play on St. Valentine’s Day which doesn’t celebrate the quest for marital love but the consummation of such love in holy matrimony. It is indeed a time for wives and husbands to make merry!
