The Human Condition in Jean Valentine's Poems

Throughout her poems Valentine focuses on the human condition through biblical allusions as well as the body, soul, and human suffering making up this condition.

Valentine begins invoking the human condition by focusing equally on the body and soul and their relationship, that is: how the “soul [becomes] flesh” (3). Valentine focuses on specific bodily attributes including the eyes, hands (see I heard my left hand and Do flies remember us), skin (see Occurrence of White), “charcoal skull” and bones (17). With this she continues to distinguish the body and soul, or her “crayon bones” and her “heart shutting down” (11). She also incorporates sexuality with the body “[wanting] breasts, bellies, hair... nipples, foreskin, heart” (5). She uses imagery of the body in a biblical sense as well “the pelvis thinning out to God” (3).

Coming largely from the Catholic tradition, Valentine depicts a human condition that is categorized by suffering, just as Jesus Christ suffered as the human God. This suffering though, following the Bible, has almost a redemptive quality. In the poem The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns, the very title suggests a redemptive quality resulting from human suffering. The fact that this poem is in the form of a conversation with “Mary” invokes biblical imagery of the maternal figure of the Virgin Mary suggesting that Valentine may even be involved in the act of prayer during this poem. Again invoking images of the body, Valentine describes her “older breast” and “thinner rib” as well as imagery of the piercing of a heart (7). This piercing of the body imagery again invoke biblical allusions, in this case to the crucifixion and ultimate human suffering of Jesus Christ.

In line with the human sufferings of Jesus, Valentine also carries a theme of abandonment, betrayal,  “emptiness” and loss throughout many of her poems (19). Her lover and her family are the most common subjects, beginning the section entitled “New Poems”  with Valentine’s accounts of abandonment as a young girl. This appears most vividly in The Girl as “the mother and son are gone happy, the father to work, the sister to marriage, [while] the girl is still spilling” (4). In concurrence with this theme is the idea of the “Visiting Area” in either a hospital or the Avenal prison in which one is forced to be confined and isolated, “dying day by day” in human suffering (32). 

Valentine offers a fully developed portrait of the relationship between the body and the soul as in the aforementioned Annunciation the body and soul are seen as working in unity, the exact opposite is shown in Eighteen. In this poem, Valentine as an adolescent is experiencing the pulls of the desires if her body for sexual pursuits and experiences in contrast with her “soul in the corner” (5). Her spiritual self in this imagery is clearly taking a stance geographically (in its corner) and certainly idealogically different than the physical desires of the author (5).