Valentine

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-63

Pages 64-127

Pages 128-193

Pages 194-245

Pages 246-306

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Empowerment of Women

The novel is set at a tectonic moment in American cultural history, the mid-1970s, in which the country reexamined its perception of women and reevaluated centuries-long traditions that had diminished the place of women in society and in families. Centering on the lives of four very disparate women, the novel argues exactly what the women’s movement in the 1970s did—and what America needed to hear about women, then and now: that women are complex and no one-size-fits-all template exists for them.

In doing so, the novel empowers women to be exactly what their individual hearts and experiences tell them to be. Growing up in Odessa, girls had two choices: to get out of Odessa, either deliberately or recklessly, or to settle down, accepting a stunted and empty life of marriage and multiple pregnancies and a long stretch of tending to the home.

The story presents this theme primarily through the journeys and relationships between its four dominant characters—Glory, Mary Rose, Corrine, and D.A.—and many minor characters—Karla, who dispenses frontier justice to Dale Strickland; Tina, who shares an afternoon with Glory at the hotel pool; Ginny, D.A.’s desperate mother-in-flight, and the daughters of Mary Rose and Corrine. These women are at once strong and weak, selfish and compassionate, logical and unpredictable. They make both good and catastrophic decisions. They drink too much; they’re mothers and lovers, daughters and wives, they’re victims and victimizers, and they confront the heart’s wild unpredictability in ways that lead to both emotional rescue and psychological devastation. They survive, they endure, they fail, and they triumph. Their stories have both happy and tragic endings. They are only human. Through the female characters who stay in Odessa and those who leave Odessa, the novel shows that women define strength because their identity derives from far more than the places where they live and the men in their lives.

Rape and the Problems with American Justice

“That poor girl,” Mary Rose says of the brutalized Glory. “I don’t know how a child comes back from something like this” (12). The novel describes the brutal rape of Glory as a child. Mary Rose Whitehead is determined to give her testimony; she won’t be intimidated from appearing in court even if Glory is. Mary Rose Whitehead takes the stand—a woman whose entire life has been upended, her property and her child threatened, because she had the compassion to help a beaten and bloody 14-year-old rape survivor and who, in turn, clings to her faith in the American justice system to punish Dale Strickland. No one less than the judge destroys her faith in that system. After the reptilian defense attorney has misdirected and provoked Mary Rose, poised now to deliver the testimony for which she has endured so much harassment, the judge tells her to “make it quick” (232) because the local restaurant has a prime rib special.

From the moment of Dale Strickland’s arrest, Odessa’s white, Christian, male-dominated culture is determined to blame the Mexican girl and defend Strickland because he’s the son of an upstanding preacher in Arkansas, a valued worker helping keep the Odessa oil fields prosperous, and just a kid who had too much to drink and was just blowing off steam. In turn, Glory’s mother is deported, which convinces Glory and her uncle to leave Odessa; Mary Rose endures a constant stream of prank phone calls to the point that she sleeps with her loaded Winchester; Pastor Rob at the local church openly deals in salacious rumors about Glory; the judge refuses to curb the defense attorney’s leading questions; and the ultimate irony is that Mary Rose spends six hours in jail for contempt of court while Dale is given only probation.

The novel poses no solution but instead points out how misogyny and racism corrupt the American justice system so that rapists are given the benefit of many doubts while their victims may be portrayed as having invited, even encouraged, the attack. Only the generous action of Corrine Shepard prevents Mary Rose, in her anger and desperation, from shooting a man, really any man, to give Glory justice.

Misogyny and the Weakness of Men

The women in the story become involved with men who inevitably deform them, emotionally and psychologically. The men of West Texas are unironically unaware of their own selfishness: They commit more to work than to family; they’re emotionally distant and regard women as objects or possessions; they expect the women they marry to provide a stable and efficient home while they’re permitted leniency, permitted the freedom that is everything outside the boundaries of a house. “What do you call a single mother who has to be up early in the morning? A sophomore” (276) is the joke goes that encapsulates the hard misogyny of West Texas.

It’s what Ginny calls “the upright life” (80) that in the end quietly but completely wears away the integrity of the women who accept that role. The women here are prone to unexpected outbursts of tears; they seek the comfort of loneliness; they find sustenance in alcohol; they struggle to find the satisfaction they’re told to expect in having children and running a house. In the novel’s depictions of various man/woman relationships, none reveals a healthy balance. Women are blessed and damned by their ability to have children. Men make babies, not homes. Mary Rose’s Robert is home only on weekends, and when she most needs his support, he dismisses her crusade to get justice for Glory. Ginny is so enervated by her commitment to the husband who got her pregnant but little else that she takes the car keys one morning and drives away from it all. Corrine, whose husband in a strategy of selfishness and weakness staged his own suicide, feels abandoned and adrift. Karla, impregnated in high school and now a single parent, is told to make pretty with the crude oil field workers in the bar for tips—but then Dale pushes her too far.

Breakthrough male characters who see beyond their own egos and selfish needs help give the novel its optimism. Glory’s uncle takes her in after her mother is deported and ensures that the girl is given back what Texas stole from her: her identity, culture, and family. Jesse Belden, the wounded Vietnam veteran, accepts the help of a 10-year-old girl and reveals the sort of heart that the husbands and boyfriends of other characters never reveal. However, the novel celebrates the women and offers stories of women who triumph over the misogynistic culture through their flight to better places, through bonding with other women, and ultimately from refusing to allow men to destroy their hearts.

The Reward of Empathy

Dramatic events—a brutal assault, multiple near-abortions, shotgun weddings, deportation proceedings, suicides, and a near-murder—define the novel, so the most tender and rewarding moment is easily lost. Nothing dramatic happens: Two strangers share cigarettes and a conversation at a hotel pool miles from Odessa. However, the afternoon that Glory, in exile from the angry racism of Odessa, meets Tina Allen and finds in the stranger a sympathetic heart and (literally) a shoulder to cry defines one of the novel’s central themes: the virtue of empathy. Tina Allen disappears from Glory’s life and from the story when her husband gets a better job and she and her kids leave the hotel the next day. However, that moment in the pool, when the two strangers hold hands firmly and tightly, offers a moment of compassion that becomes the novel’s solution. Although Tina Allen doesn’t fix Glory’s world, she offers a strategy for not just survival but redemption.

Instead of providing an unrealistically happy conclusion, the novel opens the door to the possibility of happiness. Each of the women whose emotional lives men have negatively impacted soars into unexpected affirmation through a gesture as simple as it is demanding: They open their hearts to others.

D.A., in her determination to get Jesse Belden back home, finds her way to a surrogate mother in her neighbor Corrine. Corrine, in her friendship with the quirky new neighbor Mary Rose, finds direction for the emotional life she thought lost when her husband abandoned her—and finds in the feisty D.A. a chance to be a mother again (as her daughter is grown and on her own in Alaska, about as far away as she can be). Corrine can do what she has always longed to do, whether with her husband or in the classroom with decades of stubbornly indifferent students: make sure no one endures more than necessary. D.A., sitting in the bathtub as Corrine lovingly washes the chigger bites from the drive to Penwell, embraces her neighbor as a mother figure. Mary Rose, whose faith in justice is lost and whose husband has proven selfish, finds strength in the moment Corrine saves her from making a tragic mistake: the strength to have what her life of exile in the remote farmhouse has long denied her: friendship. Glory ends the novel, as her uncle drives her resolutely back home in his beat-up El Camino, knowing that her family can give her what West Texas denied her: the dignity of her identity. The novel offers the dynamic of others, the maternal sense of outreach, misfit to misfit, as a solution to a male-dominated world otherwise defined by the ruthless selfishness and unexamined arrogance of men like Potter Shepard, Dale Strickland, Pastor Bob, and Judge Rice.