A kiss and tell story

Power peck to tongue in cheek, Harriet Swain examines the history of the kiss.

In one of the final moments of the Italian film classic Cinema Paradiso, the hero watches, spliced together, his childhood collection of film clips - all kisses once censored out of pictures by the local priest.

The scene with its succession of clinches, some passionate, some brief, some absurd, some gentle, some erotic, others affectionate, brings home not only the infinite variety of kissing but also how its meaning has changed over the years.

A conference next week aims to do something similar, examining the kiss in history from ancient Greece to the 1960s and from adultery to the kiss of life.

What becomes clear is that the way many people take kissing for granted today, whether as a form of greeting or of erotic intimacy, is relatively new. At different periods in history kissing has been loaded with meanings of power play between classes or genders, of approval or disapproval and even of national identity. A kiss has rarely been just a kiss.

Karen Harvey, a research associate in the history department at the University of Manchester, initiated the conference after realising that in three years of studying 18th-century erotica, she had come across hardly any kissing. She started talking to other historians and found that where it did surface it was rarely in the modern erotic context. "People think the kiss has been static over history," says Richard Hawley, a lecturer in classics at Royal Holloway, London. "But even in the classical period it changes dramatically."

In the Greek world, kisses were not necessarily bestowed on wives or girlfriends, he says. Indeed, when Pericles kissed goodbye to his wife Aspasia in 5th century BC Athens it was seen as slightly unmanly.

Alexander the Great's efforts to encourage his subjects to show their respect by kissing him was also seen as suspiciously foreign.

Instead, texts tend to mention embraces either in relation to prostitutes, who were expected to provide "kisses" in the sense of oral sex to clients, or in relation to friendships between elite-class men. In that context, kissing was considered a sophisticated sign of affection, sometimes with erotic overtones, used between men friends at symposia, where they met to discuss art and ideas.

In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it became more associated with heterosexual erotic relationships, particularly in love poetry, although it remained part of complex power structures. Men were always the kissers, women the receivers. Similarly, under the Roman emperors, kissing the emperor's robe conferred a particular status on a subject. Again, a symbol of power.

Fast forward to the 17th century and you find kissing is still related to power but in quite a different way. While the medieval practice of greeting a feudal lord by kissing him on the hand was dying out, it was still important to observe social hierarchies. Embraces were used by people of all social classes, but kissing someone on the cheek implied that you were their social equal and had to be used with care.

"People at that time were concerned about the proper degrees of familiarity they should show each other in all kinds of social settings," says David Turner, a lecturer in history at the University of Glamorgan. Not only were there debates about ways of greeting strangers, particularly mature women, but also about how brothers and sisters and husbands and wives should behave towards each other.

Dr Turner says one guide, aimed at young women in the early 1700s, carried advice about how to spot a chaste and unchaste kiss. The clue that something was amiss was if a man tried to insert his tongue into her mouth.

It was a period when new codes of politeness were being born, particularly focusing on how to conduct oneself in relation to the opposite sex, at the same time as an explosion in printed material that explored different kinds of intimacy.

Surprisingly, it was also a period when the British were considered particularly free with their affections, according to Turner. Contemporary commentators from Northern Europe and the Mediterranean seemed shocked by the way Brits greeted each other with kisses, until more modern British inhibitions began to develop towards the end of the 17th century.

At periods in the past, therefore, the kiss was primarily a way of establishing identity, with different kisses for different age groups and special types of kisses for children and people of different genders or classes.

But while it has been used to express power, the kiss remains one of the chief ways of expressing intimacy.

Santanu Das, a postgraduate student at Cambridge writing a thesis on the Sensation of Touch in the Great War, has found documents in the Imperial War Museum referring to soldiers bestowing kisses on their comrades as they lay dying in the trenches. This was an expression less of eroticism, he says, than of human vulnerability. Soldiers had no wives or girlfriends or mothers to comfort them in their final moments and looked to other men for a gesture of humanity.

The dying first-world-war kiss was something picked up by writers of the period, particularly as kissing had begun to interest psychologists such as Sigmund Freud. It appears in novels such as Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and in poems by Robert Browning to show intense "homosocial" rather than homoerotic states, emphasising close bonds between men in wartime.

But the intimate connotations of the kiss have sometimes had less positive effects.

Luke Davidson, a postgraduate student at the University of York studying the history of resuscitation, has found that concern about kissing strangers partly explains why the kiss of life dropped out of use for more than 150 years. While medics in late 18th-century Britain knew about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, it had fallen out of favour by the 1790s and did not come back in again until the 1960s.

Davidson says it may have been used by midwives to resuscitate children before, but was neglected by medics because they did not have the theory that proved it would work. "It is interesting that something that seems so self-evidently right to us today should have such a troubled history," he says.

The same could be said for kissing in general.

"The Kiss in History"conference will be held at the Institute of Historical Research, London, July 1 2000.