Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture

Introduction

Introduction The crux of the story of Joan of Arc is embodied in her allegiance to her visions of Saints Catherine, Margaret, and Michael. Joan claimed that she visualized and communicated with her saints for five years before she persuaded the dauphin of France to give her control over his army in 1429. While Joan called the presence of the saints her “voices,” the Roman Catholic Church considered her claim of direct access to the divine to be heresy. Although Joan recovered Orléans and defeated the English, ending the Hundred Years’ War and creating France as a nation, she allowed herself to be burned at the stake rather than deny these visions. It is not surprising, then, that Joan of Arc appears to the twentieth century to be a figment of historical legend who is closer to an Amazonian Arthur than to Napoleon. Yet records show that a peasant girl named Jehanne Romée, daughter of Jacques D’Arc and his wife, Isabelle Romée, was born in wartorn France in 1412 and died before she could turn twenty. In the late Middle Ages, when she lived, the boundaries between heaven and earth and between the spirit and the body were blurred, and her visions of the saints, beginning at age thirteen, were accepted as real. Her success in ending the year-long siege of Orléans in eight days, however, and in having the dauphin (a title used for the eldest son of a king of France) crowned Charles VII in the English-controlled city of Rheims did not fit into any common expectations of female peasant behavior. Consequently, by the end of May 1431, the figure known as Joan of Arc had been condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic and sorceress and burned at the stake by the civil authorities in Burgundy. 1 If nothing else is known about Joan of Arc, most people are aware that she went up in flames. In one of history’s most notable backfires, the attempt to obliterate the young woman who had defeated and shamed the English army had the opposite effect. Burning Joan of Arc and any potential relics and throwing her apparently indestructible heart into the Seine River were done in vain. In their attempt to erase this anomalous female, Joan’s executioners inadvertently determined that her corporeal presence would continue to fascinate storytellers and image makers for generations to come. Who Is Joan of Arc? Although the pertinent incidents of her life were extensively recorded by the scribes at her trial,1 Joan of Arc has come to be known largely through a series of familiar archetypal motifs that often have little correspondence to any historical record. She is the Amazon warrior of classical lore whose sexual ambiguity and disdain for conventional female roles are balanced by her death. She is the epitome of female virtue and the abstract personification of faith and courage, the contradictions and mysteries of her life sublimated by a celebration of virginity and martyrdom. Since the mid–nineteenth century , the shepherdess Joan of Arc has come to embody the purity of the natural world, in which naiveté and poverty provide access to divine forces. In sum, she is an amalgam of religious, political, and folk myths, each reflecting its own time and adding to the ever-changing persona.2 The events of Joan’s life, which are known through trial records, letters, and eyewitness accounts, have been memorialized through five centuries into a legend. Fredric Jameson has described the form through which a story of this sort is known as a “strategy of containment.”3 This frame organizes the events in a manner acceptable to a given culture and at the same time represses insights that might come from examining the evidence in chronicle form. Although there are variations in the telling of this narrative, representations of Joan of Arc’s life tend to cohere into the outlines of the romance plot. The romance, or quest narrative, envisions heroic action in terms of innocence regained through sacrifice. The hero’s progression from an extraordinary birth to an initiation into experience through a quest, followed by a reversal, reintegration, and epiphany, remains on the human side 2 Visions of the Maid of myth to function as a model for behavior.4 The historic Joan of Arc serves the cultures in which she appears to the degree...