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

1. Joan of Arc in America, 1911–1920

1 Joan of Arc in America, 1911–1920 In the earliest years of the twentieth century, the widespread tendency to find advantage by associating one’s agenda with Joan of Arc coincided with both the First World War and the birth of the mass-produced image. The years before and during the First World War were marked by the rise of consumerism, in which religious and other traditional iconography was appropriated by advertising. This disorienting transformation, in which cultural authority seemed to dissipate with each ephemeral image, was facilitated by the technical refinement of photography and various printing methods during the late nineteenth century. Not coincidentally, the advent of this mechanically generated visual culture coincided with the defining event of this era, the Great War of 1914–18. As in the culture at large, this first modern world war was marked by the large-scale dominance of technology . However, the war was celebrated in art and in life as if it were a glorious endeavor in the chivalric mode, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This contradiction between the presence of technology and the refusal to acknowledge it underlies the medievalist antimodernism that characterizes the early part of the century, which helps to explain the presence of Joan of Arc in the United States. In the context of World War I, references to the Middle Ages facilitated a slippage between the contemporaneous negative situation and a highly desirable and idealized sense of national identity. This period was particularly hospitable to medievalism because it suffered the widespread breakdown of traditional political and social powers at the hands of new and unfamiliar enemies.1 These enemies were not just the conventional opponents of war 13 but also the lack of domestic consensus about the war, as well as disagreement over immigration and gender roles. The myriad conflicts and the signs of unwelcome change were assuaged to a degree by a return to medieval geocentricism . While a revival of the Middle Ages provided general reassurance that the immutable laws of civilization would hold, Joan of Arc’s presence was of particular use in debates over the proper place for women. Joan may well have come to mind with the appearance of the flapper, who echoed the heroine’s androgynous appearance and rebellious behavior. At the same time, although Joan stands for transition in gender roles and the violence inherent in innovation, her fate offers a reactionary symbol of the ultimate stability of gender difference. The pure spectacle of Joan of Arc as a warrior appealed to the filmmakers and advertisers of the era as a pretext for extravagance. Yet any use of a military personage or situation during wartime is also an attempt to link the current conflagration with a mythic war tradition. In the American context, which lacked the richly allusive war literature of Europe, Joan of Arc’s frequent presence provided the sense of romance that made the war seem to be part of a meaningful continuum of experience. The return to a specifically medieval tradition was particularly opportune. In the Middle Ages, writing about the military was a genre in itself, which was characterized by extraordinary detail involving equipment, clothing, rations, and strategy. As these details have been generally absorbed, they not only are firmly tied to ideological values such as organization, discipline, responsibility, and expertise but provide a powerful sense that past glories can be reproduced by exacting attention to these very particulars.2 In addition, the medieval Joan of Arc carried a hard-won Christian justification along with the concept that war is a virile, character-building enterprise, in which self-sacrifice is the highest goal available to females. The woman warrior Joan of Arc was also implicated in the era’s crisis in representation, in which the female body was increasingly idealized in consumer culture in types such as the American Girl and the Protecting Angel. The disequilibrium in social roles and religious life was often imagined to be the result of a gender problem that might be controlled on the level of the sign. In this regard, study of images of Joan in film and in other areas of popular culture helps to elucidate the social expectations of women during 14 Visions of the Maid the war. Joan of Arc serves as a particularly useful lens through which to see the often submerged story of female experience...