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oan of Arc has functioned as an important political symbol for all manner of factions and causes within and outside France, although her most frequent appropriation in modern times has been by the right in France,most recently JeanMarie le Pen’s national Front Party (1990s).1 but when the so-called “Merlin’s Prophecy” cited by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, and then marshaled by Joan as she was garnering support for her mission, declared “ex nemore canuto puella eliminabitur ut medelae curam adhibeat”(“from out of the oak forest would come a maiden to give care to healing”), it portended a future for what we might call the “people’s Pucelle”as well as for the already well-documented royalimperial political-symbolic structures.Her simple,pure qualities—she actually did frequent the neighboring oak forest around domremy—would overshadow even the dauphin’s ennoblement of her family, particularly in the romantic nineteenth century,as praised by Jules Michelet in his highly influential Republican (centrist), anticlerical history of her (1841).2 Returning to Joan’s era, we might possibly interpret Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (Song of Joan of Arc) (1429)—the first nonanonymous work honoring Joan in French during the heroine’s lifetime—as the poet’s sole populist piece, which accordingly differs from her other writings in its simple, spontaneous style and unabashedly patriotic tone. That it survives in only two complete manuscripts, neither elaborately produced, also suggests a work aimed more at the masses than at her usual royal patrons. The occasion may have been a celebration of Charles vII’s coronation as rightful king and his victory over the english, for which Christine penned her poem to reassure the populace, including the menu peuple,3 that Joan was divinely—not diabolically, as the pro-english propagandists argued to explain their humiliation at orléans—inspired.4 The poet The Drama of Left-Wing Joan: From “Merlin’s Prophecy” to Hellman’s Lark Nadia Margolis J 142 thereby also contributes toward establishing three key facets of Joan’s persona that would inform her future incarnations throughout world literature: her heroism, her piety, and her link to the supernatural.5 Among several manifestations since the French Revolution, during which various political wings defined themselves according to their placement around the hémicycle of the national Assembly, her left-wing presence occurs most strikingly during the early mid-twentieth century, not long after her canonization in 1920: a time when right-wing totalitarianism in the form of the nazis and their allies threatened to dominate europe and thus also soon affected the united States after the ill-wrought treaty of versailles ended World War I.This era (1920s–50s) also interests us because it involves three very distinct major authors of different nationalities: the German playwright bertolt brecht, the French dramatist Jean Anouilh, and the American woman of letters lillian Hellman.6 v bertolt brecht (1898–1956), throughout his career, ended up writing—or, more accurately, cowriting or adapting—three plays on Joan: with emil burri and elisabeth Hauptmann, Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (Saint Joan of the Stockyards) (1928–29); with lion Feuchtwanger, Die Gesichte der Simone Machard (The visions of Simone Machard); and adapting, with benno besson, Anna Seghers’s radio play Der Prozess der Jeanne d’Arc zu Rouen 1431 (The trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen 1431) for the stage in 1952.7 The first proved to be the most important,since,by itself,coming right after his sensational Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny opera), it displays brecht’s most characteristic and significant ideas on several levels: the Marxist-philosophical, the sociohistorical, and the theoretical .As one of his deliberately Marxist-didactic plays or Lehrstücke,it renders Joan’s story not so much a model to be emulated as an entire, disturbing moral fable of what happens to a virtuous, sincere, but naively idealistic, nonviolent individual locked within a brutal class struggle; it depicts his view of a depression-era united States ruled by bankers (the same who preyed upon impoverished post– World War I Germany), as portrayed by the muckrakers such as upton Sinclair. Theoretically, the play puts into practice brecht’s pioneering notion of “epic theater ”: alternatingly detaching and engaging the spectators from the action on stage so as to incite them finally to social action via knowledge accumulated as the play progresses, rather than through conventional “bourgeois” emotional involvement with the characters and plot suspense...

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