Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman

Many have accused Bernard Shaw of sharing the sentiments of Henry Higgins (as expressed in lines written by Alan Jay Lerner): "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" This repeated refrain in the musical version of Pygmalion does indeed seem to fit Shaw's mind; several critics have noted that Shaw, a crusader for women's rights, wanted to enable women to become more like men. This article will explore the problematic picture of the masculine "New Woman" by tracing Shaw's recuperation of a woman who was burned for trying to "be more like a man." Saint Joan, vilified by her contemporaries and in Shakespeare's representation of her, is presented to Shaw's audience as a paragon of rational thought. Yet it would be simplistic to argue that Shaw was praising the maid merely for her masculine qualities. Rather, we shall see that Shaw's high estimation of Joan is due to his view that she shares many qualities with him. Perhaps Lerner hit upon the right line when he had Higgins end his song with the question: "Why can't a woman be like me?"

Bernard Shaw apparently had William Shakespeare quite often on his mind. Not only does he praise Shakespeare—"He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more . . . people he has created become more real to us than our actual life" (quoted in Smith 127)—but he also expresses jealousy, or what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer . . . whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his" (quoted in Mason 47). Shaw has written several plays based on the events previously dramatized by Shakespeare. Are we to understand Shaw's "rewrites" of Shakespeare's plays as a modern man's attempts at improving the Bard's work, or as the highest compliment? After all, Shaw maintained: "the stage is still dominated by Garrick's conviction that the manager and actor must adapt Shakespear's plays to the modern stage by a process which no doubt presents itself to the adapter's mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author" ("Mainly About Myself" 20).

Shaw obviously felt that his adaptations were not debasements or mutilations. His treatment of Joan of Arc was perhaps even more justified in his mind, as he did not consider Shakespeare's Joan to be entirely authentic. Shaw believed that Shakespeare, "having begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and a harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play could not be produced" (quoted in Hardin 25). While Shaw made excuses for Shakespeare's negative treatment of Joan, it is doubtful, however, that he fully considered his own reasons for rewriting her myth. That is not to say that Shaw was not prolific in his explanations or justifications—his Preface to Saint Joan is almost half as long as the text of the play. Among his other proclaimed goals, Shaw is eager to show us Joan as the embodiment of modern ideals: "she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs . . . one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare" ("Preface" 7).¹ As she is a woman, she also becomes one of Shaw's "unwomanly women." Shaw's modernization of Joan is indicative of his desire to change the Victorian sex-gender system, which denigrated women to a lesser status because of their sex.² Joan's historical contemporaries labeled her a witch, in part because she chose to break free of the sex-gender system of her time.^3...