Joan of Arc
Ruether, Rosemary Radford
The importance of being Joan JOAN OF ARC THE IMAGE OF FEMALE HEROISM Marina Warner Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95, 349 pp. Rosemary Radford Ruether THE purpose of this study of Joan of Arc by Marina...
...At those points where traditional models of the heroic female fail, we touch something of the solid being of Joan herself...
...So the evidence of the Inquisition was reviewed and its conclusions reversed...
...They sought to entrap her into describing her voices in terrestrial terms, thus showing them to be enchantments of the Devil, for the divine only appeared in spiritual form...
...The nineteenth century added other images reflecting their concerns...
...Rather she is presenting a series of cultural images by which European society has sought to interpret what it regards as an anomalous phenomenon outside the normal range of its imagination, the female hero...
...In the process we do get striking glimpses of the historical Joan...
...in the field, shining white armour...
...Little remains of a real person to set against the models of Mariological femininity, which Warner sees as generally oppressive to women...
...Her personality is disclosed in brilliant fragments seen through the gaps between the stereotypic pictures by which she has been portrayed...
...Her canonization is a tool to possess her for the camp of the Ancient Regime against the modern world of secularization and democracy...
...The first leads us through a succession of patterns by which Joan has been defined by her friends, her enemies and herself in her own day...
...Joan dressed, not only as a male, but as a knight...
...For Republicans she is the spirit of the People against their oppressors...
...The first biographies of Joan come from seventeenth century French petty nobility who claim descent from Joan...
...At court she wore cloth of gold, silk and fur...
...When rubbed, the ancient rust fell away to reveal five crosses and the words, "Jesus" and "Maria" on the blade...
...Catherine...
...It could not be said that the king had been crowned through the agency of a proven witch...
...the patron of the fascist Ligue de la Patrie or of the liberal Ligue des Droits de I'Homme...
...Her name, Dare, is changed to d'Arc, to suggest the bow of the huntress Diana...
...Being unac-1 quainted with the literary rubrics of prophecy, Joan allowed her prophecies to be all too specific...
...Warner is not attempting a reconstruction of the life of Joan herself...
...An ideological battle over the ownership of Joan's memory is begun...
...Her virginity was declared intact...
...Male dress was not intended to conceal her femaleness, but rather to annul its social limitations...
...It was on this point that her detractors particularly concentrated, recognizing that if they could despoil her virginity, prove her a sexual tramp, they would break her power and descredit her salvific efficacy as agent of God for the salvation of France from the Anglo-Burgundian nobility...
...Each image was double-edged...
...Joan was equally stubborn on this point...
...Her role-change broke two social barriers, a female acting as male, a peasant acting a noble...
...The eighteenth century classicists clothe Joan in the trappings of Greek mythology...
...Viewed another way it proved her a heretic, a witch, a damnable limb of Satan...
...In the second section she sketches ways by which European society pictures Joan, in changing cultural and historical contexts, up to the twentieth century...
...Warner has written a well crafted, delightful book...
...These traditions of female prophecy both explain the remarkable alacrity by which she was accepted by the king and the readiness to abandon her when she failed...
...Rosemary Radford Ruether THE purpose of this study of Joan of Arc by Marina Warner is well described in the subtitle, "The Image of Female Heroism...
...To undo her, her tormentors must reverse the symbolic significance of all these claims...
...The afterlife of the Joan image added variations, as well as new motifs, to these themes...
...Claimed by both sides, she finally comes to unite both sides, uniting Left and Right in a common love of Country...
...Her tardy vindication by a court of the French king, twenty years after her death, was inspired by a need to defend the king's own legitimacy...
...Joan becomes the Child of Nature...
...Prophecy was a career "open to talent" for medieval women...
...We experience her as a real person who never quite fits the frames by which society has tried to enclose her...
...A society which normally granted women little authority would turn to respectful obedience if one was thought to speak as inspired vehicle of .' God...
...The historical Mary has been smothered by stereotypic images...
...With Joan, Warner has a subject who breaks the molds of the patriarchally-defined feminine...
...Her family, ennobled through her brief career, and the city of Orleans, delivered through her in 1429, continued to commemorate her memory to celebrate themselves...
...Here they must ignore a long Christian tradition of transvestism by female saints who showed thereby their transcendence of female 'sensuality.' Even Joan's own patron, St...
...her voices authentic...
...Warner divides her book into two sections...
...Another Christian model open to Joan was that of prophetess...
...The philosophical tradition of the female as personified Virtue also provided suitable models for an idealized Joan...
...As virgin, she could stand as savior to a France rent by warring factions...
...The self-interest of the parties who appropriated Joan's memory is revealed in the images they chose to portray her...
...The conflict continues in the twentieth century...
...This allows her to warm to her task in a different way from her earlier book on the Virgin Mary (Alone of all her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary...
...Viewed one way, it proved her a saint...
...In the very limits of these models we glimpse the more compelling reality of Joan herself as exemplar of female possibility...
...She becomes the Amazon...
...Joan was, above all, an intact virgin, the witness both to the purity of her morals and the integrity of her motives...
...Catherine of Antioch, was reputed to have concealed her femaleness by dressing as a monk...
...She predicted success in battle through her divinely guided agency...
...To read it is an excursion into the many avenues by which Chris-, tian society has sought to deal with the exception to its own rules, the heroic woman, the woman as agent of divine power...
...Other late medieval prophetesses, I however, kept their predictions suitably J vague and apocalyptic and thus adaptable ! to changing circumstances...
...Warner obviously likes this historical Joan...
...They wish to ennoble her life in order to prove their own nobility...
...Male dress must be shown to be a heretical defiance of God's ordained subordination of women...
...Joan's inquisitors concentrated on proving her a harlot, a heretic and a witch, thus reversing all these claims...
...For the clergy and nobility she is the defender of monarchy and religion...
...f The key both to Joan's own self-image and to that of her defenders was La Pucelle, the Maid...
...Her peasant origins can be rediscovered to make her the type of the intuitive wisdom of the French Folk...
...Like Arthur, Joan had a magic sword, plucked from behind the altar at the shrine of St...
...Another offense for them was her adoption of male dress...
...Is she saint or patriot...
...Her sense of style was dramatic...
...In the world wars she is France herself incinerated by enemy fire, transformed into the pure flame of resistance...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 11
