Joan of Arc (17 page)

We know from this case that Joan fought against relinquishing her virginity by invoking the law. And we know that her explanation for adopting the clothes of men—one of the aspects of her behavior that was most challenging to her accusers because it broke the unwritten law of sexual custom—was that it safeguarded her in a life lived among men. What it safeguarded was her virginity. It prevented her from being an object of male desire. Her companions in battle prided themselves on not feeling desire for her— all the time asserting their virility in other circumstances, suggesting that their lack of desire for her was a proof of the sacred character of their knightly manhood and of her specifically female magic.

Not for the first time, her short-circuiting the normal sexual path was seen as positive, a source of power.

A puzzling factor in the treatment of Joan by her enemies after she was taken prisoner is their collusion in the agreement that her virginity was, if not sacred, at least something deserving of honor. Considering the cruelty of their treatment of her—she was fettered, deprived of light, air, and movement, deprived of the sacraments, verbally insultedand taunted, shown the instruments of physical torture, perhaps even poisoned—it is remarkable that her guards, all male, all her sworn enemies, should have refrained from raping her. In the last, worst phase of her imprisonment, she complained that she was threatened with rape, but the threat was not carried out.

The situation of Joan's imprisonment included many elements of torture; it is surprising, therefore, that her enemies refrained from using one of the oldest methods of torture practiced on women prisoners. It would have been easy for one of her guards to have raped her and denied it. Her virginity, her magic, would have been shattered, and it would have been her word against that of her accusers. In the climate of disbelief that was growing up around her when things started going badly for her in the last days of her trial, when the sense of her power was radically diminished, why would her protestations of rape have been taken seriously? People were already doubting the authenticity of her voices, suggesting that they might be either demonic or invented. Why would it be any more difficult to cast doubt on the veracity of her reports of violation? Many women have been disbelieved when they have told their accounts of rape. It is in the interest of a male-dominated sensibility to suggest that rape is a female fantasy. What was it about Joan that kept her enemies from using what would have been their last, best weapon against her?

Joan's virginity was constantly subject to tests, to which Joan willingly submitted. (Her willingness to submit to these tests was later counted against her by the devil's advocatewho argued against her canonization.) But the tests seem almost pro forma, as if the outcome were already known and the procedure only a formal covering of bases. As Marina Warner has noted, the tests were far from scientific. Joan was examined most frequently by nonprofessionals, well-born women whose names, rather than their skill or experience, were what qualified them to make judgments. What were these women looking for, how did they look, and how did they know what they had found? One of the women who attests to her virginity makes her assertion after having seen Joan entering the bath. This same woman says that Joan's extensive horseback riding had resulted in her behind being completely covered in calluses. If what constitutes a definitive proof of virginity is an intact hymen, wouldn't the same extensive horseback riding that had covered her in calluses have broken her hymen?

How is it possible to explain the force of the idea of Joan's virginity? What was it that allowed the very men who calmly discussed whether or not to use the instruments of torture that would break her bones and pull her limbs from their sockets to be on Joan's side when it came to the protection of the thing about her that was more important to her than her life? What made them say: “This far and no further?” Why were they free to shackle her body, to burn it, and yet compelled to preserve a bodily distinction that was, after all, invisible to them? Was the sacredness of her virginity so immediately comprehensible to them that it overrode their hatred? This is a psychological anomaly, anothersign of the singularity Joan was able to claim for herself and that most of the women in the history of the world have not been granted. What was it about her that made men want to destroy her body but keep her image— based crucially on a bodily state—intact? How do we explain Joan's power to create a narrative whose subject is her body, a narrative so compelling that her enemies fell under its sway? Could it be that Joan's enemies feared her even more than they hated her and that the seat of their fear was Joan's virgin body? If so, they would have been fetishistically afraid to violate the site of their fear, whereas acting out their hatred on parts of her body other than the fetish site—her limbs, for example—might have served as something of a relief. And burning the virgin body would have immolated the threat: Having been devoured entirely, the body could not rise up and devour them.

It is not possible to speak about Joan of Arc without keeping in mind that every act of hers was performed by a female body, a virginal one. Because most people in the history of the world have believed that important public acts are performed by a male body, one that is sexually experienced with partners whose identity and number are irrelevant, no investigation into a male hero's sexual behavior—unless he were suspected of homosexuality and therefore of having some of the qualities of a woman—would be required. Nor would its marking be important in our understanding of a male hero. Minus a hymen, what might such a mark be?

Everything Joan did was colored by the accident of her femaleness, like a foreign accent that inflects every syllable and determines the interpretation of every word. We would respond to a man with Joan's career in a way so different from the way in which we respond to her that it would be unrecognizable.

Joan's femaleness was the most important thing we understand about her body and its meaning to us, but what did Joan's body mean to her? In which ways was it a source of pleasure and pride to her? In which ways a cause of anxiety and mortification?

We know about the importance of her virginity to her. We know, as well, that she didn't care much about food. Those around her were impressed by her abstemiousness at table. Even after the most strenuous battles, she was known to eat only a few pieces of bread dipped in wine. Like her chastity, her lack of appetite for food was seen as an indication of her worthiness or fineness or superiority. It would have been unbearable that a woman of appetite either be given authority by men or be allowed to live among them. The lightness of Joan's physical desires was the quality that allowed her, for a time, not to overbalance the fragile craft made up of men's phobias about woman and their idealization of her.

Although Joan didn't care much about food, she was drawn to luxurious and elaborate clothing. To be sure, it was the elaborate clothing of a man, more particularly a knight. Her judges accused her of dressing “like a young fop,” thereby crossing not only gender but class lines. One of the ironies of her capture is that she was pulled off her horse by her fancy cloth-of-gold jacket. Had she been dressed more simply, she would have been harder to unseat.

We know that Joan had beautiful breasts because several men—her squire and her closest companion-at-arms— mentioned them. But of all her boasting of qualities and accomplishments, she never mentioned the beauty of her form as something of which she was proud. When a tailor tried to touch her breasts during a fitting, she laid him flat on his back.

We have information about Joan's breasts, and this reminds us of the centrality of the sexual female body to everything having to do with her life. It is unlikely that we would know the details of any of the sexual characteristics of a male hero. We don't know, for instance, the size of Napoleon's penis, although in its mummified state it was auctioned at a great price and is now in the possession of a New York physician, a collector of curiosities. Joan's breasts, however, were thought a proper topic for discussion even at her rehabilitation trial. Or only at her rehabilitation trial, as though they were somehow important in creating a good image of her. At the trial that resulted in her death, where everything introduced was meant to make her look bad, her breasts were not mentioned.

Joan took pleasure in her body not as an eating body or a body that aroused or experienced sexual desires but as a body that wore clothes and used them for display, as a body that rode horses and was admired on horseback, as an active body that led men and wielded a sword. The traditional capacities of the female body never, it seems, were of much interest to her. She was never a man's lover and never bore a child. We have reports that she was kind to children and that they were drawn to her, but no mention on her part of any longing for maternity.

It was customary for single women to sleep beside other women for safety, and Joan's page reports that she much preferred sleeping beside young rather than old women. But whether this has sexual implications or simply indicates a wish to be with someone close to her own age is a matter of speculation.

We also have testimony from her page concerning Joan and one of the other common properties of the female body. Joan did not menstruate. Her page would have known this, because he was in charge of the care of her clothing.

Amenorrhea is a well-known phenomenon among women athletes; it also accompanies anorexia—and Joan's reluctance to eat more than the minimum needed for survival suggests that she might not have been taking in the proper number of calories to encourage menstruation. The combination of extreme physical activity, extreme stress, and a minimum of food easily explains Joan's not menstruating. But once again she is placed, or she places herself, apart from the common lot of women.

When Joan has been depicted visually, most frequently she is slender and blond. But contemporary reports tell us that she was dark, stocky, and short in stature, so short in fact that she had to be provided with a block in order to easily mount her horse. Except, that is, when she was performing the cowboy trick of landing on her horse's back from a running jump.

Whatever the reality of contemporary witnesses, however, the dominant northern aesthetic since the Renaissance requires slimness and fineness, and in its iconic demands on Joan the culture has insisted that she take on the properties of its most common dreams.

The sexual allure of boyishness attaches not to strength but to lightness. But Joan was not an English public school boy; she was a tough peasant girl. Her skeleton was not long and thin in structure. Perhaps Bastien-Lepage's muscular dreamer gives something of the quality of Joan's peasant physicality, but I'm not sure. His Joan is a rustic beauty. People who spoke of Joan's physical appearance stressed health and strength and vigor. And lovely breasts. But no one speaks of her as having a lovely face except for those who see her from a distance of centuries, a figure not of history but of longing. For them she is the girl/boy saint, untouched, immaculate, a creature not of earth but air. In fact, her body mirrors both her language and her actions. Joan was down-to-earth. In her career as a soldier and a servant of the king, this would be her undoing. In her posthumous career as a saint, she was stripped of gravitas in order that she might be well and easily beloved.

After her body was exposed and examined by passersby, it was returned to the fire, where it was burned to ashes. These were thrown into the Seine to prevent the cultivation of relics. It is said, however, that no matter how long it was left in the flame, her heart could not be consumed. Of the fate of Joan's unconsumable heart, we have no word.

CHAPTER VII

FOOD FOR THE FEAST

SHE HAS BEEN RE-CREATED by more writers who can readily be called great than any other figure: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Schiller, De Quincey, Twain, Brecht, Shaw. This list excludes the merely good, among whom I would place Anatole France. Many mediocre films have been made about her and one great one. Even Jesus has not fared as well; perhaps only Napoleon has come close.

The writers who have made something of Joan have provided a feast that we in the West have continuously consumed. They have taken what they needed of her, a clutch of chefs searching out markets for the tenderest ingredients to create succulent meals that will show off their talents and their tastes, rejecting or ignoring what will not serve either. These meals are in no way to be mourned. Indeed, the variety of the dishes simply marks the richness of what Joan suggests, the variousness of our needs for her or for some pure girl who entered the larger world and gave her life for it.

That masterpieces have been created with Joan as their subject is undeniable; that none of them has presented her in her radical contradictions is undeniable as well. But artists' choices are based on what suits their gifts and their convictions about what is important in the world. The writers who have made Joan their subject have needed her for their own reasons, just like French nationalists or devout Catholics or girls wanting to leave home. In the end, however, it doesn't matter how much of the historical Joan gets into the play, the poem, the film. It succeeds or fails on the basis of whether or not its language creates vivid images. The terms are the same whether we are talking about Joan of Arc or Madame Bovary.

The two greatest works having to do with Joan both center importantly on Joan's trial. Yet if Dreyer's Joan and Shaw's Joan were to meet leaving the courtroom, they wouldn't recognize each other. It is as if each man had agreed to ignore the part of Joan that the other had so beautifully treated.

The Passion of Joan of Arc,
which was made in 1928 by the Danish director Carl Dreyer, is, in the words of one critic, the greatest film about suffering ever made. Indeed, its title necessarily calls to mind the Passion of Christ. Dreyer said of it, “I wanted to interpret a hymn to the triumph of the soul over life.”
¹
The film's technique is dependent on close-ups. Dreyer's Joan, played by the Italian actress Maria Falconetti, is not only a tragic figure; she is a pathetic one, pathetic in the deepest sense, a sense that has nothing in it of condescension. The obsessive attentiveness of Dreyer's camera allows no distance between the viewer and Falconetti: Our hearts must break along with hers because she is young, and pure, and ardent, and she will be overmastered by the dried-up and vicious old men who are her judges. She weeps tears that might well be tears of blood, like Jesus in the Garden. Her death is not only a triumph; it is—for her and for us—a welcome relief.