JOAN

Joan

Joan

Joan as a Heroic Figure

The United States is second only to France in its attachment to the medieval warrior and saint of the Roman Catholic Church, Joan of Arc (1412-1431). Although the presence of the heroine is expected in the Catholic countries of the Americas, her ubiquity in the Protestant United States is another matter. The visionary Joan of Arc, who burned at the stake to defend her direct access to the divine and the wearing of androgynous clothing, has been an exemplary figure throughout U.S. history, despite her monarchist and Catholic origins (Blaetz, 2001).

Joan of Arc first appeared in the United States in 1798 in a play called Female Patriotism, or The Death of Joan of Arc by the Irish-born author John Daly Burk. In suggesting an analogy between the peasant Joan of Arc's victory at Orléans and the battles of the Revolutionary War, this Joan of Arc proclaimed that monarchy is merely a stage in the transition to crowning each person free and equal. By the mid-nineteenth century, the American Joan of Arc was less a warrior than the innocent devised by Jules Michelet in 1841 in his Histoire de France. Through a steadily increasing number of books, culminating in Mark Twain's 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by the Sieur Louis de Conte (Her Page and Secretary), Joan of Arc found herself ever more envisioned as a moral reformer representing groups such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union (Pernoud, 1994).

Joan of Arc's value in U.S. culture reached its apotheosis in the twenty-year period concluding with the end of World War I and her canonization in 1920. She appeared in countless venues, from civic sculpture to popular culture phenomena such as Cecil B. DeMille's 1916 film, Joan the Woman. In this time of rapid modernization and the concomitant rise of consumer culture, images of Joan of Arc were part of a pervasive medievalism in American life, used to recall the ideals of sincerity, integrity, authentic spirituality, and divinely ordained success.

It was the suggestion in 1920 of Sydney Cockerell of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge that stimulated Bernard Shaw to explore the material that developed into the play Saint Joan. The Maid of Orleans had been canonized that year but Shaw's fascination with historical figures goes back to his treatment of the young Napoleon in The Man of Destiny and Julius Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra. In Caesar, Shaw attempts to present an early model of his ideal figure of which Joan is a later version: the person who combines the vision to sense that he or she is part of the ``Life Force'' with the practical ability to turn this vision into reality. The ``Life Force'' is an integral part of Shaw's theory of ``creative evolution,'' which he fully developed in the preface to Man and Superman Shaw proposes that mankind is progressing toward higher and higher forms of intellectual development; it was his response to the ``social Darwinism'' of the period which attempted to justify the appalling ...