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Book Review
Author takes another look at St. Joan of Arc
Reviewed by Andrew Junker, ajunker@catholicsun.org
August 7, 2008
St. Joan of Arc has been written about, dramatized, painted and sculpted so many times that she has to be one of the most easily recognizable saints.
Ask someone to describe Joan of Arc and she’ll inevitably list descriptors like: short hair, suit of armor, sword, sitting on a horse. Ask her about Joan’s life, her reason for dying, her reason for becoming a saint, and you’ll likely be met with silence.
At least, I was rather shaky on her story myself, beyond a notion that the British didn’t like her much and had her killed as a heretic.
Thankfully, Mary Gordon’s “Joan of Arc: A Life,” was recently published in paperback form, which was a good enough reason to acquaint myself with this strange and surprising saint.
Gordon does a good job of presenting Joan to an unfamiliar audience. In quick succession, we learn that Joan was most likely born on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1412, to Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle. Her mother often undertook long pilgrimages.
She had two brothers and a sister. Joan probably drove the cattle or watched over the sheep her father owned. At her trial, Joan said her mother taught her prayers. Her family seemed unexceptional, as Gordon admits.
“We would do well not to linger over Joan’s family for explanations of anything,” she writes. “Like any genius, Joan resists attempts to trace the nature of her history in clues from antecedents. She is an impossibility, a puzzlement …”
Joan came of age during the long fight between the British and the French called the Hundred Years’ War. Gordon describes this debilitating conflict as a series of “small brushfires that are never put out but smolder continually.”
Into this dynastic war explodes Joan, who began hearing the voices of St. Michael the Archangel, St. Catherine and St. Margaret in 1425, when she was 13 years old. By May of 1428, Joan heard the voices calling her to crown the dauphin (or crown prince) as king.
Gordon has a wonderful chapter describing this man, Charles VII, the “wobbling dauphin,” whose inconsistencies and weaknesses are thrown into sharp relief by the resolute and strong Joan.
At any rate, and to the surprise of everyone except Joan, the young maid crowns her king and leads his army in a series of successful battles. She did all this as a 17-year-old illiterate peasant with no military training, and had only recently learned to ride a horse.
Still, even at the height of her success, death by immolation was only two years away, and a reversal of her battle fortunes was even closer.
“Of the poignancies surrounding Joan, the brevity of everything concerning her is perhaps the greatest,” Gordon writes. “There is the brevity of her life as a whole: 19 years. But it is astonishing to contemplate the fact that her success lasted, by the most generous interpretation, nine months … or, alternatively, less than five…”
Captured by the British and their French sympathizers, Joan was subjected to a long ecclesiastical trial convicting her of heresy. They burned her at the stake. A few years after her death, a new trial was held, overturning her excommunication and guilty verdict. Then, centuries later, she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.
This brief, totally inadequate distillation of her life serves to highlight the problem of St. Joan of Arc: How are we supposed to understand her?
Instead of engaging the real Joan, Gordon argues, most try to co-opt her for one cause or the other. This happens especially in her dramatic representations. One playwright makes her a Marxist hero; another paints her as a French devil (the writer was British); still others portray her as a spunky feminist.
Gordon cites two recent film adaptations of St. Joan’s life.
“The young woman who played her told an interviewer that she liked playing Joan ‘because she was such a good person and I felt playing her made me a better person,’” Gordon writes. “The Ukrainian star of another recent Joan film, who posed for Vanity Fair wearing a gingham bikini, said in that interview: ‘Joan was really a mover and a shaker. She was a real Tasmanian devil.’”
Gordon, to her credit, tries to find Joan as she really was. Her deft style and reliance on transcripts from the saint’s trials help her in this regard. It’s clear she also has a real love for her subject.
But while Gordon criticizes other writers for using Joan to promote their own agendas, there’s a faint whiff of her doing just that towards the end of the book.
She seems to bristle at the Church declaring Joan a saint and wants to rescue the Maid of Orleans from those “men in Rome.” Of course, it’s easy for Gordon to be critical of the Church that sentenced Joan to death, rehabilitated her reputation after the fact, and canonized her centuries later.
But after reading the book, one has to wonder if St. Joan would think she needs Gordon’s rescuing at all. Somehow, I doubt it.
Andrew Junker is a staff writer for The Catholic Sun. Comments are welcome. Send e-mail to letters@catholicsun.org.
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