What about Joan? A fierce woman in combat? Medieval gender bender? Sandra Miesel has the inside scoop on Joan of Arc

Women's Quarterly, Wntr, 2002 by Sandra Miesel

JOAN OF ARC is the one medieval figure everybody knows. But what they acknowledge varies wildly. To Shakespeare, Joan was a witch; to Shaw, a proto-Protestant; to Twain, a true saint in a godless universe. The poet Schiller and the composer Verdi added love interests to her story but left out death at the stake. Luc Besson portrayed her as a guilt-ridden hysteric in The Messenger (1999). Feminists embrace her as the heroic woman in the clutches of evil men who connive at her ruin.

How can one well-documented woman be the inspiration for so many legends? Don't we all know that Jeanne d'Arc, the Maid of Orleans, was a simple shepherdess called by God to save France from the English? Captured by her enemies and burned as a witch, she became a saint. On closer inspection, however, even this most traditionalist reading of Joan of Arc turns out to have distortions.

For starters, Joan the humble shepherdess is a romantic fancy. This daughter of prosperous peasants seldom watched sheep. But from the beginning, Joan's admirers liked the pastoral myth with its obvious comparison to the biblical David called from his flocks to save his people. Marina Warner, Joan's principal feminist historian, disparages this image of the simple maid with her simple sheep in her 1981 book Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. In a review of Warner's book in Newsweek, Jean Strouse noted that Joan is a cultural Rorschach test: Each age sees her in the light of its own moral preoccupations."

Warner seems to see Joan through the prism of a class in myth and symbol. The book, according to a description on the website of the University of California Press, "takes note of her historical antecedents, both pagan and Christian, and the role she has played up to the present as the embodiment of an ideal, whether as Amazon, saint, child of nature, or personification of virtue." Warner's primary interest is in seeing Joan as a heroic woman but one sadly forced to increase her status through wearing male garb.

Joan's "voices" have been controversial since her own day. She began hearing them in her thirteenth year when they urged her to preserve her virginity; four years later they led her on to her military destiny. Viewing these experiences as delusions, Warner interprets them with a distinctly feminist twist, connecting their emergence to puberty (never mind that menarche occurred later then).

Novelist Mary Gordon is author of Joan of Arc, one of the mini-biographies of famous people by prominent writers commissioned by the publishing firm Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Gordon sees through the lens of gender studies: Joan "stands alone in our imagination for the single-minded triumph of the she--and it must be a she--who feared nothing, knew herself right, and the chosen of God." Less scholarly than Warner, Gordon finds the Maid's spirituality--expressed in less florid imagery than many mystics--not up to snuff.

Hinting that Joan's voices were imagined, Gordon does acknowledge that Joan sincerely believed herself inspired by God. Gordon interprets the voices as an aspect of power politics: "The assumption of the mantle of prophecy was one of the few ways by which medieval women could speak with public authority, certain of being listened to."

Still, it took unshakable confidence for Joan to get a hearing. In 1429, Joan presented herself to the embattled dauphin as the virgin deliverer of France. She persuaded him to accept her, possibly by assuring him that his claim on the throne was legitimate or through a vision of his crown to come.

Reams have been written about Joan's sexuality. In The Messenger, this linchpin of her psyche originates in the horrific rape of her sister--an event that never happened. To the medieval mind, it was a religious issue: The still-sealed body of a woman was packed with mystic power.

Warner regards Joan's innocence as a shortcoming-a rejection of Life. Though grudgingly accepting Joan's chastity, Warner scorns the medical validity of the virginity tests performed on Joan--Warner doesn't think backward medieval matrons knew how to find a hymen.

But Joan's virginity was essential to her mission. Her battle comrades had no doubt that it was important: They later testified that her resolute purity stilled their lusts. Gordon snipes that the effect of Joan's purity didn't last--the soldiers were known to backslide once they lost their gal-pal in arms.

It is interesting to note that Joan is the only saint on record who unrepentantly loved fine clothes-no hairshirts for her. She wore silk, velvet, fur, and cloth-of-gold. Her enemies cried "vanity," and so does Warner, who, like the judges at. Joan's trial, calls her a "fop." Yet beyond private preference, Joan's rich garments were part of her charismatic public image. Mere plain dress wouldn't have had the same impact on a medieval audience.

Her masculine attire is as attention-getting as her virginity. On embarking for the dauphin's court, Joan traded her red gown of peasant homespun for elite male garb. Acceptance by royalty brought her an expensive suit of custom-made armor, white because fashioned of unvarnished metal.