 Seeing Double: Reflections In (and On) the Mirrors of Joan of Arc
Ann Astell
Like Chaucer's Wife of Bath, I will be speaking on the basis of experience today. My experience, however, is not matrimonial but pedagogical. In the spring semester of 1997 I taught for the first time at Purdue University a course about St. Joan of Arc under the rubric of English 413, a variable-title course in literature and history. Twenty-one undergraduates enrolled, plus three adult women auditors. The course was cross-listed with Women's Studies and Medieval Studies and could be used to fulfill the Gender Studies requirement in the Liberal Arts core curriculum. At the end of the semester, my students and I agreed that the course had been very successful, and I plan to teach it again. I can honestly say that the course was one of the happiest experiences of my teaching career. Today I'd like to give a three-part--what, how, and why--reflection on the course: first, a general overview of its structure, delineating what we read and discussed; second, some observations about biographical and autobiographical criticism as a pedagogical practice within the course--that is, how we approached much of the reading materials; third, some theoretical reflections about why such an approach was particularly appropriate, given the subject matter. As you can see from the copies of the syllabus I've distributed, we began by reading in modern English translation the records of Joan's trial for heresy, dating from 1431, and of her rehabilitation (1449-56), with a sideglance at the documents relating to her beatification and eventual canonization as a saint (1869-1920). We returned to these records again and again in the course of the semester, to compare the problematic evidence given there with the versions of Joan's story in subsequent retellings. From the historical record, we moved to William Shakespeare's history play, I Henry VI, which represents Joan of Arc from an Elizabethan, English perspective as a whore and a witch. Against this Shakespearean Joan, and the 16th-century English chronicles that helped to inspire Shakespeare's play, we set the quasi-romantic, nationalistic, nineteenth-century historical account of Joan given by Jules Michelet in his History of France. Partly as a corrective to Michelet's representation of Joan, we read Jean Anouilh's The Lark immediately afterwards in Lillian Hellman's English adaptation. Two other works by French authors followed: Christine de Pisan's 1429 Ditie, and Michel Tournier's novel, Gilles and Jeanne. The pairing of these works, one a medieval poem and the other a twentieth-century novel, allowed us to see Joan in the contrastive company of two of her most famous contemporary compatriots, Christine de Pisan herself and Gilles de Rais, the notorious Bluebeard. As you can see from the syllabus, the readings assigned for the weeks after spring break are equally various. Mark Twain's sentimental idealization of Joan in his book, Personal Recollections (1895), may be an instance of historical romance, but it differs greatly from the romanticism of Friedrich Schiller's Maid of Orleans (1801). Reading George Bernard Shaw's 1924 play, St. Joan, gave us yet another version of the story, which we read and compared to Otto Preminger's film version of Shaw's play. At this point in the semester, when my students were hard at work on the completion of their research papers, we actually viewed and discussed three different cinematic representations of Joan of Arc: first, Preminger's 1956 film, starring Jean Seberg; then Victor Fleming's 1948 film, starring Ingrid Bergman; finally we gathered on a Sunday evening for a special class session to view without interruption a haunting 1928 silent movie by Carl Theodore Dreyer, entitled The Passion of Joan of Arc. During the final week of the semester we discussed Vita Sackville-West's 1936 biography, St. Joan of Arc. Finally, on the last day of class we listened to Voices of Light, a contemporary oratorio composed by Richard Einhorn, that was inspired by Dreyer's film. During the average class period, I combined lecture with discussion, placing the emphasis on the latter. For each assigned reading, I prepared focussed, discussion questions. The students worked in small groups, each group addressing a different question or pair of questions and then reporting the results of their discussion to the class as a whole. The students sometimes also used these questions as prompts and responded to them in writing in the Journal they kept for the course, in which they were required to make three paragraph-length entries per week in response to the readings. The major written assignment for the course was a research paper, for which each student first submitted a proposal and a preliminary bibliography. I have attached to the syllabus a copy of the paper topics on which they wrote. The students also each did a creative project for the course. The creative projects varied, from writing a short story or a screenplay to painting a picture of St. Joan. One student composed a musical interlude for four different instruments and submitted to me a score and a cassette tape of a performance of the piece. Four of my students actually made field trips on their own, travelling to the Joan of Arc chapel at Marquette University in Milwaukee. To record their experiences there, they made a video movie or took photos and slides. When I began teaching the course, I had been somewhat afraid that my students would tire of reading the same story again and again, but they quickly recognized and learned to appreciate a principle of seemingly infinite variety in the Jehannine retellings. "How will we ever know what really happened?" one of my students asked me. Another told me at the end of the semester, "The stories of Joan will go on forever, because each one fills in the gaps in her story differently, and because each one interprets her life from his or her own viewpoint." This observation by my student brings me to the second part of this paper, which concerns the biographical and autobiographical criticism that became a recurrent factor in the pedagogical practice of the course. Confronted by the enormous variety in the different representations of Joan, I found myself accounting for it in part by seeing (and helping my students to see) the life of the author mirrored in the life of Joan of Arc. It was a kind of "seeing double," as the title of this paper suggests. In each case, the author was writing about Joan, was telling her story, in a specific socio-political environment, at a particular time in his or her life, and often he or she was moved to do so for intensely personal reasons. Authors could be seen to be commenting on their own lives through writing about Joan's and a powerful pattern of identification in case after case emerged--so much so that it became a leitmotif of the course. In the time allotted to me, I cannot go into great depth or cover many examples to illustrate this pattern of authorial identification with Joan of Arc. Instead, I will simply choose and briefly sketch five examples that my students and I found particularly striking: those of Jules Michelet, Mark Twain, Christine de Pisan, Lillian Hellman, and Vita Sackville-West. In 1841, Jules Michelet wrote in passionate, idealistic, even romantic terms about the life and death of Joan of Arc at the conclusion of the fourth volume of his monumental History of France. In 1840 his young wife Pauline had died. He was thus literally visiting the site of Joan's execution at the same time that he was visiting Pauline's grave and writing about "the death of France" and "the end of the Middle Ages." At Rouen, where Joan was burned at the stake, he stayed at the home of a married woman, the mother of one of his students. She was dying of cancer, and Michelet's brief, paradoxically healing, love-affair with her marked the transition between two periods in his personal life and two volumes of his History of France. Entries in his journal suggest that his portrayal of Joan of Arc creatively combines the images of two beloved women, his dead wife Pauline and his mistress, Madame Dumesnil, and that his historical narrative of Joan is inescapably autobiographical. [2] Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was completed in December, 1894, as a book "written for love" on the occasion of his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when the Clemens family was one hundred thousand dollars in debt and when Mark and Livy were worried about the health of their young daughter, Susy. Twain's heroine, as depicted by an aging, fatherly narrator, is as young and beloved as his own daughter, to whom Twain read the book aloud, chapter by chapter, as he wrote it. Susy's sudden death in 1896 at age twenty-four, shortly after the publication of Joan of Arc, plunged her father into a bitter misanthropy so severe that it stood as the complete opposite of the idealization of human potential we find in his portrayal of Joan. During this dark period, his wife Livy wrote to him in distress, "Do darling change your mental attitude, try to change it . . . . Where is the mind that wrote . . . Jeanne d-Arc . . . . the sweet, dear, tender side [of you] that I know. Bring it back! . . . You always dwell upon the evil until those who live beside you are crushed to the earth and you seem almost like a monomaniac."[3] With the loss of Susy, Mark Twain also lost sight of Jeanne d'Arc and the whole angelic side of things that had kept his world in a precarious balance. Male authors, like Michelet and Twain, who write in romantic terms about Joan, seem to identify with her indirectly, in a mediated fashion, as a reflection of their real-life love-relationships with women. For women writers, such as Christine de Pisan, Lillian Hellman and Vita Sackville-West, the identification is more direct. I won't speak about Christine de Pisan and Joan of Arc, because Professor Fraoli will be addressing that topic, and others have written eloquently about the similarities Christine herself presents between herself as an inspired woman writer and Joan as a prophetic female battle-leader. It was clearly important for Christine, however, to see herself reflected in Joan's mirror and to claim a symbolic share for herself and for all women in Joan's moral and military victories. Such a sharing was also important for Lillian Hellman, an American woman writer of our own time. Lillian Hellman's play, The Lark, was performed on Broadway in 1956. As Hellman's biographer, William Wright, observes, "Ideals were much on Hellman's mind in the first years of the fifties. In the spring of 1955 she flew to London to see Christopher Frye's adaptation of Jean Anouihl's play about Joan of Arc, L'Alouette, with the idea of doing her own adaptation. The theme of a woman being coerced by the state to testify to things she was unwilling to say had a rather direct connection with Hellman's own experience at that time." [4] Not only was "Lillian Hellman's Joan . . . a down-to-earth woman very much like the playwright herself" (as Carl Rollyson rightly notes), [5] but Joan's interrogation during her trial is reminiscent of Hellman's own interrogation in 1952 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Even as Joan's Voices directed her path, Hellman's legal counsel informed her that if she answered questions about herself, she would also have to answer to questions about other people. As she explained in her letter to John Wood, Chair of the Committee, "To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable." [6] She was forced, therefore, to plead the Fifth Amendment. As you can see from this transparency (#2), the repetitiveness of the questions and answers during Hellman's hearing bears an uncanny resemblance to the badgering of Joan of Arc in Hellman's play.[7] To cite a fifth and final example of authorial identification with Joan of Arc, we turn to Vita Sackville-West. Vita, a member of the Bloomsbury group and a friend and lover of Virginia Woolf, wrote her biography of Joan of Arc at the same time that her sister-in-law, Gwen St. Aubry, was converting to Catholicism. Gwen's conversion moved and troubled Vita, who had been living an irreligious life, and Vita's 1936 book on Joan thus coincides with, and gives expression to, an awakening quest for faith in her personal life. Vita Sackville-West's biography is unlike other Jehannine biographies we read in the course, in part because of the emphasis it places on Joan's friendships with women and her association with other female mystics of her time--topics that reflect Vita's own subjectivity and sexual orientation. As Victoria Glendinning remarks, "The subject [of Joan of Arc] was well suited to Vita's temperament and interests . . . . Joan's determined assumption of male clothing was something she could understand, and she attributed to Joan 'as queer a mixture of feminine and masculine attributes as ever relentlessly assaulted the enemy and then wept to see him hurt'."[8] As the letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West record, Virginia disliked Vita's biography of Joan, perhaps out of a certain jealousy and a hostile fear of the Christian faith, and the period of its composition marked a distinct cooling of their friendship.[9] A mutual friend of the two women, Ethel Smyth, shared Virginia's distaste for the book. As Glendinning explains, "What Vita's friends were really deploring was [not her artistry as a biographer, but] her absorption in topics for which they felt she was ill-suited and had only tackled because of the religious preoccupations of her sister-in-law." [10] The unspoken assumption is that a biographer of Joan of Arc should and must be able to identify with her, and that, measured by morality and spirituality, Vita Sackville-West was unfit to write about a saint. As Charles Wood has eloquently reminded us, the problem of saintly identification was also an issue for Joan of Arc herself. As Wood expresses it, "[Joan's] mission to raise the seige of Orleans was central to what would become her mature personality, but even more crucial, one suspects, was her recognition of, and identification with, the specific saints who had for so long been speaking to her" (stress mine)--namely, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Margaret, and St. Catherine of Alexandria. Under the special patronage and guidance of these saints, Joan was to emulate them and to continue their saintly mission on earth, as it were, through her own life. In the words of Charles Wood, "Just as Catherine, ever the virgin, had cogently argued the true way even to the mightiest in her land, so, too, could Joan, who lacked all knowledge of philosophy and the liberal arts."[11] As another Michael, Joan led the armed forces of her king. As another Margaret, Joan assumed a man's dress. As another Catherine, Joan answered boldly to her sovereign and later to her judges. The exemplary force of the lives of Michael, Margaret, and Catherine within the life of Joan of Arc helps to explain, perhaps, the exemplarity of Joan's life in relation to the lives of writers about her. It is time to raise the question: Why is biographical and autobiographical criticism especially appropriate to the study of Jehannine materials? Why, in pedagogical terms, does it "work"? What is it about hagiography as a genre that permits and even necessitates the anachronistic mingling of the biography of Lillian Hellman, for instance, with the life of Joan of Arc? In her much-acclaimed 1990 book, Saints and Postmodernism, Edith Wyschogrod suggests an answer. As Wyschogrod emphasizes, the lives of saints are legenda, stories that must be read as a basis for a saintly agenda, that is, actions that must be continued (not replicated) in space and time, work that must be carried out in the world. The grammatical mood of the saint's life is thus imperative, not indicative; the "story's success is not measured in aesthetic or cognitive terms but rather in regard to whether the addressees experience the saint's spiritual rebirth as an existential demand . . . [that inspires] a new catena of moral events appropriate to the addressee's life." The "text's addressees [should] feel impelled to 'make the saint's movements' after her." By definition hagiography is read and lived forward. As narrative, the saint's life transmits traditional knowledge, but it also "forwards the purpose of moral insurgency" through a challenging "proto-novelistic discourse" that sabotages received knowledge through its very excess. The life of a saint, after all, is always the life of an exceptional and often provocative figure, in conflict with the standards of the world around him or her. The saint's history, moreover, answers to "an unrealizable imperative because the life of Christ cannot be replicated," even as it issues an imperative to follow Him, "to reach out for what is inherently refractory to representation, a life like that of Jesus."[12] The response of my students to the many lives of Joan of Arc, and to the mirroring of authorial lives in hers, was, at a certain level, a response to such an imperative. Joan's life was "lived forward" into theirs. This became most clear, not so much in their research papers, but in their creative projects and in their journal entries. One student wrote, "This class has been a spiritual journey for me. I'd forgotten a lot about the faith I grew up in. Through reading related books and trying to get background material on the Church that Joan loved so well (as did I when I was little), I have changed, and the changes have been for the better, I'd say." Another girl wrote: "All of my friends now like to tease me about my feelings for Joan of Arc. They always ask me about Joan or for some tidbit from the class. . . . Because of Joan of Arc and learning more about her in this class, I have seriously reevaluated my whole life to see if I'd be ready or not to open myself up to the wishes of the Lord." One young man, who had no religious background, wrote in his journal that he had felt strong emotions during the course and had actually wept with compassion for Joan's suffering. He concluded with the words, "I don't know that life holds for me, but if I have Joan's story as a guide, I won't falter upon the mountain that I must climb and in the adventures that I must face." Yet another student recorded the following "last thoughts": "I have a great respect now for a woman who accomplished great feats and met her terrible death at the age I was getting ready to graduate from High School. . . . Her faith in God was obviously tremendous. . . . I'm not Catholic, but if I had to pick a saint, it would be Joan. Not only was she a great female leader; she also embodied numerous other admirable qualities. She is someone all humankind should look up to, not just those in the Catholic faith." I did nothing directly to encourage such responses from my students. They simply came. They point, I think, to something irreducibly different about the literary quality of a saint's life as a work written in the imperative mood and in a capacious temporality, inclusive of past and future events. To study Joan of Arc is to look into a mirror in which one never sees a single image, but rather, double and triple reflections, as one life, Joan's life, is "lived forward" into others.
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Since this session celebrates "history in a comic mode," I am going to begin with a
transparency that illustrates the title of my paper. This picture is surely an instance
of seeing double and triple. At first sight we see, against a background that resembles
a medieval tapestry, the image of Joan of Arc. A second look and a glance at the caption
in the left corner tells us that, no, this is a picture of actress Emma Thompson, dressed
as Joan of Arc. A third look informs us that, no, this is, at least in a symbolic sense,
a picture of the photographer, Annie Liebowitz, who "in 1991 became the second living
photographer--and the first woman ever--to have a one-person exhibition at the
Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery."