Joan Of Arc: Roman Catholic Saint
Joan of Arc is a Roman Catholic Saint, and is considered a heroine for France. At the mere age of 13, Joan was spoken to by a voice, which is believed to be God, and is encouraged to join the French army to fight against England. In doing so, she won many battles for the French, but was soon met with a trial, in which she was essentially accused of being a mystic, and not performing in the proper way of a woman in relation to how she dressed. It is here that I must question, what exactly is performing like a proper woman? It is a question that I constantly thought of when reading about her life, but I also thought about how her life could so easily translate into our modern society. In this essay, I will examine Joan’s life, and answer the
…show more content…
most important question that can relate to our lives today: is Joan of Arc a normal person like all of us or is she something greater?
As a female saint, “female spirituality and sanctity do not function to put a non-threatening face on female power,” but rather to proclaim power in “divinely sanctioned legitimacy” (Warren 89). Warren also concludes that virginity and chastity are “the defining characteristics of medieval female sanctity” (Warren 111). This is a common theme in general with women. For example, in class this semester, we briefly discussed that female saints are viewed as nurturing, and use their ordinary experiences without a crisis as a model of their sainthood, whereas male saints are models of action. However, Warren believes that Joan exhibits “intellectual and rhetorical abilities that allow her to come out “on top” in her debates with male authority figures,” and her victories are “also clearly to the benefit of her country and people” (Warren 110).
It should also be mentioned that Joan of Arc was considered a martyr as well, and of course like female saints, female martyrs were not memorialized like their male counterparts. Thomas Head mentions this in his essay Women and Hagiography in Medieval Christianity, and states that “Christian communities favored prominent clerics”, meaning men, “in their recognition of communal heroes” (Head, the-orb.net). This comes as no surprise because women are still looked down upon as being less than men in everyday life, and I can only imagine the severity during Joan’s time.
In So Well-Suited: The Evolution of Joan of Arc as a Dramatic Image, Ellen Dogin quotes Mark Twain’s assessment of Joan of Arc, which summarizes her very well:
Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back the tide of the Hundred Years' War, she fatally crippled the English power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF FRANCE, which she bears to this day. (Dogin 40)
The title, Deliverer of France, suggests that Joan was a heroine, and indeed she could very well be considered that. In this quote from Mark Twain, Joan is painted as a saint-like figure, almost like Christ. To be considered so highly is an honor, which makes a normal person believe that a saint is far greater than a regular human being, but is this true?
During Joan’s time period, women visionaries started to become prominent figures in religious life where the rate of women “among those canonized doubled from 11.8 to 22.6 percent” (Sullivan 21). In Interrogation of Joan of Arc, Karen Sullivan attributes this increase to the shift in the identification of sanctity, and that saintliness became an important element in inner experience, which includes hearing voices and having visions. These experiences were often gifted to women, and became more valued. Women visionaries such as Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena were very powerful at this time, and these women “aroused admiration and even veneration among the people, but they also sparked suspicion in the church” (Sullivan 22). Even though the clerics of the church supported these women visionaries as advisors, there was an issue of these supernatural powers only given to a few which made it dangerous or ambivalent. Because of this Joan was ultimately feared by many of the church because clerics viewed prophesies as being “satanically inspired,” and miracles as “the result of sorcery” (Sullivan 22). In turn, many groups of spiritual women, like the beguines, were accused of heresy, and if Joan proclaimed that she heard voices, “and if she found herself subjected to clerical investigation because of this assertion,” she would be looked at as a mystic, and tried as such if “what she heard differed from what her contemporaries beheld” (Sullivan 23). It is here where the grand debate starts on what Joan is. Is she a heroine, martyr, or something else? The examining of this question is precisely what leads to the connection to the human aspects relating to our lives.
Dogin starts off by characterizing 1870 as a turning point in church and state relations, thus “a contradiction arose between the ideology of the literary apologists for Joan as heroine and martyr and that of the church” (Dogin 34). Joan’s story during this time tended to be broad stories, and Dogin mentions that even after her death, her image continued to be historically inaccurate. However, women in this time could not escape the stereotypes of being morally superior, but needing a man’s protection. This parallels to today’s society in the United States. Recently, there has been a feminist movement that is becoming apparent, where there is an outcry by women voicing their opinions about the way society views them. Among the many complaints is the feeling of needing protection by a man. For example, when in a situation where a man consistently pursues a woman, women have confessed that they feel the need to lie and say they have a boyfriend, just so the man will leave them alone. In a sense, Joan was braver than this, and with her hair cut short, and wearing a “man’s tunic and leggings,” Joan hopped on a horse and went forth to “lead Armagnac forces into battle” (Sullivan 42).
Joan of Arc has been talked about in every medium possible, but Mark Twain characterizes her century as “the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the dark ages,” but describes her as being “a miracle product from such soil” (Dogin 39). From the way I see it, Joan was a strong woman, and at the age of 16, she propelled herself into a war. Dogin believes she was self-made, “a product of the people,” but a victim of repressive ideology who “personified the virtues of the nurturing healer, pure moral leader, and innocent child” (Dogin 41). These characteristics are typical to describe a woman, but what I must add is that she can be seen as a brave, and strong woman. In addition, she knew who she was, and what she was destined for. She believed so strongly in her cause that she was willing to die for it, and what started all of this was when she was 13 in her father’s garden, a voice came to her and told her “that she should come to France and that she could no longer stay where she was,” and the voice revealed to her that “she should lift the siege set before Orléans” (Sullivan 54). However, it was in this moment that Joan was not the strong person she became to be, in fact, she protested at first because she was scared, and expressed concern that she could not perform such great deeds that God revealed to her. This is a very human moment for her, but it is only the beginning of her story, and how her story connects to ours.
Perhaps what is the most interesting to me about her story is the contradictions of the clergy when prosecuting her, and it is these contradictions that make me feel that Joan of Arc could have very well been a medieval feminist. The clerics frowned upon “the women who wore men’s clothes, and performed men’s deeds out of their own desire to do so,” but later figures such as Gratian justified these views by declaring that if “a woman, judging it useful according to her own decision, puts on male clothing, she is anathematized because this is imitating male dress” (Sullivan 42). Even Thomas Aquinas declared that wearing clothes made for the opposite sex was wrong, and “gave rise to lasciviousness” (Sullivan 42). However, it was these contradictory garments that prostitutes of antiquity wore in order for their clients to lust after them. This contradicts the clerics who defended women that wore men’s clothes “in order to protect themselves from such lust” (Sullivan 43).
It is hard to understand why dressing as a man in that time period is repulsive, but this also parallels to modern society. In modern society in the United States, clothes are still viewed in this contradictory manner. Some are acceptable, and some are not, giving little space for those who wish to express themselves in the way they feel is comfortable. Like Joan of Arc, many men and women today are persecuted for this reason, and if this is the case, why is Joan of Arc looked down upon for her way of dressing compared to the women of the high Middle Ages who were respected “for dressing and acting as men in their pursuit of Christian virtue” (Sullivan 43)? Perhaps it is because she came about at a slightly different time, but she too was in pursuit of a Christian revelation, and she had nothing, but God in her heart.
Joan was depicted as a subject of female transgression that caused the clerics to believe she “initiated, realized, and bore responsibility for her acts,” but she was also portrayed as “an object through which God initiated his actions and realized goals, for which he bore ultimate responsibility” (Sullivan 45). These two contrasting ideals are exactly what brought upon her trial, and eventually her death. At a young age, Joan is described as being “unusually devout” to Christianity, and she assumed the title, La Pucelle, a word that simply means a virgin, but in medieval literature “the words implied no rank,” which thus “cancelled out her background, without denying it” (Taylor 22). Joan departed home clandestinely against her parents’ will who wanted to marry her off. In part of her trial, the clerics believed that she was defiant, and that she disturbed family structures by fleeing in this manner. In turn, she was described as being reckless, and was subjected to “sexual advances from soldiers” (Sullivan 47). In today’s society, many people would side on the position of the clerics by saying that Joan should have known better being a woman amongst men. This argument continues to be used when handling cases related to sexual assault in the army.
Recently a woman, Katie Rapp, came forth about her sexual assault in the U.S Army, and was told by a higher official that she was part of an all male unit, and she has to understand that those men don’t know how to deal with women. The clerics during Joan’s time are essentially saying the same thing here, and according to their traditional understanding “symbolic structures should function, clothing should subordinate itself to the body as the sign should subordinate itself to the thing,” which translates to the individual being subordinate to the “Creator, out of recognition of the natural and fitting correspondence between these two sets of categories” (Sullivan 48). In turn, women who permitted this described correspondence opened themselves up to what Sullivan states as “an affinity between her sex and her gender,” meaning femaleness versus femininity and natural identity versus cultural identity, and Joan, who was viewed as disrupting this correspondence, thus disrupted “the relation between nature and art, referent and sign, thing and word” (Sullivan 48).
The clerics also suggested that because Joan dressed like a man, she was viewed as acting like a man as well. This derives from the word habitus, which Sullivan declares creates the connection between wardrobe and behavior. Although this belief is not exactly found in American culture, it is perpetuated in another form. For example, women who dress in a fashion that is seen as manly, are automatically deemed a lesbian, and it is generally understood of people in LGBT communities that expressing sexuality is fluid. However, to a vast number of people in the United States, sexuality is not this particular gray area. To them, sexuality is black and white. This carries over to Joan’s era because the same thing is essentially being said here, that Joan had “ceased to do the other work appropriate to the female sex, comporting herself in all things like a man rather than like a woman” (Sullivan 50). Joan, who believed so strongly that the voices were from God was only met with contempt and the decision which indicated that “Joan not only rejected God’s and Saint Paul’s commands in rejecting women’s outer veiling,” but also sparked a riot in her society’s mannerisms “by making the man serve the woman, the nobleman serve the peasant, the higher serve the lower” (Sullivan 51). The clerics so obviously did not want this power structure to be reversed simply because it benefited them, and as a result, Joan was the scapegoat, she was the one who had to take all the blame even though there is no sufficient evidence to suggest that a power structure was dismantled so easily by her wearing men’s clothes. In fact, the clerics should have congratulated her, and her bravery for participating in a war that she was called upon by God to experience. Ultimately, Joan of Arc was believed to expose herself “to the temptations of the devil,” and that this demon must have “goaded her to claim to have experienced what she had not experienced” (Sullivan 53).
Joan of Arc has so far come off as being strong, and almost magical.
It is this interpretation that permits her to be considered a Saint, but during the course of her interrogation, she has quite a few human moments, moments that allow us to question her saintliness. Sullivan fully exposes these moments by exposing the severe conditions under which she was interrogated. At first, Joan stood by her statements that she heard God’s voice, and that she was called upon by God to fight in the war, but under the influence of the clerics, she slowly changed her story. She first began to move “from speaking of God to speaking of a voice,” yet she did not name any “individual heavenly figures” (Sullivan 26). Initially she affirmed that “she came on the part of God,” but after a while she proclaimed her contact with God “without stressing the political purpose of that contact,” and that this shift of political purpose of a mystical experience to just the mythical experience “reflected the gradual shift from references to God to references to the voices” (Sullivan 26). It is understood that no matter what Joan said, she was doubted and ultimately she confessed that the voices were of saints or angels. Sullivan uses Pierre Duparc’s hypothesis that Joan was under pressure to say this because “they probably found themselves disconcerted in front of a mysticism, inspired by God, without handle on it” (Sullivan 27). On the other hand, Larissa Juliet Taylor believes “she played for time to formulate her responses,” and that in all likelihood, “she was making up her answers as she went along” (Taylor 25). Regardless, this is a very human moment that we all know so well. The human moment of not knowing what to say or think in a moment of pressure, which feeds into the popular saying “fake it until you make it”. However, it is unsure if Joan was faking this, but she was under pressure to produce an acceptable response to the judges, and at first she stood her ground on her beliefs, but
soon, like under pressure, she was susceptible to crumbling and begging in order to save herself, and her life.
Sullivan believes that Joan understood boldness and fear as contrast between propelling self forward, and holding self back. In the beginning of her interrogation, Joan exhibited this boldness, and there was no fear in her. At the age of 19, having left her family to fight in a war at 16, she stood before people, who had already made up their minds with what they were going to do to her, with bravery and boldness. This bravery and boldness was knocked down like a wrecking ball demolishing everything in its path. In the end, she exuded fear, and it is this fear that she describes as damning “herself to save her life,” instead of acting boldly like “the voices told her to do,” so that she would have “lost her life but saved herself” (Sullivan 136). At this point, it should be asked to the reader how they would have handled this? It is safe to say that most people would have reacted the same, because it is believed that when face with near death, we most likely will choose to save our lives, even if it means losing our souls, and it is in this moment that the reader can see Joan as a human instead of a saint.
In conclusion, Joan of Arc may very well have been a brave person, but like many people, we crumble and break sometimes. Joan is considered a heroine, a martyr, and a saint, but she can also be characterized as a human. It is in her life that we can sometimes see ourselves, and our world can parallel to hers. Dobin quotes Mark Twain, “Joan never asked to be remembered. Joan never asked for a church for Domremy. Everything which Joan of Arc did not ask for has been given to her, but this one humble thing which she did ask for and get has been taken away from her” (Dobin 43). I would like to think that there is a little bit of Joan of Arc in all of us; a little bit of bravery and boldness, but a little bit of fear as well. Joan of Arc can be considered something greater, but she is also the medieval normal in all of us.
most important question that can relate to our lives today: is Joan of Arc a normal person like all of us or is she something greater?
As a female saint, “female spirituality and sanctity do not function to put a non-threatening face on female power,” but rather to proclaim power in “divinely sanctioned legitimacy” (Warren 89). Warren also concludes that virginity and chastity are “the defining characteristics of medieval female sanctity” (Warren 111). This is a common theme in general with women. For example, in class this semester, we briefly discussed that female saints are viewed as nurturing, and use their ordinary experiences without a crisis as a model of their sainthood, whereas male saints are models of action. However, Warren believes that Joan exhibits “intellectual and rhetorical abilities that allow her to come out “on top” in her debates with male authority figures,” and her victories are “also clearly to the benefit of her country and people” (Warren 110).
It should also be mentioned that Joan of Arc was considered a martyr as well, and of course like female saints, female martyrs were not memorialized like their male counterparts. Thomas Head mentions this in his essay Women and Hagiography in Medieval Christianity, and states that “Christian communities favored prominent clerics”, meaning men, “in their recognition of communal heroes” (Head, the-orb.net). This comes as no surprise because women are still looked down upon as being less than men in everyday life, and I can only imagine the severity during Joan’s time.
In So Well-Suited: The Evolution of Joan of Arc as a Dramatic Image, Ellen Dogin quotes Mark Twain’s assessment of Joan of Arc, which summarizes her very well:
Joan of Arc, a mere child in years, ignorant, unlettered, a poor village girl unknown and without influence, found a great nation lying in chains, helpless and hopeless under an alien domination, its treasury bankrupt, its soldiers disheartened and dispersed, all spirit torpid, all courage dead in the hearts of the people through long years of foreign and domestic outrage and oppression, their King cowed, resigned to its fate, and preparing to fly the country; and she laid her hand upon this nation, this corpse, and it rose and followed her. She led it from victory to victory, she turned back the tide of the Hundred Years' War, she fatally crippled the English power, and died with the earned title of DELIVERER OF FRANCE, which she bears to this day. (Dogin 40)
The title, Deliverer of France, suggests that Joan was a heroine, and indeed she could very well be considered that. In this quote from Mark Twain, Joan is painted as a saint-like figure, almost like Christ. To be considered so highly is an honor, which makes a normal person believe that a saint is far greater than a regular human being, but is this true?
During Joan’s time period, women visionaries started to become prominent figures in religious life where the rate of women “among those canonized doubled from 11.8 to 22.6 percent” (Sullivan 21). In Interrogation of Joan of Arc, Karen Sullivan attributes this increase to the shift in the identification of sanctity, and that saintliness became an important element in inner experience, which includes hearing voices and having visions. These experiences were often gifted to women, and became more valued. Women visionaries such as Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena were very powerful at this time, and these women “aroused admiration and even veneration among the people, but they also sparked suspicion in the church” (Sullivan 22). Even though the clerics of the church supported these women visionaries as advisors, there was an issue of these supernatural powers only given to a few which made it dangerous or ambivalent. Because of this Joan was ultimately feared by many of the church because clerics viewed prophesies as being “satanically inspired,” and miracles as “the result of sorcery” (Sullivan 22). In turn, many groups of spiritual women, like the beguines, were accused of heresy, and if Joan proclaimed that she heard voices, “and if she found herself subjected to clerical investigation because of this assertion,” she would be looked at as a mystic, and tried as such if “what she heard differed from what her contemporaries beheld” (Sullivan 23). It is here where the grand debate starts on what Joan is. Is she a heroine, martyr, or something else? The examining of this question is precisely what leads to the connection to the human aspects relating to our lives.
Dogin starts off by characterizing 1870 as a turning point in church and state relations, thus “a contradiction arose between the ideology of the literary apologists for Joan as heroine and martyr and that of the church” (Dogin 34). Joan’s story during this time tended to be broad stories, and Dogin mentions that even after her death, her image continued to be historically inaccurate. However, women in this time could not escape the stereotypes of being morally superior, but needing a man’s protection. This parallels to today’s society in the United States. Recently, there has been a feminist movement that is becoming apparent, where there is an outcry by women voicing their opinions about the way society views them. Among the many complaints is the feeling of needing protection by a man. For example, when in a situation where a man consistently pursues a woman, women have confessed that they feel the need to lie and say they have a boyfriend, just so the man will leave them alone. In a sense, Joan was braver than this, and with her hair cut short, and wearing a “man’s tunic and leggings,” Joan hopped on a horse and went forth to “lead Armagnac forces into battle” (Sullivan 42).
Joan of Arc has been talked about in every medium possible, but Mark Twain characterizes her century as “the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the dark ages,” but describes her as being “a miracle product from such soil” (Dogin 39). From the way I see it, Joan was a strong woman, and at the age of 16, she propelled herself into a war. Dogin believes she was self-made, “a product of the people,” but a victim of repressive ideology who “personified the virtues of the nurturing healer, pure moral leader, and innocent child” (Dogin 41). These characteristics are typical to describe a woman, but what I must add is that she can be seen as a brave, and strong woman. In addition, she knew who she was, and what she was destined for. She believed so strongly in her cause that she was willing to die for it, and what started all of this was when she was 13 in her father’s garden, a voice came to her and told her “that she should come to France and that she could no longer stay where she was,” and the voice revealed to her that “she should lift the siege set before Orléans” (Sullivan 54). However, it was in this moment that Joan was not the strong person she became to be, in fact, she protested at first because she was scared, and expressed concern that she could not perform such great deeds that God revealed to her. This is a very human moment for her, but it is only the beginning of her story, and how her story connects to ours.
Perhaps what is the most interesting to me about her story is the contradictions of the clergy when prosecuting her, and it is these contradictions that make me feel that Joan of Arc could have very well been a medieval feminist. The clerics frowned upon “the women who wore men’s clothes, and performed men’s deeds out of their own desire to do so,” but later figures such as Gratian justified these views by declaring that if “a woman, judging it useful according to her own decision, puts on male clothing, she is anathematized because this is imitating male dress” (Sullivan 42). Even Thomas Aquinas declared that wearing clothes made for the opposite sex was wrong, and “gave rise to lasciviousness” (Sullivan 42). However, it was these contradictory garments that prostitutes of antiquity wore in order for their clients to lust after them. This contradicts the clerics who defended women that wore men’s clothes “in order to protect themselves from such lust” (Sullivan 43).
It is hard to understand why dressing as a man in that time period is repulsive, but this also parallels to modern society. In modern society in the United States, clothes are still viewed in this contradictory manner. Some are acceptable, and some are not, giving little space for those who wish to express themselves in the way they feel is comfortable. Like Joan of Arc, many men and women today are persecuted for this reason, and if this is the case, why is Joan of Arc looked down upon for her way of dressing compared to the women of the high Middle Ages who were respected “for dressing and acting as men in their pursuit of Christian virtue” (Sullivan 43)? Perhaps it is because she came about at a slightly different time, but she too was in pursuit of a Christian revelation, and she had nothing, but God in her heart.
Joan was depicted as a subject of female transgression that caused the clerics to believe she “initiated, realized, and bore responsibility for her acts,” but she was also portrayed as “an object through which God initiated his actions and realized goals, for which he bore ultimate responsibility” (Sullivan 45). These two contrasting ideals are exactly what brought upon her trial, and eventually her death. At a young age, Joan is described as being “unusually devout” to Christianity, and she assumed the title, La Pucelle, a word that simply means a virgin, but in medieval literature “the words implied no rank,” which thus “cancelled out her background, without denying it” (Taylor 22). Joan departed home clandestinely against her parents’ will who wanted to marry her off. In part of her trial, the clerics believed that she was defiant, and that she disturbed family structures by fleeing in this manner. In turn, she was described as being reckless, and was subjected to “sexual advances from soldiers” (Sullivan 47). In today’s society, many people would side on the position of the clerics by saying that Joan should have known better being a woman amongst men. This argument continues to be used when handling cases related to sexual assault in the army.
Recently a woman, Katie Rapp, came forth about her sexual assault in the U.S Army, and was told by a higher official that she was part of an all male unit, and she has to understand that those men don’t know how to deal with women. The clerics during Joan’s time are essentially saying the same thing here, and according to their traditional understanding “symbolic structures should function, clothing should subordinate itself to the body as the sign should subordinate itself to the thing,” which translates to the individual being subordinate to the “Creator, out of recognition of the natural and fitting correspondence between these two sets of categories” (Sullivan 48). In turn, women who permitted this described correspondence opened themselves up to what Sullivan states as “an affinity between her sex and her gender,” meaning femaleness versus femininity and natural identity versus cultural identity, and Joan, who was viewed as disrupting this correspondence, thus disrupted “the relation between nature and art, referent and sign, thing and word” (Sullivan 48).
The clerics also suggested that because Joan dressed like a man, she was viewed as acting like a man as well. This derives from the word habitus, which Sullivan declares creates the connection between wardrobe and behavior. Although this belief is not exactly found in American culture, it is perpetuated in another form. For example, women who dress in a fashion that is seen as manly, are automatically deemed a lesbian, and it is generally understood of people in LGBT communities that expressing sexuality is fluid. However, to a vast number of people in the United States, sexuality is not this particular gray area. To them, sexuality is black and white. This carries over to Joan’s era because the same thing is essentially being said here, that Joan had “ceased to do the other work appropriate to the female sex, comporting herself in all things like a man rather than like a woman” (Sullivan 50). Joan, who believed so strongly that the voices were from God was only met with contempt and the decision which indicated that “Joan not only rejected God’s and Saint Paul’s commands in rejecting women’s outer veiling,” but also sparked a riot in her society’s mannerisms “by making the man serve the woman, the nobleman serve the peasant, the higher serve the lower” (Sullivan 51). The clerics so obviously did not want this power structure to be reversed simply because it benefited them, and as a result, Joan was the scapegoat, she was the one who had to take all the blame even though there is no sufficient evidence to suggest that a power structure was dismantled so easily by her wearing men’s clothes. In fact, the clerics should have congratulated her, and her bravery for participating in a war that she was called upon by God to experience. Ultimately, Joan of Arc was believed to expose herself “to the temptations of the devil,” and that this demon must have “goaded her to claim to have experienced what she had not experienced” (Sullivan 53).
Joan of Arc has so far come off as being strong, and almost magical.
It is this interpretation that permits her to be considered a Saint, but during the course of her interrogation, she has quite a few human moments, moments that allow us to question her saintliness. Sullivan fully exposes these moments by exposing the severe conditions under which she was interrogated. At first, Joan stood by her statements that she heard God’s voice, and that she was called upon by God to fight in the war, but under the influence of the clerics, she slowly changed her story. She first began to move “from speaking of God to speaking of a voice,” yet she did not name any “individual heavenly figures” (Sullivan 26). Initially she affirmed that “she came on the part of God,” but after a while she proclaimed her contact with God “without stressing the political purpose of that contact,” and that this shift of political purpose of a mystical experience to just the mythical experience “reflected the gradual shift from references to God to references to the voices” (Sullivan 26). It is understood that no matter what Joan said, she was doubted and ultimately she confessed that the voices were of saints or angels. Sullivan uses Pierre Duparc’s hypothesis that Joan was under pressure to say this because “they probably found themselves disconcerted in front of a mysticism, inspired by God, without handle on it” (Sullivan 27). On the other hand, Larissa Juliet Taylor believes “she played for time to formulate her responses,” and that in all likelihood, “she was making up her answers as she went along” (Taylor 25). Regardless, this is a very human moment that we all know so well. The human moment of not knowing what to say or think in a moment of pressure, which feeds into the popular saying “fake it until you make it”. However, it is unsure if Joan was faking this, but she was under pressure to produce an acceptable response to the judges, and at first she stood her ground on her beliefs, but
soon, like under pressure, she was susceptible to crumbling and begging in order to save herself, and her life.
Sullivan believes that Joan understood boldness and fear as contrast between propelling self forward, and holding self back. In the beginning of her interrogation, Joan exhibited this boldness, and there was no fear in her. At the age of 19, having left her family to fight in a war at 16, she stood before people, who had already made up their minds with what they were going to do to her, with bravery and boldness. This bravery and boldness was knocked down like a wrecking ball demolishing everything in its path. In the end, she exuded fear, and it is this fear that she describes as damning “herself to save her life,” instead of acting boldly like “the voices told her to do,” so that she would have “lost her life but saved herself” (Sullivan 136). At this point, it should be asked to the reader how they would have handled this? It is safe to say that most people would have reacted the same, because it is believed that when face with near death, we most likely will choose to save our lives, even if it means losing our souls, and it is in this moment that the reader can see Joan as a human instead of a saint.
In conclusion, Joan of Arc may very well have been a brave person, but like many people, we crumble and break sometimes. Joan is considered a heroine, a martyr, and a saint, but she can also be characterized as a human. It is in her life that we can sometimes see ourselves, and our world can parallel to hers. Dobin quotes Mark Twain, “Joan never asked to be remembered. Joan never asked for a church for Domremy. Everything which Joan of Arc did not ask for has been given to her, but this one humble thing which she did ask for and get has been taken away from her” (Dobin 43). I would like to think that there is a little bit of Joan of Arc in all of us; a little bit of bravery and boldness, but a little bit of fear as well. Joan of Arc can be considered something greater, but she is also the medieval normal in all of us.