SAINT JOAN by G. B. Shaw

Let's Start with the Preface

Some students of Saint Joan go to the exams never having read Shaw’s “Preface” to his play Saint Joan. This is a pity as it signposts some of the major themes of the text and also announces Shaw’s literary and intellectual agenda in writing about this 15th century female military hero from his perspective in the early 20th century, soon after her 1920 canonisation.

Shaw was determined not to present Joan of Arc as the heroine of a MELODRAMA

As Shaw notes in his “Preface”, most previous literary representations of St Joan—from Shakespeare to Schiller to Coleridge and Mark Twain--have sentimentalised or Romanticised (idealised) her, presenting her story as a “melodrama” where Joan is presented as virtuous and the Church and other characters are seen to be villains. Please read the section “The Maid in Literature” (Preface) for more details.

Melodramas depict conflicts in moral terms as a battle between good and evil. In addition, the characters that represent these forces are exaggerated stereotypes.

To avoid melodrama, Shaw had to avoid the sexist trap of presenting Joan as virtuous, gorgeous and helpless. For Shaw, Joan was “not a melodramatic heroine…a physically beautiful lovelorn parasite on an equally beautiful hero, but a genius and a saint, about as completely the opposite of a melodramatic heroine as it is possible for a human being to be” (Preface).

Instead he wanted to present her as a character from her historical era.

Joan as a Medieval Historical Phenomenon

The “Preface” suggests that Shaw wanted to present Saint Joan as a “credible historical and human phenomenon” (Preface) by which he meant to seize her as a woman of the Middle Ages.

As he notes, the earlier writers had lost sight of the medieval period: capitalism gradually gave way to medieval feudalism and Europeans lost sight of Catholicism in their conversion to Protestantism.

However, industrial Britain in the mid-1850s had been caught in a fervour of rediscovering Medieval culture: there was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of writer-painters and Gothic Revival architects looked nostalgically towards the religious piety of the medieval era. More here.

Shaw thus felt he could try to understand the ‘real’ Joan of Arc:

To see her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System, as they existed and were understood in the Middle Ages. (Preface)

Shaw clearly sees himself as a historian. He wanted his readers to understand the historical context of why Joan was burned, to grasp why they too “might have voted for burning her” if they had “been a member of the court that tried her” (Preface). The play tries to depict Joan as she would have been seen through Medieval eyes and not through that of the 20th century. “[U]ntil you feel that, you know nothing essential about her,” he says. He has thus “taken care to let the medieval atmosphere blow through [his] play freely” (Preface).

For example, if we read the play with a contemporary feminist mindset, the Church establishment would come across as patriarchal bullies. But if we pay attention to the way Shaw depicts the sincerity of the Chaplain’s and the Inquisitor’s belief that gender roles and dressing are determined by nature, we can better appreciate Joan as a genius who constantly thought outside the box of medieval ideas and how that genius tragically turned her into an object of evil to the male establishment of that time.

Nevertheless, 20th century time also flows through the play. On the one hand, Joan is presented as herself believing in the heavenly origins of her voices but the play also suggests that these voices are an unconscious expression of Joan’s genius. In his “Preface”, Shaw speaks of humanity’s “EVOLUTIONARY APPETITE” for change as a 20th century idea. By this he meant that humanity was instinctively pulled towards finding new and better knowledge and sought power over nature, forces that went beyond serving personal ambition. Thus we note that Joan’s voices could be viewed as supernatural, delusional or as Joan’s genius imagination expressing for her, ideas such as nationalism and Protestantism that belonged to the future.

Not Melodrama But Tragedy and Comedy

Shaw finds that only by understanding the story of Joan as tragedy can we get at the “innermost truth” (Preface). What he means by tragedy is that the choices the characters make are inevitable—they are caught within the force of their own character, within the circumstances and attitudes of their times and the roles they play in society.

Tragedy, he says, is not about a good person being victimised by bad people; it is about people bringing about evil even as they try to be good and behave righteously:

It is, I repeat, what normally innocent people do that concerns us; and if Joan had not been burnt by normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness her death at their hands would have no more significance than the Tokyo earthquake, which burnt a great many maidens. The tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders… (Preface)

Thus in Shaw’s play, Cauchon is neither a “scoundrel” nor a “great Catholic churchman” but a cleric caught in his limited understanding of theology. Nor is Warwick a bloodthirsty aristocrat greedy for power but one who seeks to save his class from the power of the people and their king.

Shaw also offers doses of comedy within a context of tragedy. As readers we can identify with the limitations of humanity as seen in the characters, but in so far as their vanities and errors are not our own, we can see through them and laugh.

‘Truthful’ but not always ‘realistic’

Sometimes writers have to sacrifice realism in order to be truthful. Shaw admits that in order to help his readers understand the forces that plagued the Medieval era, he had to endow his characters with a historical awareness of their situation. As he says, this involved a “sacrifice of verisimilitude”.

Certainly the real Warwick probably did not see Nationalism coming nor could the inquisitor Lemaitre have understood Joan’s case as well as he seems to. It is also unlikely that Cauchon was so completely in control of his emotions and disregarding of his own self-interest in judging Joan. But by presenting them in this manner, Shaw hoped to make the Church, the Inquisition and the feudal system of social relationships “intelligible” to modern readers and help them understand “an epoch fundamentally different from [their] own” (Preface).

Joan and the main ideas of the play

Joan exposes the patriarchal nature of 15th century Europe, of the Church and the feudal system. Her action makes us aware of the class structure and class conflicts of that era in feudal France where the nobility could have more power than the King. Joan herself was from bourgeoisie/business class—she was not a peasant’s daughter. Joan’s negotiations with the King, the aristocracy, the military, and the Church reveals to us the complex relationships of power in the medieval era.

She was a PIONEER FIGURE IN PROPAGATING NATIONALISM. This exposed the selfishness of the upper classes, who were reluctant to believe in Nationalist ideas because this meant sharing power with the masses.

She questioned the Catholic Church’s theology and its basis of authority, exposing contradictions and hypocrisies in their belief system. For e.g, she shows that faith is unimportant to the Catholic Church establishment, given that they mocked her faith. She makes it evident that the medieval CATHOLIC CHURCH WAS MORE INTERESTED IN POWE THAN IN RELIGION OR FAITH. Joan is a prototype of a Protestant who insists on a one-to-one relation with God, who had no patience with authority.

Shaw also uses the figure of Joan to depict how SOCIETY NEVER RECOGNISES A GENIUS until that era passes, when they can then see the person from the perspective and value system of a different time. Even Joan could not recognise her own genius and mistook it for the voice of saints. Joan illustrates how geniuses often have to suffer for their talent since society is not yet ready to engage with their ideas.

An interesting question to ask is how far Joan’s rebellion against State and Church, her ‘heresy’, is connected to her gender, to expressing a 'FEMININE' RESPONSE TO LIFE, POWER AND AUTHORITY. Certainly Courcelles and the Chaplain are unable to differentiate between heresy and witchery. The Inquisitor too in his speech on heresy (pp128-130, Sc VI) compares the growth of heresy with women’s rebellion against gender rules and marriage allegedly leading to incest, the “monstrous horror of unnatural wickedness”. The only other person in the play who is burnt as a heretic is a woman. Joan’s inspiration too comes from at least two female saints. Is the play about a female insurrection against male systems and values?

Joan as a victim of patriarchal culture

Patriarchal culture promotes the values of men, not only in relation to their alleged superiority over women, but also in terms of the values of hierarchy, classification, a black and white view of life, individualism, competition, success, egoism, and rationality. The struggle for power is also something associated with the male domain. Women in their roles as mothers, daughters and sisters are traditionally associated with community values, with emphasising support of others and collaboration over the ego. They also give importance to emotions since their roles in the family have required them to negotiate people’s feelings.

Patriarchal culture also refers to beliefs and attitudes about the nature of women and men and their respective roles in life. Some of these include the belief that women’s minds are not as strong as men’s, that it is women’s duty to be the caretakers of the family and its heritage while men are to ‘bring home the bacon’, either literally in the hunting days or figuratively now in terms of financially providing for the family. A ‘natural’ woman is even today understood in conservative society as being submissive, accommodating, and silent (she’s not supposed to have opinions). In patriarchal culture, the man is assumed to be the head of the house.

You will find patriarchal culture housed in many systems of belief and institutions such as that of religion, the family institution, schools/education, the laws of the country, ethnic culture and rituals, and military culture (wars, conquests). In monotheistic religions, God is described as a ‘He’, and in Catholic religion, only men can be priests—men are the superior beings who can be our intermediaries to God while women, nuns, are seen as capable only of ministering to people’s needs. In Catholic weddings, women must promise obedience but not men. In most cultures, modesty in dress and character is demanded from women but not from men. Laws may appear to be equitable but the processes may not be fair. As we saw recently in Singapore, young men prosecuted for sex crimes can be given light sentences so as not to destroy their chance for a ‘promising future’, which is not a consideration given to women who appear in court.

As we see in the trial scene, Joan’s cross-dressing and her breaking other rules of gender are continuously brought up even though they don’t appear to be relevant to the charge of heresy. Joan wanted to be a soldier but her culture couldn’t grasp the notion of a female soldier. Her father told her brothers to drown her if she tried to run away to join the army. Wherever Joan is accepted, it is as a performer of miracles or as someone who can accomplish goals that serve men. She gets to see the King only by claiming to be a doer of miracles and to having received messages from God. Her military plans and her idea of nationalism, of France for the French-speaking, suit the King’s political and financial interests. Dunois will heed her military strategies only if he thinks they’re messages from God. Otherwise, he is not convinced she knows the first thing about winning wars.

Some Themes in Saint Joan

• Monarchy as a complex and contradictory structure of power

• How Medieval power relations differ from modern times in terms of religious vs secular power, Church vs state, gentry vs monarchy, individuals vs institutions, peasants vs the landowners

• Medieval ideas of Gender

• The role of individual action and alliances in bringing about social change.

• What does it mean to be a ‘tragic’ figure in history?

• The blurred boundaries of pride, arrogance and innocence as character qualities—Is Joan proud or innocent?

• Reality vs Appearance

• The workings of Authority and Hierarchy

• Tragedy vs Melodrama

• Genius—the problem of recognising it

• The value and nature of imagination

• What is faith? How different is it from reason or fantasy?

• Protestantism vs Catholicism

• Nationalism vs the feudal system of power and social relations

• Systemic Tyranny

• Perspectives on Justice

• Heresy (the difference between it, witchcraft and blasphemy)

• Medieval culture vs modern culture

How to do Close Reading of Saint Joan

Some texts can feel very culturally alien to you. You may feel more comfortable with this play if you’re Catholic but still the 15th century is very different from the 21st century. One way to ‘embrace’ a text, to feel at home with it, is to do lots of close reading of passages from it. It helps to get an online edition of the text and annotate it in great detail (which you can’t do with print editions). Fill in research you’ve done on allusions and jot down your observations of how the themes and characters are developed from scene to scene.

Below is an example of close analysis of a passage from Scene V of Saint Joan. I take each part of it and identify literary/dramatic techniques as well as noting its surface meanings (of characterisation, conflict, plot development) and probing the deeper meanings (especially linking the part to what they reveal of macro themes).

Essay on a Passage-Based Question (PBQ) on humour

EXTRACT:

The Archbishop[resolutely] Come, come! this will not do. My Lord Chamberlain: please! please! we must keep some sort of order. [To the Dauphin] And you, sir: if you cannot rule your kingdom, at least try to rule yourself.

Charles. Another lecture! Thank you.

La Trémouille[handing over the paper to the Archbishop] Here: read the accursed thing for me. He has sent the blood boiling into my head: I cant distinguish the letters.

Charles[coming back and peering round La Trémouille’s left shoulder] I will read it for you if you like. I can read, you know.

La Trémouille[with intense contempt, not at all stung by the taunt] Yes: reading is about all you are fit for. Can you make it out, Archbishop?

The Archbishop. I should have expected more common-sense from De Baudricourt. He is sending some cracked country lass here —

Charles[interrupting] No: he is sending a saint: an angel. And she is coming to me: to me, the king, and not to you, Archbishop, holy as you are. She knows the blood royal if you dont. [He struts up to the curtains between Bluebeard and La Hire].

The archbishop. You cannot be allowed to see this crazy wench.

Charles[turning] But I am the king; and I will.

La Trémouille[brutally] Then she cannot be allowed to see you. Now!

Charles. I tell you I will. I am going to put my foot down —

Bluebeard[laughing at him] Naughty! What would your wise grandfather say?

Charles. That just shews your ignorance, Bluebeard. My grandfather had a saint who used to float in the air when she was praying, and told him everything he wanted to know. My poor father had two saints, Marie de Maille and the Gasque of Avignon. It is in our family; and I dont care what you say: I will have my saint too.

The Archbishop. This creature is not a saint. She is not even a respectable woman. She does not wear women’s clothes. She is dressed like a soldier, and rides round the country with soldiers. Do you suppose such a person can be admitted to your Highness’s court?

La Hire. Stop. [Going to the Archbishop] Did you say a girl in armor, like a soldier?

The Archbishop. So De Baudricourt describes her.

La Hire. But by all the devils in hell — Oh, God forgive me, what am I saying? — by Our Lady and all the saints, this must be the angel that struck Foul Mouthed Frank dead for swearing.

Charles[triumphant] You see! A miracle!

La Hire. She may strike the lot of us dead if we cross her. For Heaven’s sake, Archbishop, be careful what you are doing.

The Archbishop[severely] Rubbish! Nobody has been struck dead. A drunken blackguard who has been rebuked a hundred times for swearing has fallen into a well, and been drowned. A mere coincidence.

La Hire. I do not know what a coincidence is. I do know that the man is dead, and that she told him he was going to die.

The Archbishop. We are all going to die, Captain.

La Hire[crossing himself] I hope not. [He backs out of the conversation].

Bluebeard. We can easily find out whether she is an angel or not. Let us arrange when she comes that I shall be the Dauphin, and see whether she will find me out.

Charles. Yes: I agree to that. If she cannot find the blood royal I will have nothing to do with her.

The Archbishop. It is for the Church to make saints: let De Baudricourt mind his own business, and not dare usurp the function of his priest. I say the girl shall not be admitted.

Bluebeard. But, Archbishop —

The Archbishop[sternly] I speak in the Church’s name. [To the Dauphin] Do you dare say she shall?

Write a critical commentary on the above extract, discussing Shaw’s use of humour here and elsewhere in the play.

It is often said that Shaw’s play Saint Joan refuses to see the tragic death of the 15th century military heroine as being due to villainy but rather as due to the weaknesses, stupidities and narrow-mindedness of the social environment in which she operated. Humour is a major tool that Shaw uses to convey this sense of a woman who suffered because she was too talented and intellectually ahead of powerful men in her society. The play uses satire to pillory the vices and follies of the medieval French society’s religious and secular elite and their failure to understand even their own selfish motives. Other tools of humour used include the different types of irony, verbal wit in repartee, comic action and movement on stage and the use of inappropriate language and diction. The passage above is taken from Scene 2 of the play where we are introduced to the Dauphin and to politics in the French court. De Baudricourt has written to the Dauphin requesting him to receive Joan at the French court and give her permission to lead the French fight against the English forces, with the ultimate purpose of making Charles King of France. The scene is typical of other moments of the play in using humour and satire to expose the follies of those in power.

The scene is comic in that it presents the French court as being disorderly and unruly even though all the characters have a strong sense of hierarchical order. The passage starts with irony, with the Archbishop of Rheims emphasising the need to “keep some sort of order”. However, in this scene no one seems to have any ultimate authority, although everyone is trying to play the role of referee. The disorder arises because Charles wants to meet Joan but the Archbishop and his secular statesmen like the Lord Chamberlain La Trémouille and Bluebeard are against admitting a mere peasant girl to the French court. As the French elite, they appear to be scrappy characters. La Trémouille wants to assert power over the Dauphin but he can’t even read. We laugh at his vanity as he hands the message to the Archbishop to read, pretending that the Dauphin has “sent the blood boiling to [his] head” and that’s why he can’t read. The language of the Archbishop too at the opening of the passage is hysterical and depicts a churchman desperately trying to take power over the throne and the aristocracy. His speech is full of exclamations as he says to La Trémouille, “Come, come! this will not do. My Lord Chamberlain: please! please! we must keep some sort of order.” The fact that the stage directions tell us he says this “resolutely” suggests how badly he wants to be in charge. Then he tells Charles, “And you, sir: if you cannot rule your kingdom, at least try to rule yourself.” This is ironic because his own hysterical speech shows that he, an elderly clergyman, can’t “rule” himself but expects the Dauphin, a mere 20-something to have self-control. The silliness of the French elite is further shown later in this passage when they all decide that they will verify the claim that Joan can perform miracles by seeing if she can identify Charles among the crowd, a foolish test since all of France knows what the Dauphin looks like. In other parts of the play too, the silliness of the elite class and their vanities are seen in ironic dialogue. For instance after the crowning of Charles at Rheims Cathedral, we see the Archbishop struggle to maintain his power relationship in the court, scolding Joan for interrupting his conversation with the newly-crowned King, saying, “Maid: the King addressed himself to me, not to you. You forget yourself. You very often forget yourself.” This is ironic as it shows that he finds it very difficult to forget himself, his title and social status. Here we see the petty politics that reigns in the French court.

Shaw’s treatment of the Archbishop is especially comic in this scene, and serves to highlight his critical view of the hypocrisies and insincerities of the Catholic clergy of that era. For a churchman, the Archbishop uses highly inappropriate ‘unpriestly’ language. In this scene, he refers to Joan as some “cracked country lass” and later as a “crazy wench”. The humour of the language arises from its anachronic quality—the words are more early 20th century words belonging to Shaw’s time than to the 15th century era in which the play is set. But this type of irreverent modish language is also something we don’t expect to hear from a priest. It makes the Archbishop sound worldly, and indeed, in the next part of this scene following this passage, the Archbishop does come across as worldly when he speaks to La Trémouille about the way he uses the idea of miracles to promote the religion though he himself can see that the miracles are mere coincidences. Although he is an Archbishop, he is much more interested in wielding power than he is in spiritual matters. When he says that Joan is “not even a respectable woman” because she “does not wear women’s clothes,” the shallowness of his argument exposes the fact that this churchman has no Christian charity in his character. In this way, Shaw gives us a satiric portrayal of the ‘unholiness’ of the Catholic Church elite. This is seen in other parts of the play such as in Scene 4, where De Stogumber, the Chaplain to the Cardinal of Winchester, expresses his hatred for Joan for having won back French territories from the English by using language that shows his thirst for her blood: “Let her perish. Let her burn. Let her not infect the whole flock. It is expedient that one woman die for the people.” Towards the end of the scene, he tells Warwick and Cauchon, “I would burn her with my own hands.” Cauchon turns it into a joke by saying “Sancta simplicatas!”, suggesting he is a simple-minded soul but underneath the humour is an unpleasant image of a churchman with a murderous instinct!

Shaw also uses humour in this and other scenes to expose confusion in Catholic religious ideology that prevailed both among the masses and the Church clergy. In this passage, much humour is caused by La Hire’s conviction that Joan caused the death of a fellow-soldier, “Foul-Mouthed Frank”. The humour here comes partly from illogical reasoning—La Hire mistakes a coincidence for a miracle when Joan tells Frank that he should not swear on the point of death and Frank later falls into a well and drowns. He mistakes two unrelated events as cause and effect. The humour also comes from the fear this has caused to La Hire, who himself swears habitually. So excited by what he has learned, he swears and then tries to take back his swearing: “But by all the devils in hell—Oh, God forgive me, what am I saying? –by our Lady and all our saints…”. This is funny but it is even more so when he asks the court to give leeway to Joan as “She may strike the lot of us dead if we cross her.” Shaw mocks the religion of the French laity here: just like Robert de Baudricourt and his steward in Scene 1, La Hire’s Catholicism is based on superstition and fear of the supernatural, which were aspects of paganism that Christianity tried to correct. Contrasted with the complex ideology of the Church Militant, which deals with rarefied theory of who can interpret God’s will and how to differentiate heresy from saintliness, the ordinary people’s Catholicism seems to draw on pre-Christian cosmology. This is even more ironic in the trial scene, when the church clergy like Courcelles and de Stogumber want to draw up 64 charges against her, including that of “dancing around fairy trees with the village children” and the trial prosecutor himself, d’Estivet, thinks she is a sorceress. The irony and humour thus shows us the inconsistency and confusion in Catholic beliefs at that time and yet Joan was burned for not following the rules of a religion that was fluid.

Humour is also created in this passage by the contrast between the unconventional, lively Dauphin and his pompous, rigid courtiers. Comedy is created by the contradiction between the Dauphin’s bold assertions of his power and his nervous actions: he interrupts the Archbishop’s denigration of Joan to say assertively that she is a “saint, an angel,” adding that “she is coming to me: to me, the king, and not to you, Archbishop, holy as you are” but then follows up this sudden bossiness by quickly “strut[ting] up to the curtains” and taking refuge “between Bluebeard and La Hire”. He is also comic in the way he goes against conventional values: when told by others that he should make decisions with wisdom like his grandfather Charles the Wise (Charles V of France), he irreverently puts down his ancestor’s wisdom by retorting that his grandfather had “a saint who used to float in the air when she was praying and told him everything he wanted to know”. It is more than likely that the Dauphin had made this up, but he certainly creates a hilarious visual image for the reader and strikes us with his creativity. He also creates comedy by mocking the pretensions of the others, such as when he exposes La Trémouille’s attempt to hide his illiteracy by offering to “read [the letter] for you if you like,” and slyly adding, “I can read, you know”, pointedly hinting that La Trémouille can’t. This is accompanied by comically inappropriate action as the king-in-waiting runs over to peer over his Lord Chamberlain’s shoulder. When the Archbishop strives to scold him, he rejects this power play by counter-attacking the Archbishop’s egotism: “Another lecture, thank you,” he says. In other scenes in the play too, Shaw depicts Charles as an endearing but comic figure. In the epilogue, he is presented as a comic figure. Although by now he is King Charles the Victorious, who has won back former colonies from the British in the battlefield, he is depicted in comic terms as being in bed, and then running for cover when Ladvenu enters suddenly, saying with fear, “Who are you? Where is my gentleman of the bedchamber? What do you want?” Later in the scene when Joan enters his dream when his room is in darkness, he panics and asks, “Who is there? Who is that? Help! Murder!” The humour serves to show that Charles alone is like Joan in being creative, unconventional, rebellious and humble, able to recognise his own flaws. Shaw seems to want us to approve of him.

Humour is thus central to Shaw’s purpose in the play of mocking the hunger for power of the elite sectors of society in court and in the Church, their vanities. hypocrisies and their ignorance. It is also used to highlight breaks and fractures of belief in a Church that appears to think of itself as being a coherent body of ideology. The often comic language and action of Charles and Joan are also used to suggest that greatness of being, heroism and even genius can often be found in unexpected, light-hearted places.

Photo by fotografierende on Unsplash

Keeping a Journal

on Saint Joan

You can’t do well in Literature without

doing some writing yourself. Your

Saint Joan journal should be a place

where you reflect on the text, its characters,

themes and techniques and probe your own interpretation of the text. The more

you write about the text, the easier

it becomes to write fluently and speedily

in the exam. You will have your ideas ready

at your fingertips and you won’t be

stumped for the words needed to express your claims.

Here are some questions to start you off. Explore them from various angles and do try to include evidence from the text:

Is Joan innocent or guilty?

In what ways is Shaw’s Joan a psychologically complex character rather than a stereotype?

Make a mind map of Joan’s journey in getting what she wants. How did she, a young girl in a patriarchal society, manage to get powerful sections of her society to sponsor her plans to go to war against the English and regain French territory? How did she negotiate power?

De Stogumber says that he is “not cruel by nature”. Do you agree with that self-assessment?

In what ways are medieval ideas, beliefs and customs different from our modern world? Are we similar in some ways though?

How are Joan’s ideas about God and religion different from those held by the Church establishment? Which of her views constitute heresy?

To what extent do you think the Inquisitor, Cauchon and D’Estivet are driven by purely noble intentions in safeguarding their faith and the institution of the Church?