Overview

"Joan has a unique role in Western imagination - she is one of the few true female heroes. Marina Warner uses her superb historical and literary skills to move beyond conventional biography and to capture the essence of ""Joan of Arc"", both as she lived in her own time and as she has 'grown' in the human imagination over the five centuries since her death. She has examined the court documents from Joan of Arc's 1431 Inquisition trial for heresy and woven the facts together with an analysis of the histories, biographies, plays, and paintings and sculptures that have appeared over time to honor this heroine and symbol of France's nationhood. Warner shows how the few facts that are known about the woman Joan have been shaped to suit the aims of those who have chosen her as their hero. This book places Joan in the context of the mythology of the female hero and 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."

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9780520224643

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"""Elegantly written, thoughtful (as one would expect from the author of ""Alone of All Her Sex), imaginative, sensitive. Warner ranges through iconographic, allegorical, literary, dramatic, operatic, cinematographic, linguistic, historical, biographical, and political evidence to present a history of Joan and of her subsequent representations.""--""Choice"

After an inconclusive encounter with the Virgin Mary (Alone of All Her Sex), Warner tackles another great archetypal figure, again with mixed results. Joan, as Warner says, overturns the usual feminine categories (wife, mother, courtesan, queen, etc., even amazon). In her effort to frame this bafflingly simple, mythically protean woman, Warner ransacks history, theology, iconography, psychology, and so on; some of her interpretations are arresting, but her findings are ultimately incoherent. Thus, Warner makes a great deal of Joan's transvestism, only to conclude that while her virginal independence from men might suggest a kind of Jungian wholeness (coincidentia opposotorum, female warrior as Yin-and-Yang), still her life must be read as a tribute to the superiority of the male world. Both in life and in death Joan served as a suitably versatile talisman for all sorts of masculine causes, military and political. On the other hand, loan was unquestionably female, and so Warner pronounces her a figurehead for the women's side in one phase of the lasting struggle, the continuing duel, between Penthesilea and Hero Achilles. As loan might have said, Comment?? Warner is never at a loss for theories, sometimes quite plausible (loan's interrogators forced her to personify and distort her voices ), sometimes quite dubious (the use of feminine gender for abstract virtues is a linguistic anomaly). There's no reason why feminists shouldn't lay claim to loan, just as French nationalists, Romantic artists, and pious Catholics already have. But to insist, as Warner does, on shattering the mould of received ideas that now confines la Pucelle is simply to propose another (perhaps more rational) form of confinement. And, like other flesh-and-blood heroes, Joan is too rich, too complex, and too contradictory for that. A thoughtful, stimulating failure. (Kirkus Reviews)

Elegantly written, thoughtful (as one would expect from the author of Alone of All Her Sex), imaginative, sensitive. Warner ranges through iconographic, allegorical, literary, dramatic, operatic, cinematographic, linguistic, historical, biographical, and political evidence to present a history of Joan and of her subsequent representations. -- Choice

Author Information

Marina Warner is a historian and novelist; among her books are No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1995), and Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1983). She lives in London.

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