Intercourse (17 page)

Joan was sentenced to life imprisonment in women’s clothes.

On May 27 or 28, she dressed in men’s clothes. Questioned in her cell by the Inquisitors as to why, since this act of defiance would cost her her life,

She said, of her own will. And that nobody had forced her to do so. And that she preferred man’s dress to woman’s.
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She said that she had recanted “only through fear of the fire”; that she “would rather do penance by dying, than bear any longer the agony of imprisonment”; and that she had never meant to “revoke anything. ”
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On May 30, Joan the Maid was burned at the stake. Walking toward it, she asked if someone would not give her a cross. A soldier gave her two twigs, formed into a cross. Legend says that a white dove emerged from the fire at her death; that the word
Jesus
was legible in the flames; and the executioner insisted that he could not burn her heart, that “when the body was burnt in the flames and reduced to ashes her heart remained intact and full of blood. ”
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The indestructible heart became, as Marina Warner says, “a new touchstone, of her integrity, her incorruptibility... ”
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The indestructible heart is likened to her body undestroyed by sex in life, her virginity, a source of the elegance and strength of her heroism: “The pure vessel cannot, in the last analysis, be smashed; nothing can prevail against it. ”
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Not a sentimentalist, Joan said at her trial

that those who wished to remove her from this world might well themselves go first.
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And, indeed, they all have.

We have role models; Joan had voices. Her voices were always accompanied by a radiance, illumination, an expanse of light. She saw angels and was visited by saints. Her two special voices, guides and consolation, were St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret of Antioch. While many of the elaborations on their legends show the iconoclastic individuality of the two saints, the main outlines of their lives—the substance of their heroism—were virtually identical. Both were desired by powerful men (heads of state), turned them down, were tortured and decapitated. Both were in mortal combat with male power, were militant in their opposition to it, did not capitulate, and were killed for resisting. Both were virgins.

St. Catherine was the patron saint of unmarried girls and also of philosophers and students. She was famous for her erudition, one of the rare and great women of learning. Her father, a king, wanted her to be married but she kept turning down suitors. One night she dreamed that Mary, holding Jesus, asked her if she wanted to be his bride. She said yes, but Jesus turned her down because she was not a Christian. She got baptized; that night Jesus, surrounded by angels and saints, put a wedding ring on her hand. When the Emperor Maxentius ordered all the Christians in Alexandria killed, Catherine went to him to argue for her faith. The Emperor made her debate fifty learned men, skilled orators; she won each debate and the fifty men were burned. The Emperor wanted Catherine for his mistress and promised that her image would be worshipped everywhere if only she would make a sacrifice to the gods. She refused, for Jesus and her faith. The Emperor threw her into prison and had her terribly tortured. The Catherine wheel, an instrument of torture, was invented for the purpose of eviscerating and killing her; but an angel destroyed the wheel. Catherine was killed by decapitation.

St. Margaret was the patron saint of peasants and women in childbirth, the latter not because she had children but because she was swallowed by the devil in the form of a dragon, and her purity and resistance were so great that he had to spew her up again whole and unhurt. Viewed as someone miraculously reborn uninjured, she became a symbol of hope in the life-and-death agony of childbirth. Margaret’s father was a pagan priest, but she was secretly baptized. She tended animals in the fields. The governor, Olybrius, saw her, wanted her, and had her brought to him. She refused him and declared her faith. She was imprisoned, flogged, and terribly tortured. In prison she was swallowed by the dragon; and when she triumphed over the dragon, the devil confronted her again, this time in the form of a sympathetic man who told her that she had suffered too much:

But she seized his hair, hurled him to the ground, and placing her foot on his head, exclaimed:

“Tremble, great enemy. You now lie under the foot of a woman. ”
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She was burned, torches applied to various parts of her body, but she acted as if she felt no pain. She was killed by decapitation.

The legends of both saints were well known in Joan’s time and environment, common stories for everyone, not arcane anecdotes for the educated. The narrative details were so familiar that an evil and stupid person was even referred to, in the common parlance, as an “Olybrius. ” Women were named after these saints and celebrated name days. These saints were figures of mass adoration in stories of adventure, romance, and heroism. There was an elaborate and epic imagery in the churches to communicate visually the drama and scale of their bravery and martyrdom. The artifacts and paintings in the churches told the stories of the saints and their heroism and suffering in dramatic, graphic pictures; a bold, articulate, mesmerizing iconography not rivaled for effect until the invention of the wide screen in cinema. St. Catherine was pictured with the wheel named after her, St. Margaret with a dragon, both with swords. They were shown with swords because they had been decapitated, but the abridgement of the narrative into a martial image conveyed militance, not just martyrdom. Each faced what amounted to a state-waged war against her person: the whole power of the state—military, physical, sadistic—arrayed against her will and her resistance and the limits of a body fragile because human. This goes beyond the timorous ambition of today: a woman fights off a rapist. Each of these women fought off a rapist who used the apparatus of the state— prison and torture—to destroy her as if she were an enemy nation. Each refused the male appropriation of her body for sex, the right to which is a basic premise of male domination; each refused a man in whom male power and state power were united, a prototype for male power over women; and each viewed the integrity of her physical body as synonymous with the purity of her faith, her purpose, her self-determination, her honor. This was not a puerile virginity defined by fear or effeminacy. This was a rebel virginity harmonious with the deepest values of resistance to any political despotism.

Joan identified deeply with these women; indeed, her love for these saints is her richest adult experience of sisterhood or woman-identification. They were her main voices and radiances. They were sometimes tangible presences to her, so that she kissed and touched and held them:

Asked if she had ever kissed or embraced Saint Catherine or Saint Margaret,
She said she had embraced them both.
Asked whether they smelt pleasant,
She replied: “Assuredly they did so. ”
Asked whether in embracing them she felt warmth or anything else,
She said she could not embrace them without feeling and touching them.
Asked what part she embraced, whether the upper or lower,
She answered: “It is more fitting to embrace them above rather than below. ”
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In Joan’s society, there was a widespread belief in the reality of such visitations. The Inquisitors were not asking: is she crazy? On the contrary, they were asking: was it the Devil? In asking about the smell of the saints, for instance, they were most probably looking for evidence of a sulphur smell associated with the devil. These saints were real to Joan; and had Joan not been a political outlaw—had Joan been a political ally of the Inquisition—they might have been both real and good to the Church, as later they became when she herself was sainted. In the years of her victories, Catherine and Margaret told her what to do. In the years of her defeats and imprisonment, they were her consolation. Either they came to her literally, sent by God, as she said; or she had magnificently internalized them, surpassing them in ambition, in the reach of her challenge, in the complexity of her resistance, and in the original and resourceful strategies she created for putting herself beyond the reach of the male sexual desire that annihilated them. She learned from them the way a genius learns: she did not repeat them in form or in content; she invented new form, new content, a revolutionary resistance. Joan did not die because men desired her; but because she refused the status, including the outward trappings (female clothing), of one who could be so desired at all. Virginity was one dimension of her overall strategy, one aspect of her rebellion; and, interestingly, her refusal to have sex with a man was not a dogmatic or ideological one. As Marina Warner points out in her book on Joan, the name Joan called herself and by which she was widely known,
La Pucelle, “denotes a time of passage, not a permanent condition. ”
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Her own testimony at her trial seems to confirm this nuance:

Asked whether it had been revealed to her that if she lost her virginity she would lose her good fortune, and that her voices would come no more to her.
She said: That has not been revealed to me.
Asked whether she believes that if she were married the voices would come to her,
She answered: I do not know; and I wait upon Our Lord."
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Had Joan simply learned a Church precept by rote or had she wanted to conform to a theological code of sexual purity, she would have held virginity to be a sacred state of being, one that would ennoble her for the duration of her life, a passive state intrinsically holy and magical with God’s blessings. In her society, virginity was “an ideal wreathed by the finest poetry and exalted in beautiful Latin hymns and conventual chants. ”
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It was a common belief cited as fact by Church authorities with whom she came into contact that “God had revealed to virgins ... that which He had kept hidden from men. ”
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Instead for Joan—and Catherine and Margaret—virginity was an active element of a self-determined integrity, an existential independence, affirmed in choice and faith from minute to minute; not a retreat from life but an active engagement with it; dangerous and confrontational because it repudiated rather than endorsed male power over women. For all three women, virginity was “a passage, not a permanent condition, ” the precondition for a precocious, tragic passage to death. As rebellion, virginity amounted to a capital crime. No woman, however, had ever rebelled the way Joan of Arc, virgin, rebelled.

Because she found a way to bypass male desire, Joan’s story illuminates and clarifies to what degree male desire determines a woman’s possibilities in life: how far, how fast, where, when, and how she can move; by what means; what activities she can engage in; how circumscribed her physical freedom is; the total subjugation of her physical form and freedom to what men want from her.

Joan, unlike Catherine and Margaret, lived in a Christian world: all the soldiers, English, Burgundian, and French, were Christians. Virgins were supposed to be venerated by Christians; and certainly, Christian virgins were not supposed to be raped. More than law, ecclesiastic or secular, magic backed up the prohibition: God and all the angels and saints were on the side of the virgin; and so, of course, was Mary with her great and sacred power. Maxentius and Olybrius did not have to reckon with the divine significance of virginity; but Christian soldiers did. And there was an aura of magic created by the gossip and legend around the persona of Joan herself, a deviant virgin in that she was a soldier and a deviant soldier in that she was a woman. Virgin and soldier: she was dangerous in both regards. A man who wanted to fuck her might be killed: whether by magic or in combat. She was not the usual easy pickings. The stories about her insisted on her vocation as a soldier but emphasized the lethal magic of her virginity. For instance, once she was saluted by a soldier who recognized her as
La Pucelle. He bragged to a companion: “If I could only get hold of her for a night, by God, she wouldn’t be a virgin much longer. ” Joan heard and answered: “You mock God and yet you shall soon die. ”
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In less than an hour, the soldier drowned.

The soldier understood that Joan was genitally female and therefore socially arrogant in her chastity; he wanted to fuck her to bring her down, put her in her place, use her for what she was. His comprehension of her status was appropriately metaphysical. She is; therefore she is female, carnal, accessible. This is the underlying a priori reality of male supremacy; but it is overladen with ideology and a baroque psychology of male desire. Male desire is presented as a response to female beauty. It is dogmatically maintained, in the ideology, that men fuck women because the women attract, are sensual, are pretty, have some dimension of beauty or grace, however lowdown or elegant, that brings on desire. The ravaged junkie-prostitutes on our contemporary streets who quantitatively do the elephant’s share of the fucking in this society or the toothless bawds of history who got fucked more than the elegant ladies by all accounts are happily invisible in the ideological representations of how, why, when, and under what circumstances men fuck. The ideology allows for the fanciful development of a psychology of personal desire: the man is complex and interesting, lured as a unique individual by various manifestations of beauty in women. But as Lenny Bruce noted: “You put guys on a desert island and they’ll do it to mud. ”
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Men dignify themselves by insisting on a correspondence between fucking and beauty, but there is none (see Baudelaire); men fuck female in the metaphysical sense. Because male ideology has the authority of truth, male desire is taken as a real recognition of or measure of female beauty, even though male desire in reality is a sexual recognition of female as female, fucking the empirical proof that
she is, therefore he can use her. According to the ideology, then, where there is no desire, there is no beauty. Thus, Bernard Shaw can write of Joan: