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to India International Centre Quarterly
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN / 23
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24 / India International Centre Quarterly
[ was in my thirteenth year when god sent a voice to guide me. At first,
I was very much frightened. The voice came towards the hour of noon,
in summer, in my father's garden. I had fasted the preceding day. I heard
the voice on my right hand, in the direction of the church. I seldom
hear it without seeing a light. That light always appears on the side
from which I hear the voice.6
Sackville-West writes:
The spirits who habitually appeared to her were three— the Archangel
Michael, St. Margaret and St. Catherine; Gabriel and other angels
appeared too but these were most constant. They came in light, she
could feel them and touch them. They had soft and beautiful voices
and appeared particularly if she was in a wood, and when bells chime.
One of the witnesses writes when she was in the fields and heard the
She left Domremy, her native village, first in May 1428 and
then finally forever in January 1429. She left without her parents'
permission—her father had already had dreams of Joan's war
riorhood and had threatened to drown her if ever she ran away
with soldiers. Her father was to die of a broken heart at the end, o
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN / 25
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26 / India International Centre Quarterly
Rheimssystematically
is theandturning point. Joan's Once
voices, Charles is crowned
King, he loses interest in Joan, and the rest follows as
deliberately as murder.
having accomplished their mission, logically clamour for the
sacrifice. Blood must be spilled, this is the semiotic consequence
of her amenorreah. Even in death by fire, however, her heart and
her guts did not burn or atrophy according to legend, but running
with blood were thrown into the river.
Thus, for a period of two years, briefly, Joan broke the boun
daries between what was characterised as the implicit features of
the Estate System: Religious/Warrior/Production function. In
her being, worship, combat and labour were fused. What had
justified their existence as separate categories were their func
tions. Joan showed that she, a woman could collapse all of them
and be victorious. What was then the bases of her prophecy? It
was an understanding of structures, roles, events, circumstances
and the will to act upon these. Intuition and reason combined
fearlessly and communicated itself in the clarity of her position,
her speech. A peasant, a woman led a king and won for him a
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN / 27
crown. The strategy lay in her belief that God existed, and that
she had a will—both existed autonomously and in relation to each
other, and gave her the courage to face the fire.
Yet, inspite of the miracles accompanying her death is the
understanding that she was a woman, afraid, cold, isolated, con
fused. And it is to a description of these last months that I shall
now return.
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28 / India International Centre Quarterly
"How do you know that it is Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret who
talk to you," they asked.
"I have told you often enough that they are Saint Catherine and Saint
Margaret—believe me if you like."
"Does St. Catherine speak English?"
"Why should she speak English as she is not on the English side?"
"What did St. Michael look like when he appeared to you? Was he
naked?"
"Do you think our Lord has nothing to dress him in?"
"Had he any hair?"
"Why should it have been cut off?"
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN / 29
For her, the counsel of voices was the one to whom she gave
legitimacy; and she substantially proved thereby that private
judgement, will, intuition and revolution were more important to
her than the Association of Believers called the Church. The
nation as secular, a composition of differences was so clear in her
articulation, in her aim and her motivation; but it was not a valid
desire in the medieval age, when State and religion thus com
bined. This is why Bernard Shaw in Saint Joan calls her Prot
tant—because it is indeed an early voice of the direct encount
with God. She loved the church, but her politics was profound
located in the freedom of spirit. Yet as Shaw remarks, this will wa
never arbitrary, it was clearly conditioned in the understandin
of the divine, Joan's answer is implicitly that of complete trust an
of a cerebrality characteristic of prophecy. Shaw describes thi
attitude with the verse "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him
but I will maintain my own way before Him."18 When threatened
by the fire she said, "I will say no more about that. Were I to see
the fire, I would still say all that I have said, and would not d
otherwise."19 The clerk wrote in the margins "Superba Responsa".
One of the most curious turns of the trial is the so called
By March 10th, she said that "there was an angel, she curtsied
to him, went down on her knees, and took-off her cap." March
13th saw her elaborating the story further—probably exhausted
by the Inquisition's desire to hear a story, she invented it. It is a
gauche and muddled story—the angel brought the crown
through the door to the King ( a distance 'the length of a Lance').
She follows the angel into the room and said to the King, "Sire,
here is your sign, take it." She believed by the time she produces
this version that other people had seen the crown.
What Sackville-West has called an invention, or at best an
allegory, Marina Warner describes as the substitutability of
metaphorical language. A King was not a king without a crown
given to him through God's intermediaries on earth. The angel at
Chinon, whom she first said gave the Dauphin the sign of his
crown, and the archbishop of Rheims, of whom she spoke later,
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30 / India International Centre Quarterly
90
are in this respect interchangeable. When Charles was crowned
at Rheims, which had been Joan's greatest desire, she wept and
said, "Gentle King, now the will of God has been accomplished
who wished that I should raise the siege of Orleans and bring you
to this city of Rheims to receive your solemn consecration, show
ing that you are the true king, that you are he to whom the
Kingdom of France should belong."
between human beings and nature and need we say it, the sacred.
The cathedrals of France are born of the French countryside."
As Rodin enters one of these churches, at the triumphal arch,
he sees a little girl, and describes her as 'a lily of the valley in
flower' to whom sensual pleasure is yet a stranger. "If this young
girl knew how to look and to see, she would recognise her portrait
in all the portals of our Gothic churches, for she is the incarnation
of our style, of our art, of our France."23
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SUSAN VISVANATHAN / 31
Bibliography
3. The Knight, the Lady and the Priest, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
4. Tom Keneally, Blood Red Sister Rose, London: Sceptre, 1991.
5. Michael Kunze, Highroad to the State: A Tale of Witchcraft, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987.
6. Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe, Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic, New York:
Vintage, Random, 1983.
7. August Rodin, Cathedrals of France, London: Hamlyn, 1965.
8. Vita Sackville-West, St. Joan, London: Penguin, 1955.
9. Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1978.
10. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc, London: Vintage, 1991.
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India International Centre Quarterly
Notes:
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