Discourse On Femininity: Joan of Arc as a Symbol of Gender Conflict

According to Richard Hofstadter, "American historians in the nineteenth century were in the main a conservative class of men writing for a conservative public." What they wrote "embodied the ideas of the possessing classes about industrial and financial issues, manifested the complacency of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants about social and ethnic issues, and, on constitutional issues, underwrote the requirements of property and of national centralization." Although the professionalization of historiography after 1890 produced a new generation of university-trained historians more sympathetic to social change, the pageantry movement drew on the conservative legacy of the nineteenth century as well as the historicism of the Progressive Era. As custodians of culture, the genteel classes were accustomed to history as orthodoxy based on an ideological consensus, that is, a form of knowledge that inculcated moral and patriotic values in a loyal citizenry.^[29] Given the intertext of American historical literature in the early twentieth century, Joan. the Woman is unmistakably addressed to the educated and privileged middle class. During and after the credits, DeMille precedes the first shot of the film with seven historical intertitles that appear three-dimensional, as if chiselled on stone:

Founded on the Life of Joan of Arc, the Girl Patriot, Who Fought with Men, Was Loved by Men, and Killed by Men—Yet Withal Retained the Heart of a Woman

For seventy years defeat after defeat had followed the French arms, until in the year 1429, France was on the verge of becoming an English province

Charles VII, King of France—deserted by his most powerful nobles—was opposed by his cousin the Duke of Burgundy, whose wealth and soldiers were at England's call

Paris, itself, was in English hands; and Charles, the weakling King, ruled a shabby, debt-ridden little court—unhonored and uncrowned

At this time—when the soul of France was slowly dying—there dwelt in the little village of Domremy, a simple peasant girl, the daughter of Jacques d'Arc

Her name was Joan of Arc, and her life that of the sturdy country maiden as she worked at the hearth or in the pasture

Joan of Arc [a crest appears in upper right hand corner]

DeMille had never before begun a narrative with a succession of intertitles equivalent to voice-over narration in sound films; historical literature that only educated audiences could understand evidently comprised the intertext for such titles. The sentimental tone of the first intertitle which, unlike the rest, is featured in the credits, clearly demarcates the romantic melodrama from the textbook rhetoric of the epic. The mise-en-scène of the first two shots of the film, photographed in low-key lighting, further contrasts the domestic life of the peasant girl confined to the private sphere with the martyrdom of a warrior sacrificed in defense of the public sphere. A telescoping of events for didactic purposes, these two shots juxtapose the beginning and end of the narrative before the plot unfolds. Specifically, Joan is introduced spinning thread in a medium shot which is then contrasted with a full shot of her martyred figure lit by a fleur-de-lys cast against a shadowy wall. As she extends her arms outward and lowers her head, she is obviously the victim of a crucifixion. After a slow fade-out, a historical intertitle informs the audience, "Joan of Arc is not dead. She can never die—and in the war-torn land she loved so well, her spirit fights today." Although there is no mention of either the prologue or epilogue in the script, an art title illustrated with barbed wire links the past with the present, "AN ENGLISH TRENCH SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE."^[30]

DeMille constructs his version of a usable past in the prologue by showing a young British officer (Wallace Reid) discovering an ancient sword embedded in the wall of a trench. After volunteering for a suicide mission, the soldier is pensive. An art title with the single word "MEMORY," evoked by the drawing of a British castle on a horizon of fields intersected by a stream, conveys his nostalgia for the bucolic scene that is home. Spending his last

moments in a darkened trench lit by a single candle, the soldier is seated on his bunk when a brilliant apparition of Joan of Arc appears to his left. She links the events of the past to the present, as well as melodrama to realistic newsreel footage, by stating rather enigmatically, "The time has come for thee to expiate thy sin against me." Stilted utterances repeated by actors in countless sound epics, it should be noted, underscore the advantage of dialogue titles as archaically inflected speech in silent film; in this instance, the intertitles give further evidence of historical address constructed for a highbrow audience. Plunged "INTO THE PAST," the maid of Domrémy meets Eric Trent, an English nobleman in the service of the Duke of Burgundy during the Hundred Years' War. A French counterpart of the art title, "MEMORY," an extreme long shot shows Joan in a pastoral scene as she tends sheep on a brilliant sunlit day in woods where skyscraping trees form graceful arches. Although they are separated by historical time, nationality, and gender, the British officer and the French peasant girl both have ties to a romanticized vision of a rural landscape. Americans have a quarrel with history, as Hofstadter argues, because they are unable to reconcile a yearning for the agrarian past with modernization as progress. The contradictions of antimodernist civic drama rooted in nostalgia are expressed in Joan the Woman in terms of the politics of gender rather than urban class conflict. The peasant maid whose spiritual mission meant a refusal, indeed, a reversal, of traditional gender roles is represented according to a sentimental tradition familiar to genteel audiences. A fan magazine novelization captured Macpherson's concept of the heroine as a woman who foregoes romantic love to become the savior of her country:

And so she grew to womanhood, with the flame that burned in her heart shining in her wide, grave eyes. . . . And those beautiful, sad-seer eyes of hers glanced once into other eyes, bold and beseeching and loverlike, and the brave heart nearly faltered ere she could look away.

Human love was not for her, nor the touch of her child's groping fingers on her breast, nor the homely, humble joys of home.

"I cannot love you," she told her lover quietly; "I shall not wed any man."^[31]

At a time when anxiety regarding the diminution of the Victorian practice of separate spheres for the sexes informed political discourse, Joan the Woman exemplified confusion regarding gender roles. For an untutored peasant maid in a remote village, romantic love proves to be as treacherous as court intrigue. DeMille uses Freudian symbolism to show that Joan of Arc assumes the unconventional role of a warrior only because men are cowardly and unprincipled. A timid French deserter named Gaspard (Lawrence Peyton), for example, seeks shelter in Domrémy and flings his sword on the table. Joan carries the weapon out of the room as if she were transfixed by it. When the villagers flee in panic from Burgundian troops led by Eric Trent, DeMille shows the peasant maid in a medium shot as she hands the sword back to Gaspard so that he may "parley" with the invaders. Carrying

a child in her arms, she then rushes off to join her family but stops to glance backward; a cut to a point-of-view shot reveals the unmanly Gaspard taking refuge in a barn. A cut back to Joan shows her handing the child to another woman; in the next shot, she occupies the space that Gaspard has abandoned to confront enemy soldiers advancing from the rear. At the head of his troops, Eric Trent, in a reverse high angle shot, first sights Joan with arms outstretched as she entreats him to turn back. Dismounting, he forces her into the barn where Gaspard is hiding. DeMille cuts between interior medium shots of Eric Trent expressing dishonorable intentions and exterior long shots of pillaging soldiers to emphasize sexual assault. Awed by the French maid's fearlessness and spirituality, the invader becomes a gallant courtier but is felled by Gaspard, concealed in the loft, before he can rejoin his men. Joan decides to hide the wounded Englishman to nurse him back to health. Photographed in a slightly high angle medium shot, Joan of Arc and Eric Trent are lit against a darkened loft strewn with straw; while he sleeps in the foreground, she wears his glove and looks inspired. The dim illumination gradually fades except for a spotlight on the face of the saint transported by a vision of her future.

DeMille had no compunction about foregrounding fictional scenes of romantic melodrama seemingly out of place in a historical pageant. As Eric Trent recovers from his wound, for example, he plucks the petals from a daisy and recites, "She loves me. She loves me not." When he later bids Joan farewell, DeMille cuts from a frontal two-shot to an oblique angle to show an apparition of a lighted sword against the Englishman's body. As Eric Trent descends the ladder, the brilliant figure of a courtier representing one of Joan's angels appears to announce, "Prepare thyself, Joan, for thou art to save France." Astounded, the peasant maid drops to her knees as the light from the apparition illuminates the loft. DeMille cuts to a close medium shot of Joan to capture her awed response, but in the next shot her mother emerges from a hut to pluck the feathers from a bird. The director thus juxtaposes domestic scenes with historical tableaux until Joan leaves Domrémy during a nighttime sequence that impressed critics with a two-color process that intensified the orange glow of a candle in a room flooded with ambient moonlight.^[32] At the court of Charles VII (Raymond Hatton), where the focus is on historical reenactment rather than romantic melodrama, Joan of Arc inspires French soldiers to follow her into battle. An extreme long shot of the crowded throne room, intercut with English soldiers advancing on Orléans, dramatizes Joan's extraordinary ability as a seer; she announces the siege as superimposed images of the enemy march across the screen. After the call to arms, a historical tableau titled "The Blessing of the Standard" consists of two shots, the second beginning with an iris that opens out to reveal a panorama with clergy in ceremonial robes flanking the screen, Joan holding the consecrated flag in the center, and General La Hire

(Hobart Bosworth) and his troops kneeling in the background. As evidence of research to achieve authenticity in these sequences, the script cites several sources such as Manners, Customs, and Dress during the Middle Ages , the Encyclopedia Britannica , the Life of Charles the Bold , and the Life of Louis XI .^[33]

After "The Blessing of the Standard," which is constructed in the tradition of historical reenactments in parlor theatricals and civic pageants, DeMille's representation of space becomes more cinematic in the first of his monumental battle scenes, the lifting of the siege of Orléans. Although the director demonstrates finesse in handling extras in the huge crowd scenes that became his trademark, the geography of the conflict is unclear because the French attack an outlying fortress occupied by the English, who are laying siege but have not yet become the conquerors of Orléans.^[34] Assisted by a team of ten directors, including his brother William and Oscar Apfel, each in charge of a regiment of one hundred men and armored horses, DeMille produced a spectacle that represented the battle of the sexes as well as the end of a famous siege.^[35] Advancing knights carrying banners on horseback and foot soldiers with pikes are photographed in sweeping long shots from frontal, lateral, and reverse angles as they ride over impalements and charge into the English line to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The fighting becomes especially fierce in the moat surrounding the castle as the French, photographed in high angle shots, attempt to scale the wall. After an artillery barrage creates an opening in the stone wall of the fortress, Eric Trent and his men retreat toward the tower as Joan of Arc enters through the breach and is immediately felled by an arrow. About to slay the woman he loves, the Englishman halts with a shock of recognition. DeMille cuts from extreme long shot to medium shot to medium close-up to focus on human feelings in the midst of stirring historical events. When Eric Trent is later brought to Joan as a captive, he surrenders his sword and is obliterated by an iris that focuses on the saint glancing up toward the heavens. According to a historical title, this victory marks the "End of First Epoch." At first-run theaters that projected the entire film, a ten-minute intermission followed.^[36]

Although the battle for Orléans is symbolically represented as a sexual assault under the command of a female warrior, especially in scenes in which Joan of Arc storms the castle, the victor herself becomes the prey in "The Second Epoch." Welcomed by the jubilant inhabitants of the city, who had previously been shown close to starvation, Joan leads her troops into the city in one of the few forward tracking shots in the film. She is immediately surrounded by admiring women, one of whom offers her an infant to be embraced. At the very moment of her triumph, however, Joan is reduced to a voyeuristic object as the suspicious eyes of a spy are shown behind the rectangular slot of a door. A reverse shot of the interior reveals the voyeur to be L'Oiseleur (Tully Marshall), a monk in the employ of a British agent

24. Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc is surrounded by women, one of whom lifts 
up her child, after the liberation of Orléans in Joan the Woman, 
DeMille's first historical epic. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

25. Farrar relinquishes romantic love as represented by Eric Trent 
(Wallace Reid), a fictional character, in favor of spirituality 
and martyrdom. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)

named Bishop Cauchon. Following the coronation of Charles VII, another impressive historical tableau, Joan of Arc refuses both filial obligation and romantic love in separate interviews with her uncle and her English prisoner. DeMille ends this sequence with a lyrical set piece in which Eric slowly walks toward the Gothic arches in the rear of the dimly lit cathedral, still strewn with flowers from the coronation. A cut to a reverse shot shows the saint ascending the stairs to the altar where she kneels to dedicate herself to God.

Joan of Arc's demise quickly follows as Eric Trent is enlisted in a plot orchestrated by Bishop Cauchon (Theodore Roberts) and a court advisor nicknamed "The Spider" (George Clary), both agents in the English cause. A forward tracking shot shows the Maid of Orléans, dressed without her usual armor, riding at night with a handful of men to Compiègne. Accompanying her is the superimposed image of the angel of death on horseback. At daybreak she is captured by Eric's men and sexually harassed as a sign of foul play to come. Gaspard, who has become a devoted follower, is stabbed to death as he attempts to defend her honor. Anticipating events with unbecoming glee for a cleric, Bishop Cauchon threatens Joan in a darkened chamber with a boiling cauldron in the foreground. Photographed in extreme low-key lighting, this sequence proves riveting because the Bishop terrifies the saint in the presence of three hooded figures costumed like Ku Klux Klansmen. DeMille thus conflates a Catholic clergyman, symbolizing new immigrants in a Protestant culture, with hooded persecutors in scenes that aroused protest. After she "promises to return to the garb of a woman," Joan is led back to her cell, but the Bishop initiates a scheme to pronounce her "a relapsed heretic" to be burned at the stake. At this point, even L'Oiseleur protests, "Thou art a priest and should seek the salvation of the girl rather than her death!" Cauchon orders a soldier to "place the worst ruffian of thy guard in the cell of Joan the Maid" and, in another highly voyeuristic moment, proceeds to spy on her through a large opening in the floor above the prison chamber. An overhead shot photographed through the aperture shows the brute trying to assault Joan as Eric Trent finally comes to her rescue, but his attempt to save her is foiled.

Condemned to death because she has "resumed the garb of a man," a sure sign of heresy, Joan of Arc spends her final nightmarish hours in a sequence tinted blue and intercut with amber shots of the court of Charles VII in utter debauchery. At dawn, she is carted to the public square where black smoke turns day into night in a stunning two-color process that shows orange flames consuming piles of faggots. Joan triumphantly cries out, "My voices were of God—they have not deceived me!" As clouds of billowing smoke fade out, the epilogue continues the events of the prologue to relate the Hundred Years' War to World War I. The British officer has been fatally wounded during a successful effort to destroy an enemy trench.

As he lays dying in the foreground, a large apparition of Joan, lit against the surrounding darkness of the trenches, appears to dominate the skyline. Aside from linking past and present through the fate of the characters in the romantic melodrama, the prologue and epilogue convey the universal significance of the life of Joan of Arc as an allegory.