54 pages • 1 hour read
George Bernard ShawSaint Joan
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Persecution and the Freedom of the Individual
Saint Joan explores the inevitable conflict between individual freedom and social stability, resulting in the persecution of people whose beliefs are too radically different from those of their contemporaries. In the Preface, George Bernard Shaw compares Joan’s conflict with the Catholic Church to how contemporary people cannot tolerate those who defy the dominant social systems of the 1920s, particularly medical science. Shaw sees this persecution as inevitable—not the result of corruption or illegal abuse of the court system, but rather its intended function. For this reason, he believes that Joan’s conviction had both a tragic and comic aspect:
[T]he tragedy of such murders is that they are not committed by murderers. They are judicial murders, pious murders; and this contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into tragedy: the angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers (63).
Because society will persecute those who refuse to submit to collective beliefs, even if their ideas are objectively the correct ones, Shaw suggests that individual freedom will always be challenged.
In Joan’s case, her individual interpretation of God’s will comes into conflict with the authority of the Catholic Church, resulting in her excommunication. Pierre Cauchon articulates that the problem with Joan is not that she is spreading theological misinformation, but rather that she believes she is communicating directly with God. Cauchon complains that this invalidates the need for the clergy, saying, “[S]he acts as if she herself were The Church. She brings the message of God to Charles; and The Church must stand aside. She will crown him in the cathedral of Rheims: she, not The Church!” (120). Similarly, the Inquisitor at Joan’s trial explains that Joan is guilty of the sin of pride, despite the fact that she displays personal humility. The Inquisitor describes Joan’s pride as too much trust in her own reason, claiming that heresies are always begun “by vain and ignorant persons setting up their own judgment against the Church, and taking it upon themselves to be the interpreters of God’s will” (149). The inquisitor believes that individual freedom is equivalent to the sin of pride because it would invalidate the social power of the Church. Therefore, as Shaw argues in the preface, the system cannot tolerate Joan’s individuality because it threatens to destabilize the hierarchy of social power.
Joan does not see herself as prideful because, from her perspective, she is merely following the commands of God—a higher authority than the Church. In her trial, she argues that she cannot submit to the will of the Church if the Church is in direct conflict with what she has been told by God. She refuses to promise to obey the court’s commands “in case the Church should bid me do anything contrary to the command I have from God, I will not consent to it, no matter what it may be” (157). Joan frames her individual freedom as a form of submission to authority, but to an authority that supersedes the earthly authority of the Church. Therefore, she does not see herself as prideful or heretical.
In the Epilogue, when Joan becomes a saint, the spirit of the Inquisitor reverses his earlier perspective and acknowledges that sometimes the law can be a form of tyranny. While Cauchon and Ladvenu attest that Joan’s trial was entirely legal and free from corruption, the Inquisitor’s spirit admits that the law can still be wrong. When he kneels before Joan, he tells her, “[T]he judges in the blindness and bondage of the law praise thee, because thou has vindicated the vision and the freedom of the living soul” (187). Joan’s canonization as a saint affirms the right of an individual to decide what is right and wrong, suggesting that laws can often be blind and overly restrictive. While individual freedom appears victorious in this moment, Joan’s rejected suggestion that she return to life implies that the world might still not be able to accommodate the radical freedom of an individual, and she would eventually be persecuted once again.
The Invention of Nationalism
Shaw depicts the beginnings of Nationalism through the conflict between the English and the French in the 15th century. While he points out in the preface that “[T]he idea we call Nationalism was so foreign to the medieval conception of Christian society that it might almost have been directly charged against Joan as an additional heresy” (38), many characters display nationalistic traits. Joan notably believes that fighting the English is divinely justified because God supports the sovereignty of nations. Referring to the English invaders, she claims that “God made them just like us; but He gave them their own country and their own language; and it is not His will that they should come into our country and try to speak our language” (82). Similarly, when she urges the Dauphin to become consecrated and crowned as king, she argues that this will restore the proper order of society. She tells the Dauphin that “the very clay of France will become holy: her soldiers will be the soldiers of God: the rebel dukes will be rebels against God: the English will fall to their knees and beg thee let them return to their lawful homes in peace” (103). To Joan, having a French king who has been blessed by God will restore social order.
Previously, England and France had fought over territory due to conflicts over feudal inheritance. Most of the English court and royal family spoke primarily French, as they were descended from the Normans who invaded England in 1066 CE. The English kings claimed the right to the French throne after the death of Charles IV of France because the English King Edward III was technically the oldest male relative of the French king. However, because his relation to the French throne was through his mother, Isabella of France, French jurists disputed his claim to the throne. King Edward III also held the title of Duke of Aquitaine, a large territory in Western France that had passed into English hands through Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to King Henry II in 1152. It was the invasion of this territory by King Philip VI of France, in 1337, that sparked the Hundred Year’s War between the two kingdoms. By the time Joan was born, in 1412, the English King Henry VI possessed a legally defensible claim to the throne of France. His father, Henry V, had been adopted as heir of France by King Charles VI of France, and his mother was the French King’s eldest living daughter. However, Joan’s interpretation of nations as being defined by language rather than inheritance law causes her to see an English ruler as a violation of God’s plan. Her views are informed by nationalistic devotion to the French-speaking population, rather than an interpretation of feudal rights.
Pierre Cauchon notes that Joan is a Nationalist, but so is John de Stogumber on the side of the English. Cauchon sees Nationalism as a form of heresy, claiming that God intended all Christians to be unified and ruled only by Christ. He remarks, “[D]ivide that kingdom into nations, and you dethrone Christ” (125). When Stogumber insists that Joan must be a witch because she has defeated English commanders, Cauchon pushes back: “And if the men are Frenchmen, as the modern fashion calls them, I am afraid the bare fact that an English army has been defeated by a French one will not convince them that there is any sorcery in the matter” (115). By referring to the term “Frenchmen” as a “modern fashion,” Cauchon associates Nationalism with the newly emerging world order, foreshadowing its ideological importance in the 20th century.
Common Sense versus Supernatural Ability
Throughout Saint Joan, Shaw plays with the ambiguity over Joan’s purported “miracles.” In the Preface, Shaw argues that Joan’s voices were the result of her vivid imagination manifesting her own thoughts through the figures of saints and angels. In this view, Joan’s battlefield victories were—as Dunois suggests—the product of her tactical mind and not of divine intervention. However, there are a few moments in the play that seem show Joan enacting a literal miracle. When Robert de Baudricourt gives Joan what she has requested, his previously unproductive hens suddenly begin to lay numerous eggs. When Joan arrives at Orléans, the wind changes to a more tactically advantageous direction immediately after she decides to pray for it to do so. Both of these miracles might be coincidence, the result of natural processes that Joan has no influence over, but the fact that Shaw includes these moments suggests that Joan might have some real assistance from a supernatural source.
Bertrand de Poulengey expresses the need for miracles rather than common sense at the beginning of the play, telling Baudricourt that miracles can better inspire the otherwise defeated French army. He scoffs when Baudricourt tells him to use common sense, asking, “[W]hat is the good of commonsense? If we had any commonsense we should join the Duke of Burgundy and the English king” (79). Here, common sense and miracles are set up as opposites, with miracles being the only way to achieve military victory against the odds.
The Archbishop of Rheims seeks to blur the line between the miraculous and common sense by suggesting that miracles are actually entirely rational and are only called miracles because some people do not understand their actual causes. He explains that Joan will easily be able to recognize Gilles de Rais because of his Bluebeard and so will use her reason to deduce he is not the Dauphin. Therefore, the Archbishop claims, “[W]hen this girl picks out the Dauphin among his courtiers, it will not be a miracle for me, because I shall know how it has been done, and my faith will not be increased.” (95). Furthermore, the Archbishop of Rheims admits that he is more devoted to scientific rationality than to spirituality. When he tells Trémouille about Pythagoras’s theory that the earth is round and orbits the sun, Trémouille scoffs, “[W]hat an utter fool! Couldn’t he use his eyes?” (96). This interaction suggests that many things that seem unbelievable and against common sense are actually true. Because the audience is aware that the earth is indeed round and orbits the sun, Trémouille’s doubt is comedic, indicating that rationality is not always obvious and can actually appear contrary to reason.
During her trial, Joan brings together the notion of divine miracles and common sense, arguing that because God gave humans their capacity for reason, simple logic is the best way to understand God’s will. Joan does not claim to have performed miracles in her military campaigns, but she remains firmly convinced that the voices she hears come from God. She remains certain that her voices are not those of demons in part because their advice aligns with common sense. For example, when the Inquisition accuses her of blaspheming by wearing men’s clothes, she points out that it makes more sense for her to dress as a man when she needs to live among men. The Inquisitor concedes that she has a point, but accuses her of displaying a simplistic, animal-like logic, rather than the more refined teachings of the Church. Joan replies, “[T]here is great wisdom in the simplicity of a beast, let me tell you; and sometimes great foolishness in the wisdom of scholars” (161). By upholding this simple form of wisdom above the foolishness of scholarly arguments, Joan suggests that her own instincts have more spiritual validity than the teachings of the Catholic Church. When she wavers at the thought of her execution, she explicitly claims that her intuition comes from God, saying, “God, who gave me my commonsense, cannot will me to do that” (162). Joan’s connection between God and her own rationality demonstrates the notion that Shaw sets up in his preface: Miracles have rational explanations, but that does not necessarily mean that they do not come from God.
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