Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints

Popularly acclaimed as a saint in her homeland and celebrated by such authors as Christine de Pisan some 500 years before receiving official Church sanction, Joan of Arc nonetheless remained vilified or ignored in the English-speaking world until the Romantics adopted her as a heroine of democracy and the oppressed masses. Since then, Joan has become an increasingly fashionable focus for both intellectual and popular ideologies, first in literature and in various professional and academic journals, and later in film. By 1996, she could claim sufficient cinematic versions of her story to merit an entire book devoted to the study of them. Part of our enduring re-creation of the Middle Ages, such films employ what Deren calls the “innocent arrogance of objective fact,” which is simultaneously film's authority and its illusion, to propose a medieval mystic who never existed. We have created Joans to embody Marxist, democratic, populist, and patriotic political agendas; female heroes for feminists and gays; new-age shamans with mystical journeys and guardian angels. More recently, we discover Joan as psychotic, schizophrenic, delusional, manic-depressive, or any combination of these, apparently the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Freudian interpretations of her as the frustrated victim of overactive, pubescent hormones. Whatever the sauce in which we serve her up, all these re-creations ignore the fundamental medieval reality of Joan as a woman of unshakable faith in her personal and profound experience of Christianity. In our efforts to explain away the religious experiences so believable to her contemporaries and so unbelievable to the scientific rationalist impulse of the twentieth century, we have left the real Joan far behind and rendered her an icon defining our own concept of human identity. To borrow from Gledhill, she has become: a signifier of the second order of signification – connotation… The connotative signifier drains the original purely denotative sign of its historical and material reference – what Barthes rather suspectly calls its meaning – and turns it into support for a new… signifier, the naturalized concept of eternal truths or the “human condition.” In 1999, Hollywood and its Canadian equivalent produced two films – Columbia's blockbuster The Messenger and Joan of Arc , released for home video by Artisan – which provide excellent case studies of this process. Both productions claim veracity for their interpretations in introductory screen overlays.

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