Joan of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship

Joan of Arc and Sacnficial Authorship. By Ann W. Astell. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. xvi + 283 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper).

The brief life and terrible death of Joan of Arc (1412-1431) have received countless descriptions, literary presentations, and reenactments. The International Joan of Arc Society (with its own website) ensures continuing academic interest in the martyred saint, with new articles and books regularly appearing. Besides Ann Astells splendidly readable book, one notes, for example, the almost simultaneous publication of Joan of Arc, A Saint for all Reasons: Studies in Myth and Politics, edited by Dominique GoyBlanquet (Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). Astell writes mainly of the different literary representations of Joan, the notable exception being Arthur Honegger's oratorio-or opera-based on Paul Claudel's libretto (1938). Claudel places Joan in an afterlife conversation with St. Dominic, who approaches her with a book from heaven, which she supposes might be still another account of her story: so many pens have written of me, she complains, all concerned with me for their theme, and I cannot even read.

Astell does not wish to survey this long tradition of "pens" (and artists, and composers, too); her aim is rather to show the "recurrent use of the life, death, and afterlife of a medieval saint in order to comment analogously onand thus construct, control, and direct-the fate of the modern author" (p. 4). Consequently, "structures of identity" are revealed that hover between "autobiography, hagiography, sanctity and art." Astell selects certain imaginative retellings of Joan's life in order to show the various ways in which Joan's victimization and sacrifice have been reflected in the sensibilities of particular post-Enlightenment authors. Thus Astell wishes, by using Joan of Arc's martyrdom and rehabilitation, to describe those authors in terms of "the creative sacrifice of their precursors and their (and their own) literary canonization" (p. 7). The modern authors Astell discusses include Robert Southey, Friedrich Schiller, Mark Twain, Bertholt Brecht, and G. B. Shaw. She discusses more briefly such others as Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Georges Bernanos, and-perhaps surprisingly in this company-Leonard Cohen.

Astell bases her study of authorial identification to a large extent upon Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1967), on the notion, quoting from him, that "the writing (and reading) of poems is a sacrificial process, 'poetic misprision,' a purgation that drains more than it replenishes" (p. 6). Even more useful for her theoretical basis for "sacrificial authorship" are Rene Girard's works, especially Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978), and The Scapegoat (1982). In spite of, or perhaps because of, these theoretical underpinnings, the best parts of, the book comment in detail on specific works, with a substantial portion of the first chapter given to an account of Southey's epic poem, begun while he was an Oxford undergraduate, and completed within about three years, in 1796. His poem on Joan of Arc may indeed owe something to Spenser's Faerie Queene, as Astell convincingly demonstrates; yet the thoughtful concern for Southey's work (one of a number of "epic" poems he would write) is hardly matched by the negligible literary significance of the work, or of the author. The chapter on Schiller's important play, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), however, is one of the strongest in the book, and this may be partly due to the fact that the work itself is substantial, and Astell is well able to show how this truly notable play rewrites Joan's history. Schiller composed his play, says Astell, as a ritual performance-not only a play about the death of the heroine, but about "the death of beauty itself (p. 76).

The subsequent chapter on Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), which is accompanied by eight of Frank du Mond's highly sentimental (and rather ugly) illustrations from the first edition, like the earlier chapter on Southey's epic, suffers, I think, from the material itself. Twain valued the Recollections as the favorite and best of his books, an opinion certainly not shared by most of his later readers. This tedious work, like Southey's epic, is long but slight, though it illustrates well Astell's thesis about "sacrificial authorship"-an author who recovers and reinvests the martyred figure for his own sake. The weakness of the book lies in its unwillingness to distinguish between the inherent interests of the various authors that appear in this historical, but decidedly theorized, survey. Such a complaint may seem to ask for a study that the author had no intention of offering, but the detailed and tendentious reading of some decidedly minor works even for the sake of a higher purpose must remain troublesome. Nevertheless, Astell's lucid style and her thoughtful, sympathetic understanding of Joan of Arc as a literary and cultural martyr, commend this remarkable and in many ways excellent book.