Saint Joan (Criticism)

Criticism

Sheldon Goldfarb

Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, he

discusses the underlying philosophy of Shaw’s Saint Joan.

Saint Joan is full of surprises. The first surprise is that a nonreligious writer like Shaw (at least nonreligious in a conventional Christian sense) should even write on a topic like this: the martyrdom of a Christian saint. Indeed, when it was first announced that Shaw, the “professional iconoclast,” was writing on Saint Joan, at least one critic worried that the play would not be properly reverent. And critics in France, before the French version opened, were similarly nervous about how the irreverent Irishman would treat their national heroine.

But the critics were all satisfied, at least on this point: Shaw, the mocking non-Christian, produced a completely sympathetic portrait of a Christian saint. Except in a way the saint is less Christian than Shavian: Shaw’s Joan does hear Heavenly voices, it is true, and ends up a martyr, but she is no shrinking, timid victim (except in the French production, which displeased Shaw immensely). She is an active warrior saint, keen to go into battle, strong and clever, ready with a pert reply when challenged. For instance, when told (in Scene I) that the voices she says are from God actually come from her imagination, she says: “Of course. That is how the messages from God come to us.” Commentators have disapproved of this line, saying the historical Joan would never have spoken like that. Probably true. But the line is very revealing about the nature of the Shavian Joan: she is as witty as her creator, a genius just like him, though a somewhat untutored genius, whose inexperience contributes to her downfall.

Not that it is clear that even an experienced genius can triumph in our world. As Shaw says in his Preface, even the experienced Socrates was forced to drink hemlock. The world cannot tolerate its geniuses; superior men and women make others feel inferior and resentful, and so the superior ones end up being condemned to die, just as Joan is condemned to die by the Catholic Church and its Holy Office of the Inquisition.

But here is another surprise from Shaw. In both the Preface and the play itself, Shaw is at pains to say that Joan received a fair trial at the hands of the Church. He goes out of his way to present a flattering portrait of Cauchon, one of her chief judges, even though the historical record suggests he was unscrupulous and corrupt, not the merciful and fair-minded defender of the Church that Shaw makes him out to be. How can Shaw, the professional rebel and defender of Joan, be sympathetic to the Inquisition, that instrument for suppressing individual rights, for maintaining dictatorial rule, and stamping out new thoughts, the instrument that sent Joan to her death?

According to Louis Crompton, in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Shaw is not actually sympathetic to the Inquisition at all; he is merely warning us that individuals may believe themselves to be right and still do evil things: “the most nefarious institutions and their administrators always seem perfectly justified in their own eyes and in the eyes of most onlookers.”

But Shaw is actually more sympathetic to the Inquisition than Crompton suggests, saying in his Preface not that Joan was executed by a nefarious institution but by “normally innocent people in the energy of their righteousness.” And though Shaw says that executing Joan was a horrible action, he suggests that the Church was within its rights to punish her in some way, perhaps to excommunicate her, because societies have the right to set down laws and have them obeyed: “society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviors for blasphemers.” He even says, “We must persecute, even to the death.”

In Saint Joan: Playing with Fire, Arnold Silver sees this persecuting side of Shaw as reflecting his growing disillusionment with democracy and his simultaneous attraction to dictatorial regimes like that of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in Russia. It is certainly true — and this is another surprise — that Shaw takes a shot at democracy in his Preface, saying, somewhat bizarrely, that the Catholic Church is in practice a democracy, and therefore flawed, because the process of selecting bishops, cardinals, and the Pope is one of “selection and election. .. of the superior by the inferior (the cardinal vice of democracy).” The result is that the leaders of the Church cannot match geniuses like Joan who are self-selected rather than elected by their inferiors.

But what is notable here is that Shaw is calling the Church, the persecuting agency, a democracy. He is not contrasting dictatorship and democracy; he is associating the two. The actual contrast in the play is between the dictatorial orders of a democratic organization like the Church, on the one hand, and the rights of individuals on the other. It may be commonplace nowadays to associate individual rights with democracy, but Shaw is actually placing these two concepts in opposition to each other. On the one hand, there is the democratic organization of the Church, representing the people and society as a whole, and on the other hand there are individuals with their own private interests. What Shaw is doing is opposing collective rights to individual rights, and saying in his Preface that in many cases society is justified in putting its collective rights ahead of individual rights. This sounds like Shaw the socialist speaking, not necessarily Shaw the lover of dictators.

As a socialist, Shaw was impatient with individual rights and individualism. In the Preface, in his discussion of Shakespeare’s plays, he specifically derides the individualism of the middle classes. He describes Shakespeare’s characters as being “individualist, sceptical, self-centred. . . and selfish... without public responsibilities of any kind” and says that “that is why they seem natural to our middle classes, who are comfortable and irresponsible at other people’s expense.”

Shaw also seems critical of the individual rights of the working classes, another surprise, given that as a socialist, one would expect him to be supportive of the rights of laboring people. However, Shaw was never that close to the masses; instead of joining the proletarian Social Democratic Foundation in the 1880s, he joined the intellectual socialists in the Fabian Society. And as noted above, he was no great fan of the power of “inferiors” to elect their superiors. It is notable that, in his Preface, Shaw goes out of his way to emphasize that his heroine is not a mere laborer, but comes from a higher social class. And in the play itself (in Scene IV), Cauchon worries that Joan’s assertion of the right to follow her private judgment may lead to the thrusting aside of the Church and its accumulated wisdom “by every ignorant laborer or dairymaid.” This will lead, he adds, to blood and fury and devastation as well as to national conflict and destructive war.

Now, this is Cauchon speaking, not Shaw, but Cauchon’s two speeches on these topics are so powerful that they seem to reflect Shaw’s own views, and indeed, they meet with no rebuttal in the play.

All of this leads to seeing the following set of conflicting attitudes in the play. On the one hand, Shaw seems to be asserting the right of society through institutions like the Church to set down laws that must be obeyed and to persecute “even to the death” those who break those laws. Shaw seems to be strongly asserting the collective rights of society against individual rights, and seems to be opposed to allowing such rights to either the selfish

middle classes or the ignorant working classes. He also seems to be attacking nationalism and the horrors of war.

At the same time, he has created a very sympathetic heroine who stands preeminently for individual rights, at least for her own right to judge God’s will for herself in accordance with her private visions. Moreover, this heroine is a strong nationalist who wants France for the French as well as an advocate for a more serious, that is, a more destructive, approach to warfare.

How can these contradictory ideas be reconciled? How can Shaw be both for and against individual rights, for and against nationalism and war?

Some, like Eric Bentley, in Bernard Shaw, say that in fact Shaw was on both sides of the individual rights issues. Arnold Silver says that there are two Shaws in the play: the young, rebellious supporter of individualism (represented by Joan) and the older, grimmer supporter of authoritarianism (represented by Cauchon). On the issue of nationalism and war, J. L. Wisenthal, in Shaw’s Sense of History, says Shaw supported Joan’s spirit and power but not the causes she used that spirit and power to advance.

There is something in all these views, especially in Wisenthal’s. There is a sense in the play (and the Preface) that Shaw supports Joan because she is a genius, one of those rare people who help advance the “creative evolution” of the human race. From one perspective, then, as Wisenthal says, it matters less what specific policies Joan favored; the point is that such geniuses are important leaders for others to follow. It may also be that Shaw, who saw history as progressing through stages, accepted the nationalist stage promoted by Joan as a necessary stage in humanity’s progressive development. Or he may simply have been thinking of the society of his own day: in Shaw’s view, modern society had to be transformed; he was a supporter of those who can transform societies; and therefore he would be drawn to Joan because she was one of those who brought about a transformation, even if the specific nature of that transformation was not one he favored. In other words, Shaw was in favor of rebels and geniuses and that he would support them whatever specific proposals they were advocating.

This support for geniuses also may be the key to explaining the apparent contradiction between Shaw’s support for Joan’s individual rights and his opposition to individual rights for others. Shaw’s basic philosophical attitude as it emerges from this play seems to be the following: There are a few self-selected geniuses in the world who see further and probe deeper than other people, and whose ideas are more advanced than those to be found in organizations representing the people at large. It is important to respect, tolerate, and even celebrate these geniuses, for it is through them that society advances. Society’s organizations should give them free rein.

At the same time, the bulk of the population, not being geniuses, should not have the same rights as the geniuses. The “ignorant” working classes and the “selfish” middle classes should follow the rules established by society’s organizations.

So there should be order and discipline for the majority (imposed by organizations representing the majority) and free rein for the small minority of geniuses. Unfortunately, this system is not often found. It is hard to recognize a genius, for one thing. As Cauchon says in the Epilogue, “mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.” Or perhaps it is not so much that geniuses cannot be recognized as that they inspire fear, as Shaw says in his Preface. Then instead of following them, the people or their organizations put them to death. After they are dead, they may be worshipped, as Joan is in the Epilogue, which suggests something hopeful, but if the genius threatens to return to life, as Joan does, the ordinary people are most unhappy. As Charles says in the Epilogue, “If you could bring her back to life, they would burn her again within six months.”

Still, Joan does triumph in a way. Though burnt at the stake and not wanted back on earth, the causes she advocated do win out. The English are pushed out of France, warfare becomes more modern, and the individualism she represents in Shaw’s play becomes the dominant ideology of Western society. Shaw’s geniuses may exert influence even though they die; there is thus some optimism present even though the play ends with Joan’s lament about the earth not being ready to receive God’s saints. The saints may rule from Heaven.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

What Do I Read Next?

• Caesar and Cleopatra(1901), an earlier historical play by Shaw, focuses on the heroism of Julius Caesar.
• Major Barbara(1905) is another play by Shaw about a heroic female: this time, an official in the Salvation Army and a social reformer.
• Androcles and the Lion(1912) is a play by Shaw about miracles, martyrs, and Christians.
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is Mark Twain’s loving portrayal of Joan, first published in 1896.
• The Maid of Orléans is Voltaire’s irreverently ribald account of Joan’s story, first published as Lapucelle d’Orléans in 1755.
• Joan of Lorraine(1946) is a play about Joan by the American playwright Maxwell Anderson.
• Saint Joan of the Stockyards(1931) is a play by Bertolt Brecht that combines elements of Shaw’s Saint Joan and his Major Barbara. Brecht’s Joan is a member of the Salvation Army trying to do good in Chicago during the Depression.
• Henry VI, Part One(1623), by William Shakespeare, is about the Hundred Years’ War and contains a negative portrayal of Joan.