Erecting a Pyramid in France: Tomb Symbolism in 1 Henry VI

Abstract

In December of 2012, Marina Warner, author of a well-known study of the life and afterlife of Joan of Arc, revisited the Maid of Orleans in a powerful opinion piece in The London Review of Books. In the article, Warner touches on the ways that Joan's life resonates in the modern world, including a disturbing glimpse of the misuse of the French saint as a avatar for the xenophobic policies of the Front National. Warner writes that Front National founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, nauseatingly called Joan 'my little sister' (Warner 12) and that the party's current leader, Jean-Marie's daughter, Marine Le Pen, holds the party's rally on [ Joan's] feast day and in 2011 invoked her at immense length, claiming that Joan's campaign against the godons in France anticipated the Front National 's vision of ethnically purified population (12). Warner concludes with a call to action:Heroes and symbols are the compass points and moorings of our shared stories; abandoning the search to identify them, out of a high-minded distaste for propaganda, lets political factions manipulate to their own ends. When Marine Le Pen calls on Joan of Arc's name, she needs to be confronted about her abuse of history. Joan's multiple resurrections and transformations show how figures like her remain. Surrendering this territory to the forces of reaction allows too easy a victory. (Warner 14)That this charged symbolic power remains relevant and potent more than five and a half centuries after Joan's death stands as testament to the mythic draw of her story. That this legacy is contested and claimed by oppositional forces, however, should come as no surprise, particularly to Warner, as this very debate about Joan's status looms large in Warner's biography of Joan.From Joan's first entrance into the historical record, sources clearly exhibit a debate over how to view her. While later French chronicles tend to rapturously eulogize her, earlier documents such as the widely circulated Poitiers conclusions, a summary of the early questioning of Joan, can be read as far from expressing the kind of total support for Joan and her mission that is often assumed (Wood 20).1 Understandably, English historians treated Joan more harshly, yet Holinshed admits to Joan's courage, humility, and ability as an understander of councels though she were not at them even as he denigrates hir father, (a sorie sheepheard) and takes shots at her semblance of chastitie (Holinshed et al. 600).Fictionalized depictions of her as a character, such as the Joan la Pucelle found in Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, present even more divisive interpretative challenges for critics. Inevitably, this English portrait of the great French heroine comes colored with jingoistic overtones; Dominique Goy-Blanquet amusingly calls the play libel, insisting [t]he playwright wreaks havoc upon the facts, chronology and Joan's reputation with a rare mixture of science and impudence (Goy-Blanquet, and Voltaire 7). 2 Within this framework, however, Joan's unique position as a low-born woman leading armies and even guiding the actions of a king, as well as her unusual attitude toward glory and worldly achievement, cause her to serve in the play as the only legitimate external threat to the English and, in a wider sense, to the patriarchal systems of authority in England, Burgundy, and France. Because of her unusual status and her power (as Warner would have it), critics have fought passionately over how to view her in the play; she has alternately been condemned as a supernatural agent bent on destabilization of the status quo and lauded as a progressive figure pioneering female self-empowerment. Which view of Joan is more accurate probably depends less on what Shakespeare wrote and more on who is asking (the French or the English, the early modern audience or audience today). Nonetheless, even the French nobility in the play seem wary of Joan's possible threat to their position, not just as individual capable of leading armies and seducing nobles, but as a powerful symbol with a threatening potential for near-infinite reinterpretability. …