For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity by Françoise Meltzer, and: Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture by Robin Blaetz (review)

Abstract

210 Reviews of Roy's daily routine, an exercice de style, as Marcotte perceptively comments, and perhaps also an exercise in the self-presentation of a public persona. University of Nottingham Rosemary Chapman For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Are and the Limits of Subjectivity. By Francoise Meltzer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2001. x + 248 pp. ?14. ISBN 0-226-51982-1. Visions of the Maid: Joan of Are in American Film and Culture. By Robin Blaetz. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2001. xvii + 279 pp. ?40-95 (phk ?15.50). ISBN 0-8139-2075-2 (pbk 0-8139-2076-0). John Steinbeck declared that itwas a rare writer in any language who had not thought 'long and longingly' of Joan of Are as a subject; the utter impossibility of her life was as tempting as the story's malleability to a writer's ideological convictions, regardless of what they were. His argument, quoted in Robin Blaetz's book, could stand as the central tenet of both of these analyses of Joan of Are, widely divergent though they may be in terms of the material they study and the critical approach they encompass. Joan's class should surely have foreclosed any contact with royalty; her ignorance of war in an age when battles were strictlychoreographed should have made itimpossible forher to raise the siege of Orleans; her illiteracy should have made her an easy target for the Church's prosecutors; and most fundamental of all, she was a woman, which should have rendered impossible both action and agency. Add to this her virginity,her voices, and her heart that survived the flames, and the elements are in place that have fascinated and confused a Western culture that is often unsure of its own position towards gender, war, and the religious supernatural. Francoise Meltzer's rich and complex study of Joan of Are takes a postmodern approach, analysing from multiple perspectives various fragments of the narrative. Meltzer's concern is to bring to light the 'epistemological baggage' of those who write about her when there are 'metaphysical conundrums' (p. 8) at stake in the story.A fun? damental part of the baggage she describes is what she calls the postmodern nostalgia forcertainty,to be found in the contemporary fascination with early Christian figures forwhom revelation provided a kind of totality of bodily experience unimaginable in our own self-reflexive age. Her analysis is studded with some sensitive readings of tangential but fertileconcepts?Derrida on the hymen, Bataille on evil and Gilles de Rais, Irigaray on angels. This is an intellectually rigorous text packed full of densely wrought and insightful arguments that has no aspirations to an overview or to a re? solution of the enigma that is Joan's being. Blaetz, by contrast, has constructed an easily accessible, perpetually interesting text that details American popular culture's fascination with Joan in the twentieth century. Her perspective here is to see the way that the figure of Joan of Are is manipulated to provide propaganda for women in wartime, and equally to analyse the changes in gender ideology over the course ofthe century. This is a marvellous piece of tenacious research, covering an amazing range of Joan of Are vehicles, from such ludicrous and anti-historical films as The Mexican Joan of Are (1911) to more respected works by Cecil B. De Mille, Joan the Woman (1916), or Ingrid Bergman's fateful interpretation of the role. Both critical texts, then, attempt to understand what goes into any given represen? tation of Joan in terms of ideology, and both explore the extent to which narrative can be manipulated and distorted to serve supposedly ethical epistemological aims. They are in fact provocative counterpoints to each other, with Meltzer's text offering profound theoretical insights into Blaetz's cultural instances of blatant gender pro? paganda. Whereas Meltzer considers Joan's virginity as the site of both sacredness MLRy 99.1, 2004 211 and danger, aligned to death and religion as a truth that cannot be seen, and which forces a recognition of full otherness in Levinas's sense, Blaetz points out that most American films in the firstWorld War...