Intercourse (18 page)

any book about Joan which begins by describing her as a beauty may be at once classified as a romance. Not one of Joan’s comrades, in village, court, or camp, even when they were straining themselves to please the king by praising her, ever claimed that she was pretty. All the men who alluded to the matter declared most emphatically that she was unattractive to a degree that seemed to them miraculous, considering that she was in the bloom of youth, and neither ugly, awkward, deformed, nor unpleasant in her person.
³⁸

But this is not what the men said. Joan lived in an all-male military society. She slept with her fellow soldiers, “all in the straw together. ”
³⁹
Some said “that they had never felt desire for her, that is to say that sometimes they had the carnal desire for her (ils en avaient volonte charnel), however never dared give way to it, and they believed that it was not possible to try it... ”
⁴⁰
Sometimes they talked about sex among themselves and got excited, but when they saw her and she approached, “they could no longer talk of such things and abruptly ceased their carnal transports. ”
⁴¹
Questioned by one Gobert Thibault, the soldiers who slept with Joan said “that they had never felt carnal desire at the moment of seeing her. ”
⁴²
And the Duke of Alencon said: “Sometimes in the army I lay down to sleep with Joan and the soldiers, all in the straw together
(a la paillade), and sometimes I saw Joan prepare for the night and sometimes I looked at her breasts which were beautiful, and yet I never had carnal desire for her. ”
⁴³

Two themes are distinct: there was no carnal desire felt, even in the presence of a beauty female by definition—her beautiful bare breasts; or, there was a fear of failure, a conviction that “it was not possible to try it. ” This brings with it the sense that it was physically impossible to do it; her body was impregnable. Her physical presence caused a paralysis of desire or it caused fear, perhaps of impotence or castration or punishment—“it was not possible to
try
it. ” [italics mine] Living among men, sleeping “all in the straw together, ” seen bare-breasted, Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement—on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it. ” She made an empirically successful escape from a metaphysical definition of female that is socially real, socially absolute, and intrinsically coercive. She did not have to run the gauntlet of male desire; and so she was free, a rare and remarkable quality and kind of freedom— commonplace for men, virtually unattainable for women. She had contempt for the women who followed the soldiers as consorts or prostitutes. She expressed this contempt in outright physical aggression against the women—physically chasing them away from the soldiers and, on at least one occasion, drawing a sword on a woman who was, of course, unarmed. These women were object lessons, the living embodiments of what a fall from grace, from her exempt status, would mean, their lives bounded on every side by the constraining domination of sexed men. Joan chose the status of the men because freedom was with them; in choosing that status, that company, she was bound to despise the women. She also hated swearing, the discourse that most rubbed in her face the sheer stigma of being female—the stigma associated with the physiology of being a woman, the functions of being a woman, the common perceptions of what a woman is and what a woman is worth. The soldiers did not swear around her because her disapproval was so visceral, so intense, so absolute. These real and deep antipathies—toward loose women and dirty words— meant to the Christians who rehabilitated her that she had been pure and good in the moralistic sense; these were the most easily assimilable of her stratagems for escaping definition as a female. Her intractable male identification, expressed not in the usual female submission to the male but in an attempted coequal bonding with him, was central to her quest for freedom. Under patriarchy, men have freedom because they are men. To want freedom is to want not only what men have but also what men are. This is male identification as militance, not feminine submission; it is deviant, complex. One wants what men have—especially physical freedom (freedom of movement, freedom from physical domination); and to have what men have one must be what men are. Joan’s unselfconscious and unrepentant assumption of a male role (both martial and heroic) was the crime against male supremacy that cost her her life. She was killed for the freedom she took, the status she usurped, her defiance of the determinism of gender. By repudiating her female status, she repudiated a life of being held hostage by male sexual desire. She became an exile from gender with a male vocation and male clothes, the clothing especially an outrage and eventually a capital crime.

Essentially seen as a transvestite by scholars and artists who came after her and took her as a subject, Joan’s defiance, her rebellion, is trivialized as a sexual kink, more style than substance, at most an interesting wrinkle in a psychosexual tragedy of a girl who wanted to be a boy and came to a bad end. Joan’s instability, it is suggested, was so great that she committed suicide rather than wear women’s clothes; she, the Inquisition’s victim, becomes her own executioner. Romantics, especially the filmmakers, seem to see the male clothing as an esthetic choice, the beauty of her androgyny highlighted by the graceful boylike look. No woman can want freedom and have it dignified. The clothes made her life of high adventure and martial brilliance possible; she needed them, a sword, a horse, a banner, a king, a cause, all of which she got with an intransigence that is the mark of genius. The male clothing—the signifier and the enabler, signifying rebellion, enabling action—became the emblem of her distinct integrity for those who hated her.

Her male clothing was both symbolic and functional. It was appropriate clothing for her movement and praxis. It protected her bodily privacy even as it declared it. Her body was closed off and covered; between her legs was inaccessible. In armor,which she wore as men did, she was doubly inaccessible, closed off: genitally private. The clothes characterized her virginity as militant: hostile to men who would want her for sex and hostile to female status altogether. The Inquisition did not honor Joan’s virginity: it was barely mentioned at her trial, except by her. The Inquisition did not accept Joan’s virginity as evidence of her love of God as it would indisputably accept virginity in feminine dress. Instead, her physical integrity emphasized by these clothes repelled these real Christian men— not soldiers but priests and judges in flowing robes, long dresses. Though Joan was examined while held captive by the Burgundians to see whether she was a virgin, the subject of virginity was avoided by the Inquisitors. A virgin could not make a pact with the devil; but Joan would be convicted as a witch. Her male clothing became the focus of their sexual obsession with her: ridding her of it became synonymous with breaking her literally and metaphorically; making her female-submissive. In her recantation, she was forced to accuse herself of wearing “[c]lothes dissolute, mis-shapen and indecent, against natural decency. ”
⁴⁴
Jean Massieu, who read her recantation aloud to her before she signed it, recalled that “it noted that in the future she would no longer carry arms nor wear man’s clothes, nor shorn hair... ”
⁴⁵

Indeed, it is unlikely that Joan was physically a virgin because of the extreme athleticism of her soldiering. It is known that she never menstruated, probably for the same reason (Marina Warner suggests anorexia nervosa as the reason; Joan’s physical strength and her willingness to wear heavy, bulky armor, in my opinion, make this impossible). The examination, manual and visual by women, would be unlikely to discern the presence or absence of the hymen. The women ascertained that Joan was a virgin because they ascertained that she was who she said she was, Joan the Maid, sent by God to help her king, a soldier; clearly not a whore who ran with soldiers. The Inquisition ignored the whole issue of virginity anyway: the male clothes were her sexual crime; and the Inquisition always nailed a woman for her sexual crime. There was a place for Joan in the abstract theory of Church orthodoxy. St. Ambrose had written:

She who does not believe is a woman, and should be designated with the name of her sex, whereas she who believes progresses to perfect manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ.
⁴⁶

And St. Jerome, a writer on virginity as well as gender, promised that when a woman

wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.
⁴⁷

But the Inquisitors were empiricists with keen sexual intuition. When women rebelled against the Church through sex, the Inquisition killed them for that. When this one woman rebelled through dress, the Inquisition killed her for that. Virginity could not buy her her life, because the issue was not ever—and is not now—to have sex or not to have sex; the issue was compliance with inferior status. The biological base of male supremacy appeared to be threatened by Joan’s authenticity, the brilliance of what had to be a masquerade, a trick, the work of the devil; and that biological base, once threatened, had to be purified—it could not be subject to modification or reform or exception. Joan’s intransigence confirmed the Inquisition in its perception that the male clothes were central to the vitality of her persona and her resistance:

Asked whether her saying that she would take a woman’s dress if they would let her go, was pleasing to God,

She answered that if they let her go in a woman’s dress, she would at once put on man’s dress and do as Our Lord commanded her. She has said this before. And she would not for anything take the oath that she would not take up arms or wear male dress to do Our Lord’s will.
⁴⁸

She would not give over her direct relationship with God to the priests; she would not give over her direct relationship with God’s will to the Church; she would not give over her private conscience to Church policy or Church practice or Church politics. Bernard Shaw writes of her “unconscious Protestantism. ”
⁴⁹
But her rebellion was simpler and deeper than Luther’s because the rights she demanded—rights of privacy over her conscience and her relationship to God—were rooted in a right to physical privacy that was fundamental but had not yet been claimed by any woman, the right to physical privacy being essential to personal freedom and self-determination. No woman had this right absolutely. It was a contingent right, dependent at best on conforming to the male-determined meaning of being a virgin and simultaneously not running into a rapist: the pedestal was a cage; male sexual desire was still a gauntlet. This right of physical privacy was never articulated as a right, and for women it barely existed as a possibility: how did Joan even imagine it, let alone bring it into physical existence for herself for so long? Without a right to physical privacy, there could be no private conscience, no personal relationship to God, no way of life that was self-chosen, self-actualized, selfsustained. Joan died for this right of physical privacy from which other rights could be derived, without which other rights were meaningless—and in this sense, she died for and in behalf of all women.

The male clothing signified this right both for her and for the Inquisitors. The Inquisitors wanted her stripped, violated, submissive; out of her male clothes, the equivalent of naked, fragile, accessible, female. She asked that if they found her guilty they allow her to wear a long dress and hood to her execution: “Asked why, since she has said that she wears man’s dress by God’s command, she asks a woman’s dress to wear in her last hours, She answered: 'It suffices that it be long. ’”
⁵⁰
Anticipating the humiliation of public exposure, the vulnerability, the shame, she wants the privacy of a body clothed from head to toe. Female clothing or not, it was privacy she wanted.

Repeatedly, she asks the Inquisitors to let her hear Mass, and they try to get her to say that, in exchange, she will give up male clothes. She capitulates this far: “Make me a long dress, right down to the ground, without a train, and give it to me to go to Mass, and then when I come back I will put on the clothes I now have. ”
⁵¹
“Without a train” means without femininity—female ornamentation licensing invasion by look, by touch, in thought. She did not want the clothes of sex; she wanted clothing that was a barrier to invasion by look, by touch, in thought.

After her recantation, Joan was returned to her prison cell dressed female, and she was put back in chains. English soldiers, male, stayed in the cell day and night to guard her. Her virginity, if it had any meaning, was undoubtedly now seen as “the key to her strength and power; if she were robbed of it, she would be disarmed, the spell would be broken, she would sink to the common level of women. ”
⁵²
She no longer had the power of a witch, having recanted; and she was no longer a soldier, dressed female. Chained and female, the men were no longer afraid of her; and it was a rape, or an attempted rape, or a gang-rape, that caused her to resume male clothing and go to her death:

After she had renounced and abjured and resumed man’s clothing, I and several others were present when Joan excused herself for having again put on man’s clothes, saying and affirming publicly that the English had had much wrong and violence done to her in prison when she was dressed in woman’s clothes. And in fact I saw her tearful, her face covered with tears, disfigured and outraged...
⁵³