Joan of Arc (14 page)

But the ones involving heresy stayed with her, literally to her death. Joan was made to wear the terms of her accusation; she was led through Rouen wearing a shift and a hat, which looked like a dunce cap, upon which had been inscribed the words “Heretic, Apostate, Relapsed, Idolater. ” The first three charges, which involve her relationship to Church doctrine, make straightforward sense in the historical moment of Joan's life.

But the hat said: Heretic, Apostate, Relapsed, Idolater. The most complicated and interesting of the charges was idolatry.

Idolatry was an elastic, all-purpose charge, and it questioned the mysterious human power to represent and to make images. Tertullian named it “the chief crime of mankind, the supreme guilt of the world, the entire case put before judgment: for every sin is committed within idolatry.” Aquinas said: “It was the cause, beginning and goal of every sin because there is no kind of wickedness which idolatry does not produce at some time.” The historian Carlos M. N. Eire says, “Idolatry is a fighting word; it presupposes a definition of what is true and false in religion, for an idol cannot universally be recognized as such. . . . One man's devotion was another man's idolatry.”
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Idolatry was one of the three default-settings for medieval accusation, the other two being sodomy and usury. Any of the three of them was flexible enough and wide enough in its applications to ensnare any number of sinners and name as sins any number of hard-to-categorize acts.

The center of the sin of idolatry is its deliberate confusion of category and identity. The sacred image becomes an idol when the perceiver misunderstands its purpose— that of drawing the perceiver closer to the invisible God— and becomes stuck in the physical properties of the picture or statue itself. Thus it becomes valued in itself rather than as a vehicle to bring the soul closer to the divine. Ideally, the sacred image should eventually disappear in the perceiver's mind; it should melt away, lose its corporeality. If the image disappears, it is, in Aquinas's terms, an example of a “true lie,” as opposed to a “fictitious lie,” where the form supersedes the function.

Joan was accused of idolatry in connection with two of her most characteristic acts: her relationship to her voices and her wearing of men's clothes. The insistent demand for physical details about the saints to whom she spoke was a way of trying to get her to overphysicalize her saints and turn them from spirits to demons. Or idols. If Joan could be made to say that she experienced her voices not only aurally but by touching and smelling them, she would be committing the sin of idolatry, a deliberate mistake in categorization. She would have failed to allow her voices to return to their proper realm of impalpable orality. She would have made a fetish of them rather than allowing them to become air.

The charge of idolatrous transvestism appears more than thirty times in the trial's text. One charge accuses her not only of wearing male dress but of cutting her hair “like a young fop,” pointing out that her doublet was fastened by twenty points and that she wore long leggings laced on the outside, a short mantel reaching to her knees, a close-cut cap, tight-fitting boots, and buskins. She was taking the place not only of a man but of a knight—and a dandy.

In connecting Joan's cross-dressing to the sin of idolatry, the judges were accusing Joan of making an idol of herself. In this, they were taking a rather sophisticated approach, arguing rationally as scholastics rather than appealing to biblical authority. They had to prove that her cross-dressing was of the forbidden rather than the tolerated kind. Not all transvestism was frowned on by Church authority; there is a tradition of “holy transvestites,” women who passed themselves off as men in order to preserve their virginity. The details of some of their biographies have unavoidably comic touches. Take the case of St. Margaret, a.k.a. Pelagius, which comes to us from a thirteenth-century collection of saints' lives,
The Golden Legend,
by Jacobus de Voraigne. Margaret decided on her wedding night that she couldn't bear giving up her virginity, so she escaped the bridal bed and betook herself to a monastery, where she passed herself off as Brother Pelagius. She was rewarded for her exemplary conduct by becoming the chaplain at a convent. But enemies accused her/him of impregnating one of the nuns. She allowed herself to be exiled to a cave rather than reveal her secret, which was made manifest only at her death.

Another holy transvestite was St. Uncumber, originally named Willevirgis. The daughter of the king of Portugal, she refused to marry the king of Sicily and prayed that God would allow her to preserve her vow of virginity. Whereupon she was blessed with the gift of a beard and mustache and became St. Uncumber, the patroness of unhappywives who wished to be unencumbered of their husbands.

But sanctioned transvestism escaped the accusation of idolatry because the woman's female identity became invisible, subsumed in the task that the disguise was meant to effect. She became, to the world, entirely male, not drawing attention to herself but disappearing into the job of making herself safe from male desire. Joan never passed as a man. Her cross-dressing made her femaleness a contradiction rather than an erasure; in taking on the power and authority of men, she refused to give up the identity of a woman.

Questioned as to whether she wanted a woman's dress, Joan answered in a way that is hard to make clear sense of. “If you give me permission, give me one, and I will take it and go. Otherwise no. I am content with this one, since it is God's will that I wear it.”
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Could she have meant to say, It's God will for me to dress as I am, that is as a man, but if you tell me not to, I will disobey God's will if you agree to let me go? The same ambiguity occurred when she was asked if the voice had ordered her to wear men's dress. She answered, “Dress is but a small matter,” but said that she had not “taken it by the advice of any living man.”
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Most often, when she talked about why she wouldn't give up male dress, she explained that it was because in female dress she was afraid for her chastity. It is as if, bearing the sign of a female, she was subject to a female's vulnerabilities;signed as male, she was safe. Like her virginity, this seems to be a pact in which both Joan and her enemies agree to a definition of bodily terms that is about the idea of the body rather than its existence in space.

The importance of Joan's chastity to her idea of herself must be measured by her protection of it at the expense of receiving the sacraments. She was, for her time, unusually devoted to the Eucharist; she received great sustenance from receiving Communion and from hearing Mass. At a time when she would have been more than ever in need of spiritual consolation, she forwent it rather than take the risk of sexual violation. Her faith that God would claim her as his own was unshakable enough for her to risk displeasing him by refusing the sacraments; her faith in the stability of her own identity if she lost her virginity was far less secure.

Asked which she would rather do, wear a woman's dress and hear mass or continue in her man's clothing and not hear mass, she engaged in a tricky dance:

“Promise me that I may hear Mass if I wear a woman's dress, and then I will answer you.”

She was promised.

She then responded, “And what do you say, if I have sworn and promised our King not to put off these clothes? Nevertheless, I say, 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.”

She was told that she must give up male clothes unconditionally.

She replied: “Bring me a dress like that of a citizen's daughter; that is, a long houppelande, and I will wear it, and also a woman's hood, to go and hear Mass.”
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But she would not agree to wear women's clothes once she had left the chapel and was back in her cell.

What this seems to suggest, although the terms are shifty, is that she didn't object to wearing women's clothing in the safe zone of a church but that she would not wear it in the hostile environment of her cell. What happened after her abjuration, when she agreed in her defeat to put on women's clothes, seems to support her instinct for self-preservation. There are two stories, one by Martin Ladvenu, her confessor, and one by the usher Massieu. They conflict, but they both support Joan's notion that her chastity was dependent on her cross-dressing.

Joan was dressed in women's clothing, but a parcel of men's clothing was left at the foot of her bed. She told Ladvenu that one of her guards tried to rape her and that was why she put on men's clothing again. Massieu's story is that the guards pulled her female clothes off her, kept them from her, and gave her no choice when she was forced to get up to answer “a demand of nature” but to wear men's clothes again or be naked. Whichever story is true, the presence of male clothing in her cell is a puzzle. Was the clothing left there to tempt her, a temptation that her judges, understanding the importance of male dress to her, well understood she wouldn't be able to resist?

The same ambivalence about dress occurs when Joan begs her judges to grant her the grace of a woman's dress and a hood for her head if she is to die. When she's asked why she wants a woman's dress for her last hours, she answers, “It suffices that it be long.”
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As if the issue were not gender but modesty.

A moment later, she says that if they let her go in a woman's dress, she'd put on a man's clothing as soon as she was free. And she would “not for anything take the oath that she will not take up arms or wear male dress to do our Lord's will.”
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It is difficult to get a firm grip on Joan's position in relation to men's clothes. Sometimes it seems that she was only wearing male clothing as a practical measure and that if her judges had allowed her to resume male clothing in the cell when she was in the presence of her hostile guards, she would wear female clothing in order to hear Mass and do so until her death. But she never agreed to appear before her judges in female dress, and she never agreed to give up male dress for good. Sometimes she said that her voices told her to put on male dress, so if she failed to wear it, she would be disobeying them. Sometimes she went so far as to say that the issue of dress was of minor importance. The only thing we can say for certain about Joan's attitude toward male clothing is that it was inconsistent. Perhaps this is because she had a strong desire to wear men's clothing, but the idea would have been so abhorrent in her time that she knew she couldn't speak of it, and may have been unable to acknowledge it, even to herself.

Joan's judges were clerics, the charges against her were doctrinal, and the terms of the trial were ecclesiastical, but her answers escape the formal boundaries of ecclesiastical, juridical language. It often seems that Joan and her judges are literally speaking different languages. But the judges' language turns dead in their mouths, as when they describe themselves as “benevolent and pitying, wishing and determined to proceed in this matter with gentleness and grace to bring her back to the way of faith and salvation.”
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Her words come to us sounding as lively as the day they were spoken. It is the language of youth, a girl's language. But it is also the language of someone with an extremely good memory and a sense of self-preservation. She is talking to keep herself alive. It is innocent language in the sense of being saturated with her conviction of being free of guilt but not of canniness or even a bit of guile.

Unlike her judges, Joan sometimes uses language for play, and she doesn't avoid exaggeration or passionate words. When refusing to speak about her voices, she says that she “will not reveal them save to Charles . . . and if they cut her head off, she would not reveal them.”
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And when asked if the people in her town sided with the Burgundians, she says she knew only one Burgundian: “whose head she would like to see chopped off, that is if it will please God.”
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When asked if St. Michael wears clothes, she said: “Do you think Our Lord has not wherewithal to clothe him?” When, after hearing the previous day's transcript read to her, she discovered that the notary had made a mistake in recording what she had said, she told him that if he does it again she'll “pull his ears.”
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On an important issue, whether she had given or caused to be given money to the man who had taken Franquet d'Arras, whose death was laid at her feet as a brutality, she said, “She is not the master of the mint or the treasurer of France to give him money.”
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She even taunts her persecutor. When asked for details of her vision of St. Michael, she says to Cauchon, “he's told me some things about you, but I'm not going to tell you right now.”
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When she speaks the words of her prayers for guidance on the manner of dress, a new kind of linguistic intensity enters the record. Her devoutness is made manifest, and its purity enters the courtroom like a red lozenge of stained glass in an opaque window.

Her response to being asked if she is in a state of grace has the bell-like clarity of a soul sure of its own destiny. She answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may He keep me there.”
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Joan's judges were frustrated by the clarity of her responses, by the unshakability of her faith, by her refusal to place herself in their hierarchy. She never mistook her place in relation to God; He is her supreme authority. The same sureness applied to her sense of her judges: They had no jurisdiction over her. When she was asked what the voices said to her on the morning of February 27, she replied: “They said I should answer you boldly.”
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