The Joan in All of Us
by John Steinbeck (published in the Saturday Review, 1956)
It is a rare writer in any language who has not thought long and longingly of Joan of Arc as a subject. At any given time there are four new plays about her. There are any number of approaches to the story. One man is concerned with whether her voices were real voices or the inwardness of a pubescent girl; another writer becomes concerned with her confession and retraction, her choice between her conviction and orthodoxy.
I have read most of the histories, testimonies, novels, and plays which concern Joan and her times, and I think I know why writers in all times find her story such a magnetic theme. There is of course the factor of universality. Anyone can find some part of himself in Joan’s story, some corroboration of his convictions, no matter what they may be. The tremendous and disparate literature proves this. But I wonder whether there is not another and more basic quality which has not been stated because it is perhaps too obvious.
The story of Joan could not possibly have happened — and did. This is the miracle, the worrisome nagging fact. Joan is a fairy tale so improbable that, without the most complete historical record and evidence, it could not be believed. If a writer were to make it up the story would be howled down as an insult to credulity. No reasonable man would waste time on such an outrageous, sentimental romance, every moment of which is contrived, unnatural, and untrue.
Critics of the story would have no difficulty with the voices. Many sensitive children hear voices in their daydreaming — but from there on the historical nonsense begins.
A peasant girl of Joan’s time was considered little more than an animal. She could not have got a hearing from the most obscure of local gentry. Politics was not a field open to people of her class; indeed only the highest in the social scale had access to political ideas. And the ideas she advanced were simple. How could they be valid to men who had spent their lives in the subtleties of the power drives of Europe?
This girl, illiterate and of a class which politically did not exist, went up through a kind of chain of command to a Dauphin [eldest prince] torn with subtleties and indecisions and convinced him in spite of all the knowledge and experience of his professional advisers. This is ridiculous, but it happened.
But this is only the first miracle. Military science as practiced in her day was the most jealously select of activities. To command at all required not only an accepted bloodline, but training from childhood. A soldier began to learn his trade when he left the cradle. Look at the suits of armor for boys who could barely walk. War was as carefully systematized and formal as ballet. Assault and defense were known movements set and invariable. War was no business for amateurs. Command was no business for peasants. A girl leading an army, directing its movements, putting forward revolutionary tactics, is not the least improbable part of the story — a girl whose experience was limited to commanding a small herd of sheep.
But having taken the command, and having set the tactics — she won. She anticipated the change of wind, pushed aside military prejudices, and won her victory. What consternation must have arisen in the minds of commanders… so it might have been if a Parisian laundress had suggested that Ardennes was unprotected, and a general staff had listened to her. So it would be now if a farm girl bringing a barrow of carrots to Les Halles left her cart, went to the National Assembly and persuaded the professionals their partisanship should take a secondary place in their minds. It could not happen now any more than then.
The end of Joan is perhaps the most incredible part of all. It was not enough that without training she should be soldier and politician — she must also become theologian with her own life as the wager and sainthood as the hidden prize. Who then could have conceived that this troublesome, tiresome child would become the dream and the miracle?
Here I think is the reason writers are drawn to Joan, although their sense of reality is outraged by her story. We know what can and must happen, given the ingredients of life. But there is not one among us who does not dream that the rules may sometime be set aside — and the dream come true. We have the traditions of many miracles — but usually the witnesses were few, the records sparse and uncertain, and the truth obscured by time and the wishful recording of “after the fact.” But to the miracle of Joan the witnesses were legion, the records exact, and the fact established. This is a miracle that did happen, and rules that were set aside. There is in our minds, because of Joan, the conviction that if it could happen then — it can happen again.
This is perhaps the greatest miracle of all — the little bit of Joan living in all of us.
(To read more about John Steinbeck’s relation to the spiritual, see “John Steinbeck, Social Mystic.” And to read more about Joan, see especially Mark Twain’s brilliant historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.)