Paul Di Filippo’s June 23 Style review of Lidia Yuknavitch’s “The Book of Joan,” “A Hundred Years’ War for a new century,” provided another example of how Joan of Arc’s real achievements have been denigrated in recent decades. The review said, “Surely, Joan of Arc, that maundering Maid of Orleans, falls solidly into the category of fascinating, exemplary misfit.”
Joan of Arc has been portrayed as a victim and puppet. Despite a historical record more exhaustive than that for anyone else of her time, common perceptions of Joan these days play down what she accomplished.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Take the words of Mark Twain, whose last completed novel (what he called a labor of love) was “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” Twain summed up Joan’s impact as only he could: “France was a wreck, a ruin, a desolation. The half of it belonged to England ... the other half belonged to nobody. ... Now came the ignorant country maid out of her remote village and confronted this hoary war, this all-consuming conflagration that had swept the land for three generations. Then began the briefest and most amazing campaign that is recorded in history. In seven weeks it was finished. In seven weeks she hopelessly crippled that gigantic war that was ninety-one years old. At Orleans she struck it a staggering blow; on the field of Patay she broke its back. ... It was an ogre, that war, an ogre that went about for near a hundred years, crunching men and dripping blood from its jaws. And with her little hand that child of seventeen struck him down; and yonder he lies stretched on the field of Patay, and will not get up any more while this old world lasts.”
No, not a “misfit.” An amazing individual. One whose character even that old curmudgeon Twain judged to be “flawless.” Joan deserves to be remembered for who she really was.
John G. Hemry, Owings
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