Lights of Madness: In Search of Joan of Arc
by Preston Russell, M.D.
Summary
Joan of Arc’s trials and imagery through history, leading to modern scientific research to explain what is considered, or dismissed, as miraculous. The three trials of Joan; her transformation in history and literature; and, from the perspective of a physician, the evolution of insanity from antiquity to current brain research.
Excerpt
In the mid-1990s my wife, Barbara, and I were on vacation in the Lorraine area of eastern France. Not far south of the city of Nancy, my guidebook informed me, was the birthplace of Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc in France, which after all was her own country?which it really wasn’t at the time, I learned. Nor was she precisely clear about her last name, or even her age. My curiosity grew. We stopped at the little town of Valcouleurs for lunch. The country cuisses de grenouille were plump and memorable, along with ample vin de maison. Finally pushing away from the table, we learned that the old town gate through which Jeanne d’Arc had passed into destiny to save France was just up the hill behind the rustic restaurant. Warding off somnolence, we strolled up the dirt road to a commanding view. Children wandered by with their dog after school. I tried to converse with them in my jarring French. They responded shyly with nervous laughter and moved on. Barbara and I walked further toward the arch, but the old fifteenth-century walls had long since disappeared. I then posed her standing beneath the old gate of Vaucouleurs, heroically pointing west, barely suppressing a smirk. It is an amusing little picture, which doubtless has been reproduced several thousand times by other tourists just like us. What a legendary little photo joke, some old stones still hanging around to feebly buttress what is largely legend too.
Then we drove a bit further south to tiny Domremy, Jeanne’s birthplace. There stands the very house of her childhood, fantastically rediscovered in the early nineteenth century. Though it is now a tourist attraction, the most rabid pilgrim could not spend more than ten dollars in the homespun gift shop, which dispenses thin booklets, key chains, and other trinkets. Out back is the small garden where a remarkably serious girl, aged twelve or thirteen, first heard a frightening voice, to her right, toward the church--or so she claimed. She said she saw a light as well. There, to the right, stood the old church. Then and there I heard something like a voice myself. Was it true? Can it be?
From that instant I was hooked. I later learned that the records of her trials still exist, tomes of testimony, rediscovered in the nineteenth century and grist for countless books thereafter. Mark Twain had his go at them, in what he at least considered his finest work. George Bernard Shaw wrote his arresting Saint Joan over three hundred years after Shakespeare had coined his little pun about Jeanne the witch, the supposedly virginal La Pucelle:
Pucelle or puzzle, dolphin or dogfish, Your hearts I’ll stamp out with my horse’s heels, And make a quagmire of your mingled brains.
Two hundred years after Shakespeare, Voltaire took another bawdy turn at sending up the Pucelle legend. What great company to argue with! Vita Sackville-West, a central biographer of the twentieth century, took on the evidence in the 1930s. What is fact and what is fiction? Let Sackville-West respond in her typically forthright way:
“I have observed a tendency to believe that very little is known of Jeanne beyond the cardinal facts of her inspiration, achievement, and death. Nothing could be less true. We know practically every detail of her passive existence as a child and, as to the few months of her active career, they are so thoroughly documented that we know exactly where she spent each day, and in whose company; what she wore, what horse she rode, what arms she bore, what she ate and drank; and, more importantly still, what words she uttered. Scores of her friends, neighbours, followers, and companions-in-arms have left vivid testimony as to her appearance, manners, habits, character, and speech. The idea that there is any paucity of material for reconstructing her life and personality is fallacious in the last degree.”
Now Jeanne d’Arc is officially a Catholic saint, made so 489 years after she was burned by the Church as a heretic. The little handwritten inscriptions by the ordinary I encountered on my visit, left in Le Livre d’Or, the visitor’s book at Domremy, are more religious than secular. In their eloquent directness, they are the most moving testament to a phenomenon transcending mere history. Short and immediate, the sentiments express hope in the mystical, wishing Jeanne well, asking for her grace, sweetly caressing the face of modern cynicism. While something continued to stir in me, I added my own little prayer to the others.
As Jeanne was redefined by the nineteenth century, she has become literally?and confusingly?une saint pour tous. Spokesperson for both the French political left and right, Vichy puppet, first Protestant, first nationalist, proto-feminist. In the process Jeanne systematically has been shorn of any supernatural or spiritual implications, a guinea pig prodded through mazes of ideological and scientific dogma. Her own words have been ignored, or reshaped to fit specific secular needs. Was she anointed by God? Did she speak directly with angels and saints? Or was she mad, or a liar, or a witch, or a man, or even a lesbian haunted by penis envy, as she was ponderously diagnosed in 1933 in full Freudian drag.
Captivated, I set out on my own search for Jeanne d’Arc, driven by scientific curiosity, a thirst for sound history, and an open-mindedness to that divine mystery that has dumbfounded both her own contemporaries and her interpreters over the centuries?her je ne sais quoi.
Author's Biography
Preston Russell, M.D., is a graduate of Tulane University and Vanderbilt Medical School. He is also the author of The Low Country: From Savannah to Charleston and coauthor, with Barbara Russell, of Savannah: A History of Her People Since 1733.He and his wife live in Savannah, Georgia.