H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 42
Françoise Meltzer. For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. x + 240 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $52.00 US (cl). ISBN 0-226-51981-3. $20.00 US (pb). ISBN 0-226-51982-1.
Review by Katherine B. Crawford, Vanderbilt University.
Academics, film-makers, playwrights, politicians, and even just plain
folks over the centuries have found Joan of Arc inspiring,
exasperating, ridiculous, and sublime. For Françoise Meltzer, the
treatment of Joan in theoretical texts has duplicated and amplified
these responses. Meltzer takes Joan of Arc as a figure through whom we
can analyze differentiated notions of the body, agency, and gendered
configurations of subjectivity through critical theory. From a careful
reading of contemporary texts and the larger Christian frame of
understandings of female embodiment, Meltzer uses Joan of Arc to
challenge the gendered blind spots in the theorization of subjectivity.
Meltzer opens by briefly considering how the range of images of Joan of
Arc has functioned since the fifteenth century. The lack of reliable
or consistent contemporary images allows each generation to impose its
vision of how to order the competing gender imperatives (masculine and
feminine) of Joan's story (p. 6). As every interpretation privileges
specific notions of how charismatic courage and gender roles ought to
combine, Joan herself recedes. That is, historical distance has elided
Joan's subjectivity and feminine subjectivity more generally. But,
Meltzer argues, Joan's story can reveal how patriarchy maintains
sovereignty in opposition to the feminine. Joan's trial represents a
moment in which patriarchal hegemony was questioned and reveals a
series of metaphysical conundrums focused on Joan's (female) body.
Already, then, Joan of Arc's historical self is less important to
Meltzer than the ways Joan may be used to consider pre-Cartesian
notions of subjectivity against the postmodern crisis of subjectivity.
Meltzer's interest is in revisiting notions of embodiment as they were
articulated by early Christians and revitalized in postmodern debates
about the body. In Chapter 1, for instance, Meltzer traces notions of
embodiment from Althusser back to Spinoza and forward to Heidegger,
with Joan and her contemporaries largely absent. Joan functions as a
prism through which Meltzer explores problems of subjectivity and
instability in postmodernism. The analysis of Althusser's body
politics allows Meltzer to consider the fascination, beginning in Late
Antiquity, with saints whose mind and body were seen as one. This
unity, Meltzer posits, represents postmodern nostalgia for a presumed
mind/body unison before Descartes. Where the postmodern move has been
to understand the body as subject to culture, Althusser's efforts to
feel embodiment through physicality reflect the postmodern anxiety that
subjectivity is fragile and fragmentary because it is so rarely a
matter of certainty. Meltzer's use of theoretical materials to the
exclusion of primary sources may not be satisfying to historians, and
she is silent concerning Caroline Bynum's forceful assertion that
the "Middle Ages was characterized by a cacophony of discourses" about
the body.[1] Nonetheless, Meltzer does point out that one discernible
trend in recent theoretical and historical understandings of the body
has been to elaborate on the notion of a thinking body before the
Enlightenment. She brings this out by tracing aspects of the history
of the body from Late Antiquity to Descartes.
A crucial aspect of the history of the body is attitudes toward
virginity. In a circuitous but intriguing analysis, Meltzer asserts
that Greco-Roman notions about virginity operated (like Late Antique
notions of embodiment) to structure the social codes that constrained
Joan of Arc. The wandering womb in Greco-Roman philosophy and medicine
was matched in many ways by the uncontrollable penis, but self-control
was considered a male virtue while female chastity was an affliction--
at best a temporary life stage; at worst a fatal medical condition (pp.
53-58). According to the author, the association of virginity and
death has been depicted as parallel to masculine subjectivity as self-
contained and self-evident, particularly in modern theory. For
Meltzer, then, postmodern nostalgia with respect to the body is deeply
entangled with a Judeo-Christian inheritance of the association of sex
and death derived from ancient sexual morality. Foucault's analysis of
the lack of separation of mind and body in his reading of John Cassian
and Kristeva's fascination with the highly problematic feminine model
of the Virgin Mary are among Meltzer's examples of such nostalgia in
postmodern theory. Omitting reference to the complex understandings of
the body discoverd by medievalists in a number of disciplines, the
author opts for the familiar dichotomy of body as feminine and mind as
masculine. Perhaps the limited use of source material--the closest
Meltzer gets to Joan of Arc in the sources is Gregory IX's 1220 order
in support of using midwives to examine women in cases of divorce (p.
69)--produces this reductive view of medieval thought. On the other
hand, Meltzer suggests how ideas about virginity came to saturate
postmodern efforts to understand the discursive power of Christianity
as an element in European identity.
Joan of Arc's role in Meltzer's story is as an heir to early Christian
body politics and, in particular, her relationship to the strictures
and structures around virginity. Asserting trans-historical claims
about the stability of cultural codes surrounding virginity, Meltzer
further posits that the association of the feminine with mystery works
out in highly conflicted ways in understandings of virginity. She
argues that the secondary status of the feminine that results from
conceptualizing virginity as an impossible alterity (the woman who is a
virgin is not fundamentally a woman) allows theorists such as Levinas,
Freud, and Nietzsche to reinscribe the feminine as a trope of mystery
(pp. 61-64). When the eighteenth-century philosopher Georges-Louis
Leclerc de Buffon called virginity a male fantasy, Meltzer notes that
he was unusual in recognizing that the notions of bodily intactness and
mental purity ascribed to virginity were ascertained only when
annihilated.[2] She charges that postmodern theorists have ignored
Buffon in their dismantling of the subject, preferring to see
femininity as a mysterious riddle, so that the transparency and
stability of the male subject remains secure. For Meltzer, this means
that virginity allows women to claim subjectivity infrequently, and it
remains contested and qualified at best.
Meltzer then returns to Late Antiquity to examine the emergence of
paradoxical thinking in the Catholic tradition about virginity. She
focuses on several elements: Because virginity is against nature, it is
admired as proof of fortitude against nearly insurmountable instincts;
virginity allows transcendence even as it depends on the denial of
bodily drives; and that which goes against nature can also easily turn
monstrous (pp. 83-88). In Meltzer's view, those ideas were combined
with the emergence, by the fifteenth century, of the idea that the loss
of the maidenhead by carnal knowledge became irremediable, while
virginity was taken as proof of sincerity. Utilizing records from the
Trial of Condemnation that discuss Joan's virginity, she locates Joan
as the heir to a tradition that uses virginity to claim dedication of
one's life to God. For the author, women especially had to accept
virginity in order to take on a role of strength outside of normal
gender expectations: The pious virgin had some room to legitimize her
discourse as a self-proclaimed ascetic, claiming some subjectivity
despite her lack of agency as a woman.
Meltzer sees the female ascetic as slightly breaking down the binaries
of subjectivity, but she also contends that both modern theorists and
Joan's adversaries found this instability troubling. Both critical
theorists and deconstructionists, according to Meltzer, do not quite
get out of the bind that female subjectivity presents. Horkheimer and
Adorno, for instance, argue that physical weakness elicits misogyny and
victimization such that political powerlessness is conflated with
weakness, while not recognizing that weakness is human--not merely
female. Meltzer reads Derrida as reinscribing feminine erasure by
subsuming it under a masculine and phallogocentric understanding of the
apocalyptic. Meltzer does not locate these readings either within or
against medieval notions of the apocalyptic, accept to argue that Joan
fashions her own understanding of the apocalyptic as linked to her
virginity. She here concurs with earlier scholarship,
remarking, "Joan's Trial of Condemnation, which begins as purely
political inquiry, turns more and more to the theological in its
obsessive questioning" (p. 115). While I suspect historians may
object to her deeply pessimistic reading of the possibilities for
subjectivity, the key for Meltzer is how both iterations of the
discussion of subjectivity--medieval and modern--can act in different
ways to impose silence.
While historical tradition, Church authority and theoretical analyses
have combined to obscure how Joan of Arc challenges the erasures of
feminine subjectivity, Meltzer uses these same elements to bring out
Joan's subjectivity. Working off Georges Bataille's account of the
noble brigand Gilles de Rais, she compares and contrasts Joan and
Rais. Executed in 1440, Rais was accused of molesting and murdering
children, as well as with consorting with the devil. Like Joan, he
initially rejected the authority of the Church, but he repented when
threatened with torture. As a result, Rais was subjected to a milder
form of execution and buried in consecrated ground. Meltzer argues
that the difference in how Rais was treated brings out the political
implications of Joan's conflicts with the Church concerning her
understanding of the occult. Critical of Bataille's analysis for
blurring the distinction between the Church Militant and the Church
Triumphant, Meltzer contends that the Church of Joan's day worked on
the basis of an economy of sin that requires excess--of sin and then of
love--in order for the Church to control forgiveness (p. 137). She
argues that Bataille's account of Rais depicts him as entering this
economy; Joan, on the other hand, by resolutely maintaining that her
religious experience was personal and private (occulta), did not.
Meltzer reads the documentation of the Trial of Condemnation in terms
of Joan infuriating the court because she had nothing religious to
atone for. The nature of the trial, she argues, shifted because Joan
left the Church no room to forgive her. For Meltzer, the heavy
concentration on technical points and the punishment of Joan for her
refusal to admit she had sinned represent a modern notion of mysticism
as personal and private, which is elided in Meltzer's analysis with
subjectivity.
Meltzer contends that Joan's dissonance with respect to Church
authority was crucial to the active denial of her subjectivity. Citing
the general patristic hostility toward women, she opens with the
assertion that Joan inspired enormous fear in her male judges simply
because she was female. Admitting that Joan was probably ignorant of
the Church fathers in any substantive way, Meltzer nonetheless frames
Joan within a patristic discourse that posited a woman was open to sin
in a way that a man was not because of the porous quality of her body
as the result of her open vagina. The patristic line continues with
the familiar claim that a woman's hands were supposed to stay busy so
that her other opening-the analogue to the vagina-her mouth, would stay
shut (p. 146). While omitting any direct evidence concerning what the
judges actually thought, Meltzer locates Joan in this context of
hostility and suspicion and then reads Joan as making a distinction
between the clergy and the Church as the provider of the Mass and
Communion.
Meltzer argues that Joan, despite being able to make this distinction,
consecrated her virginity to the Faith without recognizing that the
Church, as a discourse of power, had every interest in denying her the
ability to make that decision for herself. She accordingly reads the
interrogation transcripts as indicating that the Church had decided
Joan's voices, virginity, and even her mission, sprang from the Devil
rather than God. If, as Meltzer maintains, virginity was especially
useful for women as a mode of subjectivity, virginity was also the
locus of danger. In the author's reading, the danger is evident in
that the court had decided Joan's fate even before the trial, in part
because Joan did not acknowledge the power of the court, and in part
because she fit so well into a schema that divested her of autonomy as
a matter of anatomy. While Meltzer's argument is problematic with
respect to proving immediate contextual actions or agency, the
suggestion that subjectivity might reside historically in the loci of
repression is intriguing.
As the author is well aware, the status of Joan's voices was central to
her trial, and she discusses how both subjectivity and silence may have
played out in Joan's case. Meltzer compares Joan's lack of an
effective voice to cases of possession. As Michel de Certeau pointed
out, the possessed woman transgresses discourse because something she
does not know speaks in her.[3] Meltzer argues that Joan, in contrast,
did know the identities of her voices: Joan explained during her
interrogations that she recognized the archangel Michael, along with
saints Catherine and Margaret. Meltzer interprets Joan's certainty
about the identities of her voices as the source of her logical, lucid
responses during interrogation. Furthermore, Meltzer sees Joan's calm
assurance as provoking a great deal of anxiety among those who examined
her. She reads this anxiety both as the reason why Joan was asked to
swear to the truth repeatedly and why Joan found the request
bewildering and eventually exasperating. Meltzer sees Joan's
frustration as indicating that she understood language in an immediate
sense (the sign is the signified), and only gradually did she come to
understand that the court had appropriated the right to reinterpret her
speech (p. 155). For Meltzer, Joan's status as a non-subject was
because she was a woman, which permitted the Church to re-appropriate
her voice. While perhaps valid for Joan, the claim that she was denied
subjectivity as a woman is a bit of a stretch. The idea that no
medieval subjects were women seems unsupportable, and Meltzer does not
allow for the rendering of other (male) individuals as non-subject,
often, for example, by effeminizing them.
Meltzer's challenging penultimate chapter analyzes the gendering of the
metaphysical gaze almost entirely within a male/female gender economy.
Opening with the observation that we are prone to metaphor when faced
with the impossible, Meltzer dismantles the apparent gender neutrality
of metaphysics in Hegel and Plato. She considers Luce Irigaray's
notion that women do not yet exist as a metaphysical problem to be a
more honest attempt at gender neutrality, but finds Irigaray's Ethical
Couple to be too utopian. More importantly, Meltzer feels that
Irigaray ends up effacing the feminine all over again. She argues
that "the illusion of subjectivity is more easily maintained from the
male perspective and more easily veiled" (p. 178). Absent in Meltzer's
considerations is much reference to medieval views that construed the
masculine and the feminine in more complicated (that is, not always or
necessarily binary) ways. Nor does she, despite her focus on theory,
seem to consider the possibility that queer theory might disrupt the
normative valences of the masculine and feminine. The absence of queer
theory is striking given that the link back to Joan is the question of
veiling, which Meltzer actually reads in a rather queer way. Fire,
which is both a metaphor and, in Joan's case, the cause of her death,
partakes of veiling. Meltzer picks up Gaston Bachelard's analysis of
fire as masculine because it is warm and smoke as feminine because it
veils and is changeable, and takes his claims further: fire is
multivalent because it is both virile and feminine (p. 83).[4]
Many of the disparate elements of this difficult chapter come together
when Meltzer starts to draw on Jules Quicherat's five volumes of
documents recounting Joan's death. She uses them to explicate how
Joan's execution and its immediate aftermath feed into considerations
of modernity and national identity. Burning a heretic, the author
notes, is also a metaphor--one that is organized around rituals of
expiation, repentance, and reintegration. Meltzer breaks down the
failure of the metaphor in Joan's case, pointing out that the usual
practice--in which the Church turned over the condemned heretic for
trial and execution by the secular arm--was not followed in Joan's
case. The morning after her Church trial, she was taken to the Old
Marketplace of Rouen in order to hear the sermon exhorting her to
repent and then her condemnation. The ritual in the Marketplace was
carried out shortly after Joan disavowed her voices briefly, and
probably, Meltzer reasonably contends, so that she could receive
Communion (p. 192).
The Trial documents record that Joan denied she had recanted at all,
saying that if she did, she did so "for fear of the fire" (p. 188).
Witnesses, even hostile ones, Meltzer points out, agreed on two things:
Joan's burning elicited piteous cries and that she reportedly
said "Jesus" at the last moment. In the belief structure of the
fifteenth century, she could only do that if her faith was genuine (p.
199). Joan's body was then displayed to the crowd. Whether this was
to show that she was not a man, as Meltzer contends, or perhaps to
insist that Joan was merely human, the act of display is described by
Meltzer as "most heinous" (p. 200). Whether contemporaries saw it that
way is less significant to the author than the eyewitness report that a
dove flew out of the fire at the moment of Joan's death and headed
toward the Ile-de-France. A sign of the Holy Spirit, the dove, Meltzer
contends, contradicts the claims of the Church about Joan and her
death, and it encourages what the author sees as incipient doubts about
the Church's position throughout the ritual of the execution. If the
dove assured Joan's contemporaries that she was a member of the
Christian community, Meltzer further argues that the flight of the dove
toward France situated Joan in a patriotic discourse, with Joan as the
opponent of foreign invasion on behalf of Charles VII.
Joan as the patriotic figure committed to Charles VII as a leader in
the abstract (rather than a specific individual) leads Meltzer back to
nostalgia, and particularly to Joan as a figure of nostalgia. Jules
Michelet's understanding of Joan as offering feminine sympathy,
innocence, and emotional authenticity in an increasingly industrial
and "unscrupulous" world does much to construct Joan in nostalgic terms
(p. 225). Meltzer contrasts Michelet's idealized depiction of Joan
with Voltaire's ribald, irreverent image of Joan in La Pucelle
d'Orléans. She uses the juxtaposition of Michelet and Voltaire to
highlight their distance from each other (over the chasm of the
Revolution) and their combined distance from postmodern interpretations
of Joan. Voltaire's lack of nostalgia enables Meltzer to return to her
premise that postmodern thought is steeped in nostalgia for certainty.
While she sees Michelet's idealism as "pathetic, if brilliant," his
reveries on Joan point to what postmodernism picks up on and Voltaire
ignores about Joan: the element of mystery (p. 231). Postmodern
struggles with the problem of mystery are discernible for Meltzer in
the attempts to interpret Joan's voices in rational terms. The
nostalgia for mystery and the hope that there may be "something beyond
human reason," combines at best uncomfortably with the desire for
certainty in postmodern thinking (p. 234). For Meltzer, separating
the feminine from the mysterious, "might also allow for a clearer sense
of how we imagine, and need, an impossible that we are willing to
believe in without willing to know (understand) it" (p. 239). In
short, Meltzer sees such a separation as a way to rethink subject
formation, on the one hand, without reliance on the male subject and,
on the other, with an understanding of subjectivity as illusory.
Of course, Meltzer has indicated how unlikely such an unencumbered view
of subjectivity would be: Subjectivity has been, in her account, both
overdetermined by gender and gendered masculine. She nonetheless
raises the question of what imagining subjectivity might mean outside a
binary frame. Joan of Arc's understanding of mystery and the sacred-
signaled by her lack of comprehension that her position was radical-
offers a glimpse outside the frame. Articulating Joan of Arc in this
way is Meltzer's nostalgic moment, but it also suggests the many ways
Joan continues to resonate even in a postmodern age.
NOTES
[1] Caroline Bynum, "Why All the Fuss about the Body? A
Medievalist's Perspective," Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 1-33.
Reprinted in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Culture and Society
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 241-80, at p. 245.
[2] While Meltzer focuses on the early Christian tradition,
discussions of bodily intactness as dependent on the hymen remained
lively in the early modern period; see for instance Ambroise Paré,
Deux Livres de la Chirurgie (Paris, 1573).
[3] Meltzer does not cite an edition, but the relevant text is Michel
de Certeau, The Possession at Loudon, trans. Michael B. Smith
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
[4] Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M.
Ross (Boston, 1964). Oddly, Meltzer notes a range of evidence
concerning ideas about the gendering of fire, but none of it is
medieval.
Katherine Crawford,
Vanderbilt University,
katherine.b.crawford@vanderbilt.edu.
Copyright © 2002 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 2 (June 2002), No. 42
ISSN 1553-9172
