A Woman Soldier's Story

 “Joan” by Katherine J. Chen, 2022

This is the story of Joan d’Arc, told as if Chen was there.  A work of imaginative historical fiction, it tells of Joan growing up in a small village, Domrémy, near Burgundy in eastern France and her ascent as the teenaged leader of the French military.  This is during the 100 Years War after the disastrous 1415 battle of Agincourt that France lost.  It’s an early feminist story.  As Camille Paglia once remarked, women who avoid military matters due to ‘sensitivity’ sell themselves short or worse.  Joan did not.  This is also a class story about a tough rural nobody, a daughter of a peasant who rises to historic heights.

Joan, at 10, has grown up hearing stories of battles from this endless war.  She already has a military head on her shoulders, allocating throwing stones for use in fights with boys from a neighboring Burgundian town, planning ambushes from trees and telling her thick-header older brother to gather far more stones for battle.  Joan is what we used to call a tough girl – a ‘tomboy.’  She is beaten regularly by her father Jacques, a leading, greedy peasant in the village, who dislikes her lack of feminine virtues.  She has her hair shorn due to lice, making her look boy-like.  At a county fair, she successfully climbs up a greased pole for money and a goose using hidden iron nails in her hands.  At the fair Joan is also fascinated by a chain mail outfit and a small metal helmet made by skilled blacksmiths.  She is not religious, ignoring priests, holy women and praying, and that continues.  But the groundwork is laid, fictional or not.

Joan ‘of Arc’ is the herald of French nationalism and the actual formation of the nation.  It is 1422, still a medieval economy based on feudal relations after the Black Death 69 years earlier.  The English occupy Brittany, Normandy, Paris and all of the north of France around Rouen and Reims.  They have allies in Burgundy, while what is left of France is run by an addled and weak Dauphin.  Domrémy is sacked and burnt by Englishmen and her sister raped, then commits suicide. Anger and revenge are on the agenda.  A tall, strong 16-year old Joan is thrown out of the house when she defends herself from her father because of his continued abuse.  And so the journey begins.

The Battles Commence

Chen infuses this history of Joan, ‘the statue,’ as a real person, a former peasant, perhaps colored by modernity, streaming feminist fables and perhaps too many skills.  Joan wins an archery contest against the best marksman in the local French Army, in spite of never having shot a bow.  She eventually beats two expert swordsmen, though never having wielded a sword before. She learns to ride a horse, to swim, to track in dark woods.  She masters every unpleasant work she does.  She is chosen to meet the god-addled Dauphin in Chinon's castle, because they think her skills mean she is chosen by God.  This story has no visions, no silly stories about knowing the Dauphin before meeting him, no religiosity, no greed, no laziness.  Only a woman, a nobody, who wants to go to war. After being tested and forming a relationship with the Dauphin over shared miseries, Joan is sent by the prospective crown to relieve the siege of Orléans, a central city key to the rest of France. 

For Chen’s narrative, it is not God who is behind Joan, it is her upbringing.  Joan does not believe God is on France’s side, as the English have been winning for years.  To Joan it is about money, wealth, land, power, men and victory in war.  Engels would not be surprised as to Joan’s understanding of the role of force in history.  The Dauphin’s mother however knows Joan the peasant girl has to be dressed in the robes of God to convince others.  And so the ideological charade of national sainthood proceeds, to cloak war in a heavenly doublet, though it took 500 years to conclude. The virgin maid, encased in chain mail and a breastplate, has arrived.  Religion, like war, is politics by other means – even to this day.

In Orléans Joan slices a horses belly and slays an English knight in one battle.  In another she is wounded in the neck and yet leads an attack on a tower, driving the battering ram, then throwing Englishmen from the ramparts. Joan appears without armor in the third battle and the English retreat from the city in fear.  It reads like a Hollywood movie where the hero is unbeatable.  Is it true or embellishment?  She leads a defeat of the English in 4 more battles and clears the Loire Valley of them. Joan eats with the army, which is now full of village workmen.  She demands better maps and food and begins to learn the logistics of a campaign because she intends to take Reims and then Paris. She is injured 3 times in battle and becomes a promoter of cannons to defeat the English bowmen.  Those cannons eventually win the war for France 22 years after her execution.

Joan ignores the vile clerical intrigues of the Dauphin’s court, which lead to failed attempts at bribery and assassination against her by some bishops.  In fact the book has an excess of ‘court time’ in its sections.  Arriving in Reims the Dauphin is crowned King of France in the wake of the French retaking the town.  I won’t tell the rest of the story, which is of defeat. 

Her Crimes?

Joan’s sexual identity is an issue for others.  Is she a half male / half female? A lesbian?  Asexual?  She has already rejected an arranged marriage in Domrémy. She has threatened men who have spoken of ‘having her.’ Yet Joan does not want to be a man, she is happy as she is, even being ‘ugly.’  Her ‘crime’ of not being feminine enough becomes a reactionary accusation at her trial by the English when she is ultimately captured in Compiégne and executed in Rouen.  Heresy was the main charge, with the ‘wearing of men’s clothes’ and cutting her hair short another.  Chen, oddly, does not write about her trial or execution, but the issues are there - reactionary religion and the oppression of women.

Joan is portrayed in this book as a soldier, not as a sacrosanct and pretty virgin cheering the army on from the side, as the Church preferred.  A word to my comrades, men and women, be like this Joan – toughen up, for battles are coming.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms: ‘France,’ “medieval,’ ‘feminism,’ ‘peasant,’ ‘religion.’

Red Frog / January 23, 2025