Joan of Arc - The Martyr Figure of a Neo-Medieval Revival

By Imogen Lee

Crystalising the emergent shift in popular culture towards medievalism, Chappell Roan embodied Joan of Arc as she reimagined her hit song, “Good Luck, Babe!” at the 2024 VMAs (figure 1). Replete with dancing knights and a flaming castle set, the performance furnished the sapphic ballad with the theatricality and creativity that characterises Chappell’s artistic project. With ‘castle-core’ set to be a key trend of 2025 and multiple films based on Joan of Arc’s life announced as in production, it seems that neo-medievalism is once again on the rise, figure-headed by the 14th century teenage martyr. What is it about Joan of Arc that has led her to be venerated by Victorian painters and modern-day pop stars alike?

Figure 1: Chappell Roan performing of “Good Luck, Babe!” at the MTV VMAs 2024. Christopher Polk. Getty Photos.

Born during the ‘Hundred Years War’ in the small village of Domrémy in France, Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) claimed to experience visions from St Margaret, St Catherine and St Michael from the age of 13. Astonishingly, Joan, the daughter of a peasant, went on to lead the military campaign to liberate France from the English invaders. Seemingly fulfilling a prophecy (attributed to Merlin) stating that a virgin would save France, Joan was felt to be a signal of Divine support for their cause. However, Joan was eventually captured, put on trial for heresy and burned at the stake in 1431. Although not canonised until 1920, Joan had been understood and described in terms of sainthood long before. It is not hard to understand why the harrowing story of a cross-dressing, sword-wielding teenage girl might capture the interest of successive generations. The narrative and symbols of Joan of Arc have been engaged for various socio-political movements from the early suffragettes to right-wing French nationalists: as Saunders notes, Joan has been conceived of as “saint, heretic, zealot, witch, prophetess, adolescent lunatic, androgynous proto-feminist, class equalizer, Marxist Liberator, French Nationalist, icon for campaigners for moral reform and temperance and chastity movements.” Indeed, as I will elaborate with reference to Victorian representations and contemporary popular culture, the icon of Joan of Arc resists being read monolithically.

Consistent with the broader gothic revival, the Victorian era witnessed a near-obsession with Joan of Arc. This fascination was cultivated by the publishing of transcripts of her trial in 1841, in addition to more publications on the life of Joan of Arc than had ever been produced in the previous centuries combined. Susan Ekberg Stiritz situates this trend within the “Victorian vogue for saints,” highlighting that “saints’ lives mediated— represented, argued for, and instilled— norms of femininity.” As such, representations of Joan in both literature and art are enmeshed with contemporary gender discourses. With gendered spheres inflexibly demarcated and notions of the ‘Angel in the House’ as the feminine ideal of domestic submissiveness alongside the nascent Woman’s Rights movement, definitions of femininity and womanhood were highly contested. Looking to John Everett Millais and Dante Gabrielle Rosetti’s portrayals of Joan, we can get a sense of her place within this social context.

Figure 2: Sir John Everett Millais, Joan of Arc, 1865. Oil on canvas, 82 x 62cm. Leicester Galleries, Leicester.

Millais depicts Joan of Arc (fig. 2, 1865) kneeling, eyes cast upwards in an expression of holiness. Against a black backdrop, the figure is illuminated from the top left of the image. The composition and staging are theatrical and dramatic, with the light on the figure’s face suggestive of divine revelation. Millais’s Joan is represented through Victorian beauty ideals, with bright pale skin, a slight blush and neatly arranged hair parted in the middle. However, the luminous femininity of her face is contrasted against the masculinity suggested by the silver armour. Although the fluted chest piece, delineated with highlight and shadow, might evoke the pleating and corsets worn by women, the rendering of the reflective surface conveys the hardness and weight of the metal. Although Millais sets out an opposition between masculinity and femininity through this armour over Joan’s red dress, the ‘cross-dressing’ seems more like a costume, something divinely ordained and carried out from necessity rather than an act of radical dissidence. Thus, Millais minimises the subversive elements of her story to create an image of feminine devotion, sacrifice and submission.

Despite working during a similar period, Rosetti portrays Joan in more active and androgynous terms. One of several renderings of the same theme Rosetti produced from the 1860s until his death, here Joan of Arc (fig. 3, 1864) is presented similarly looking up but cranes her neck back as she lifts the sword above her head. The composition is cropped so that Joan takes up almost all the pictorial plane, suggesting her strength and immensity. The tightness of this composition and flatness of space presses the figure forwards to the frame. Alongside the profile format, this serves to lend Joan a sense of iconicity and perhaps align her with representations of masculine power. Modelled after Jane Morris, whose physiognomy became synonymous with pre-Raphaelite beauty, Rosetti also uses Joan to promote a feminine ideal, albeit an alternative vision involving long wavy hair and an elongated neck. However, as Saunders notes, the figure is nonetheless “an androgynous knight: the fair face could be Galahad or Lancelot as easily as Joan.” Where Millais’ Joan simply held the sword as a prop, Rosetti has Joan raises the sword up and kisses it, thus emphasising her warrior identity over her religiosity. The active pose of Joan, her tight two-handed grip on the sword, subverts chivalric expectations where “woman serves only as passive icon to active male.” Rosetti’s androgynous heroine exemplifies some of the ways Joan moves beyond “the available Western taxonomy of female archetypes.”

Figure 3: Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Joan of Arc, 1864. Watercolour on board. 533 x 571mm. Tate, London.

While these Victorian works illustrate a high point in the popularity of Joan as a subject, she has been consistently referenced and represented across visual media since. As neo- medievalism has persisted in waves, so has the symbolism of Joan of Arc. From Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) to Alexander McQueen’s 1998

collection Joan, she has continued to be a historical figure mined for meaning. Reflecting John Simmons’s notion that the Middle Ages “have been stretched in many directions in order to provide an ideological space in which a society can explore and articulate concerns which are otherwise repressed,” the mythology of Joan of Arc shifts and mutates to speak to contemporary issues. Historically, this has involved Joan’s image being used to serve multiple ideological programs due to “the ambiguities her body could accommodate”: Joan signifies the ‘outsider’ as a persecuted woman defying the social order, while simultaneously her ties to the monarchy and Catholicism express reactionary conservatism. Robin Blaetz surmises, “she is an amalgam of religious, political and folk myths, each reflecting its own time and adding to the ever-changing persona.” Essentially, it is Joan’s ‘malleability’ that makes her apt to be endlessly reimagined and reincarnated in visual culture.

Returning to the recent VMAs performance, it is evident that Joan of Arc continues to resonate as a historical figure. As Chappell Roan shoots a flaming crossbow back onto the castle set, she wields the cultural weight and associations of Joan of Arc as powerful warrior and saviour. Rossetti and Millais’s representations of Joan negotiate ideas about the nature of women, religious devotion and chivalric heroism through her. In a different vein, Chappell’s reference to the Saint might reflect her desire to remain true to her convictions in the face of a celebrity culture in which tabloids and paparazzi idolise people only to seek to (metaphorically) burn them at the stake for entertainment. Umberto Eco suggests that people have been “revisit[ing] the Middle Ages since the moment when, according to historical handbooks, they came to an end,” so Joans persistence as a cultural reference signifies a continuity of this medieval nostalgia. Ultimately, Joan appeals since we are still “dreaming of the Middle Ages” in fragmented, fantastical lenses to grapple with contemporary issues.

Bibliography:

Blaetz, Robin. Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture. University of Virginia Press, 2001.

Eco, Umberto. “Dreaming of the Middle Ages.” In Travels in Hyperreality. Translated by William Weaver. Harcourt, 1986.

Saunders, Clare Broome. “The End of Chivalry?: Joan of Arc and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer.” In Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Simmons, John. From Medieval to Medievalism. Macmillan, 1992.

Smith, Julianne Nelson. “Notorious bodies of faith: Holy women in Victorian art and literature.” ProQuest Dissertations & Thesis, 1999

Stiritz, Susan Ekberg. “Victorian Hagiography and Feminine Self -Fashioning.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2001.

Warner, Marina. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. Vintage, 1982.