Why pop culture’s love of Joan of Arc endures

(CNN) — More than 800 years after her birth, Joan of Arc — a patron saint of France — remains an object of not just historical, but cultural fascination. Over the summer, we’ve witnessed Chappell Roan’s armor-clad performance at the VMAs, a space-age Joan of Arc figure clothed by fashion designer Jeanne Friott and leather artisan Robert Mercier at the Olympics opening ceremony, not to mention Baz Luhrmann’s announcement last month that Joan of Arc will be the subject of his next film.

Her pop culture inspiration has lasted across the decades. In 1997, a now-iconic photoshoot featuring Fiona Apple captured by Joe McNally shows the indie pop artist riding the subway in a medieval knight suit and sword. “The pictures,” McNally wrote on Instagram, “have been played endlessly on Twitter for reasons unapparent to me.” Ten years later, Chloe Sevigny donned a choppy peroxide wig, a partial suit of armor and a white muslin peasant dress for her Joan of Arc Halloween costume. Most recently in 2018, Disney star turned fashion luminary Zendaya arrived at the Met Gala dressed as Joan in full chain mail and a bluntly cropped auburn bob for the “Heavenly Bodies” theme.

But what is Joan’s story, and why does her iconography appeal to the young starlets of today?

Humble beginnings

One of five children in a peasant family in Domrémy, in north-eastern France, Joan was born in the year 1412. Experiencing visions from a young age, Joan believed she was guided by God to save France from English invasion. Despite not being born with a fortune or aristocratic birthright, she was granted a rare audience with the Dauphin of France, the future King Charles VII, in February of 1429.

“How does one come from a village and find oneself in the highest echelons of French society? Where you’re rubbing elbows with dukes, and where you’re in conversation with the Dauphin — how does that even occur?” pondered Katherine J. Chen author of the 2022 historical fiction novel, “Joan”.

This unlikely beginning is partly what fuels Joan’s mystique. French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, who grew up in similar circumstances, used her start in life as the focus of his 1879 painting of Joan. It shows her with dirty hands and feet having abandoned her spinning wheel and with eyes cast towards the heavens as she contemplates ghostly visions behind her. The late Alexander McQueen too (who spoke about how, in his early career, he felt like a working-class imposter in the world of high fashion), used Joan of Arc as the inspiration for his Fall-Winter collection of 1998, drawing on her death as a martyr and her courage as a heroine.

Becoming Joan of Arc

In 1429, at around the age of 17, Joan asked the Dauphin to send her, and an army, to the siege of Orléans, a French city in the Loire valley which was at the time was under English occupation. Eventually persuaded by Joan’s religious conviction, the future king of France agreed. After being gifted a set of armor, she was sent to Orléans. Joan’s presence motivated the beleaguered French soldiers, and within nine days of her arrival the city was liberated.

Dr Eleanor Jackson, curator of the upcoming Medieval Women exhibition at the British Library, determined that Joan: “Must have had an enormous amount of personal charisma, and an incredible sense of conviction,” to be given permission to go. “It was pretty exceptional for a woman to be on the battlefield, to take on that military role, to try to influence military tactics, and be actively involved in politics, especially coming from a low birth,” Jackson explained.

The Amazonian image of Joan of Arc in armor is perhaps the most recurrent one in popular culture, inspiring thousands, if not hundreds and thousands, of similar depictions. Painters Rubens, Ingres and Rossetti all depicted Joan with flowing auburn hair and heavy full plated armor. More recent depictions have ditched the locks but kept the armor, with both Ingrid Bergman (1948) and Milla Jovovich (1999) embodying a more boyish image of Joan on film.

A patron saint of female power?

Following success in the Loire Valley, Joan saw Charles crowned as King of France at Reims, but after a defeat at the siege of Compiegne, she was captured and sold to the English. Joan was tried by a pro-English court for heresy in 1431, where she was found guilty. At approximately the age of 19, was burnt at the stake, convicted of heresy.

The transcript of Joan’s trial, which details the acts of cruelty at the hands of her captors and her remarkable resilience, remains one of two critical documents concerning Joan’s life. It also provided the inspiration for Carl Theodore Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti. Falconetti’s mesmerizing depiction of Joan after her imprisonment remains a major landmark in modern cinema.

First glorified then crucified,  Joan’s mythologized fate encapsulates the precarious role of women in society — particularly those in the limelight. In 2022, culture writer Rayne Fisher-Quann suggested the pendulum swing of public perception was such a distinctly female experience, she coined the term “woman’d.”

“Like wild animals and recycled plastic, women in the public eye have a lifecycle that most of us know by heart,” Fisher-Quann wrote for British youth culture magazine i-D. “Sometimes, she simply receives too much praise… Most often, the public seems to just get tired of her… It’s a perpetual cycle of ritualistic idolization, degradation and redemption that serves only to entertain the masses and generate profit for the powerful… I’ve begun to call it ‘being woman’d.’”

Perhaps when Roan, Sevigny, Apple and Zendaya — each a young woman at the coal face of fame — dressed as Joan, they were not only invoking her likeness but the feminist symbolism of the patron saint. McNally said Apple’s Joan of Arc-esque styling helped shift her public perception from “waif” to “warrior.” Similarly, Zendaya told InStyle her Met Gala look made her feel like “nothing could hurt me — I was like a warrior.”

More designers have since engaged with the idea of Joan as a passionate fighter rather than a passive martyr. At London Fashion Week in 2023, Turkish label Dilara Fındıkoğlu debuted a dress titled ‘Joan’s Knives’ — a striking skeletal frock made from Victorian antique crockery, inspired by Joan’s posthumous desire for vengeance. LGBTQ+ actors Emma Corrin and Hari Nef have both since donned the dress.

For Chen, it’s the malleability of Joan’s identity that has in part has crystallized her as a cultural icon. “She is so many things to so many people,” she told CNN. Not just an armor-clad symbol of victory or a military tactician, Joan was a saint, a witch, a martyr, a heretic and an ingénue — a mess of contradictions that centuries on render her both human and relatable. She is also a cautionary tale for young women, a brutal warning of the fickle nature of celebrity and a symbol of morality and strength.

“We love it when people rise very fast, we love success stories, especially when it’s rags to riches, but — as is human nature — we also love to see people crash and burn. Her life is a wonderful explosive spectacle,” Chen said.

The-CNN-Wire
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