Saint Joan

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1923

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Summary

Background

Scene Summaries & Analyses

Preface

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Birds

Birds symbolize the concepts of freedom and rebirth in Saint Joan, which Joan herself embodies through her affiliation with birds. In the opening scene of the play, Baudricourt is upset by the lack of eggs, which symbolize the situation of France. Eggs are suggestive of fertility and new life. When the hens stop laying, Baudricourt’s castle becomes metaphorically infertile, unable to generate new life, a condition that points toward Baudricourt’s unwillingness to help Joan in her fight against the French invaders. However, when Baudricourt agrees to give Joan her armor and send her to the Dauphin’s court, the steward rushes in and announces, “[T]he hens are laying like mad, sir. Five dozen eggs!” (85). This sudden fertility denotes that, by trusting in Joan, Baudricourt has helped to ensure the birth of a new France.

Later in the play, Joan herself is conflated with a beautiful bird, foreshadowing how her greatness will lead people to try to trap her. As Dunois and his page wait for Joan’s arrival at Orléans, the page suddenly shouts “There she goes!” (105). Dunois assumes that the boy means that Joan has arrived with reinforcements for the army, but the page clarifies that the “she” refers to a blue kingfisher he has spotted on the banks. The feminine pronoun creates intentional ambiguity between the bird and Joan. Because of the kingfisher’s beautiful color, the page wishes to trap the bird and keep it. Dunois reacts with anger to this wish, telling the child, “[L]et me catch you trying to trap them, and I will put you in the iron cage for a month to teach you what a cage feels like” (106). This statement foreshadows Joan’s later imprisonment by the English. When Joan is accused of trying to escape from prison by jumping from a tower, she defends herself by saying, “[I]f you leave the door of the cage open the bird will fly out,” (153) justifying the naturalness of her desire for freedom through an avian metaphor. While Joan initially signs a document repenting of her heresy in order to save herself from death, once she realizes that the rest of her life will be in prison, she immediately recants the confession and chooses to burn. She tells the Inquisition, “[Y]ou promised me my life; but you lied… you think that life is nothing but not being stone dead” (165). Joan, like the kingfisher, cannot live in captivity. The freedom of the kingfisher and of the birds who live outside represents the political and spiritual liberty that Joan fights for but cannot achieve.

Bells

The motif of church bells—which have an earthly origin but carry a suggestion of the divine—signifies the ambiguity of Joan’s mystical connection to God. When Joan describes to Dunois how she hears the voices of the saints and angels who guide her, she claims that their voices are in the echoes of church bells, rather than when the bells are pealing loudly. She tells him:

It is in the bells I hear my voices. Not to-day, when they all rang: that was nothing but jangling. But here in this corner, where the bells come down from heaven, and the echoes linger, or in the fields, where they come from a distance through the quiet of the countryside, my voices are in them (128-129).

The phrases that Joan claims to hear align with the cadence of ringing bells. She describes how she hears them saying “Dear-child-of-God” and “Be-brave-go-on” (129), which are phrases that rhythmically mimic the traditional onomatopoeia for a bell: “ding-dong, ding-dong.” This creates ambiguity about whether the voices are merely her own imagination interpreting aural impressions or actual messages from God.

The distant sound of church bells is further affiliated with the sounds of the countryside, which provides the emotional motivation for Joan’s devotion to France. Joan often describes herself as being of the land, meaning that she from the peasant farmer class, but figuratively suggesting that her connection to nature makes her more nationalistic. When the Inquisition sentences her to life in prison, she laments that she could learn to live without her armor and military glory, “if only [she] could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed church bells that send [her] angel voices floating to [her] on the wind” (166). The sounds of the French countryside are all that Joan needs to survive, and the bells are associated with the other natural sounds of peasant life such as singing birds and bleating lambs. Thus, George Bernard Shaw indicates that Joan’s mystical experiences are really tied to her embodied experiences living in her homeland. This implies that the message she hears telling her to liberate France might not be the voices of literal saints and angels but instead might be Joan’s imagination personifying the landscape itself.

Fire

Fire in Saint Joan symbolizes both hellish destruction and, paradoxically, holy rebirth. In Catholicism, Hell was traditionally imagined as being filled with fire, burning the souls of sinners to enact punishment upon them. When John de Stogumber witnesses Joan’s execution, the sight of her burning body makes him terrified that his own soul will burn in hell. While Joan is the one who has actually been burned, Stogumber reverses the situation when he cries out, “[S]he is in Thy bosom; and I am in hell for evermore” (170). However, the destructive power of fire cannot consume Joan’s heart. The executioner tells Warwick, “[H]er heart would not burn, my lord; but everything that was left is at the bottom of the river” (172). The miraculous preservation of Joan’s heart suggests its strength in resisting destruction, denoting that Joan’s power came from her ardent faith. Before her execution, Joan references “the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times” (165), comparing her situation to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. This story from Daniel in the Old Testament claims that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar threw three Hebrew boys into a furnace because he was angry that they would not worship his gods. However, the fire did not harm the boys and Nebuchadnezzar’s servants saw an angelic fourth figure protecting them amidst the flames. By evoking this story, Joan implies that God can defend her from the destruction of the fire, and therefore suggests that God was the one who allowed her heart to survive the flames.

After Joan’s death, however, the symbolic meaning of fire shifts to encompass the idea of holy light and spiritual rebirth. When Brother Ladvenu informs Charles VII that Joan’s conviction of heresy has been overturned, he claims that “the true heart that lived through the flame is consecrated” (175), suggesting that the fire served to consecrate Joan’s heart in the same way that holy water consecrates a new Christian at their baptism. Thus, the fire has actually given her new life by making her an example to inspire other Christians. Similarly, Pierre Cauchon points out the irony that when the Inquisition attempted to destroy her by burning her, “the flames whitened into the radiance of the Church Triumphant” (180). This image evokes the light of God rather than the punishment of hellfire, transforming the idea of fire from a demonic penalty into a holy weapon. This shift in the symbolic meaning of fire aligns with how Joan’s reputation has changed in the years after her death, transforming her from a heretic into a saint. Before her capture, Joan foreshadows how fire symbolizes her immortal legacy rather than her destruction when she tells the French court, “[Y]ou will all be glad to see me burnt; but if I go through the fire I shall go through it to their hearts for ever and ever” (139). This metaphor suggests that the fire is simply a process of transformation rather than destruction, turning Joan into a hero whose legacy will outlast the memory of the men who condemned her.