Visions of the Maid by Blaetz Robin;

Author:Blaetz, Robin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2001-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

7 Looking for Joan of Arc

Hedy Lamarr in The Story of Mankind

and Jean Seberg in Saint Joan

It is impossible to know whether images of Joan of Arc helped in any way to return women to their homes after the Second World War by making them feel heroic about sacrificing their independence. But it is clear that many women did quit their jobs.1 Historians, particularly those working with women’s history, continue to investigate how women’s roles could have expanded and contracted so drastically in so short a time without confusing people and challenging deep-seated attitudes about gender and the sexual division of labor. Some argue that the trauma of the Depression followed by that of the Second World War was so great that women returned en masse to the imagined stability and reassuring domesticity of the home in the 1950s. Many of these same historians believe that the experience of the 1940s may have had delayed effects in the 1960s and 1970s, through children raised by mothers who had briefly known social and financial independence.2 Other scholars, such as Leila Rupp, argue that behavior during the Second World War was typical of any war period, in which social mores are loosened and normally unacceptable behavior is allowed without causing permanent cultural transformation. After the war, images of Joan of Arc not only increased but were increasingly transformed along the conservative lines initiated in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, vicarious adventure in women’s popular literature gave way almost completely to stories about babies, home, kitchen, and domestic affection.3 However dissonantly, Joan of Arc’s presence continued to grow. As we have seen, during the war Joan was all but absent, with only three articles about her appearing in popular journals between 1939 and 1945. Between the end of the war and 1949, Joan emerged more frequently and in magazines of wider circulation, such as Newsweek and the Saturday Review of Literature. During the 1950s, however, at least fourteen essays about Joan appeared, and the number grew steadily through 1970. In 1949 a book by Christopher Bick titled The Bells of Heaven: The Story of Joan of Arc directed interest toward Joan’s childhood. Assuming that attraction to Joan was an adolescent phenomenon, Bick wrote that he wanted to make the story alive and pleasant by acquainting the reader intimately with the heroine. One-third of the book concentrates on Joan’s childhood and an entire chapter is devoted to “the dream of Jacques d’Arc.” In 1950 Classics Illustrated no. 78 featured Joan of Arc with a picture of Ingrid Bergman as Joan on horseback on the cover. The drawings inside show Joan as a voluptuous peasant who sits on her horse with an angry countenance, emoting in response to the voice bubble in the sky: “My voices tell me to stay here!” As is typical in this format, the enthusiasm of the illustrators was directed to the spectacle of the torture scenes as well as the fire, smoke, and agony of the stake. Overall, the blend of

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