Sun Shuwei

18A01E St Joan Faith PBQ

The extract, situated in Scene V, depicts Joan at her lowest moment in the play.
Although Joan is a character who shows great religious faith and trust in God
throughout the play, this extract depicts the only time in the play where her spirit is
broken during the trial and she submits to the church, believing that she has been
misled by her voices. It precedes Joan’s powerful speech in which her faith is renewed,
and in which she retracts her recantation and chooses death over confinement in a
paradoxical affirmation of life. Faith in this extract consists of both religious belief and
ordinary trust. While Joan loses her trust in her voices, her religious faith never wavers.
The Chaplain is another figure who loses his trust in institutional processes.

In this extract, Joan loses her trust in her own voices to deliver her from harm.
Throughout the trial in Scene V, she remains optimistic and lively that she is in the
right, engaging in banter and raillery with her judges. Yet, Joan in the extract
undergoes visible emotional turmoil, from ‘horrified’ and ‘desperate’ to ‘[hopeful]’
before her hope is squashed again and she becomes ‘despairing’. Towards the end
of the extract, her flat tone in ‘Do not trouble. I will sign it,’ is a clear indication of her
resignation. While initially trusting in the judgement of her voices that she will not be
burnt, as seen from how Joan says that her voices ‘promised’ her, connoting almost a
child-like and complete trust in her voices, this judgement is quickly reversed. She is
convinced by the rhetoric of Ladvenu that her voices have deceived her, and becomes
despairing. The repetition of the phrase ‘it is true’ in her speech in line 20 underscores
her complete acceptance of Ladvenu’s pronouncement. While Joan usually attributes
her voices to God, she now claims that she had been mocked by the ‘devil’, and the
antithetical nature of devilry as the furthest thing from God reveals the extent of Joan’s
loss of faith in her voices as being diabolical. Furthermore, the almost tangible nature
of the word ‘broken’ in describing her faith in her voices creates a very vivid image of
betrayal.

It is interesting that while Joan loses trust in her voices, she never doubts God and
her religious faith never wavers. When Joan ‘looks around desperately for help’, she
calls ‘Oh God!’ and turns to God for help. While Ladvenu claims that the devil has
betrayed her, he offers her salvation through the church in ‘[t]he Church holds out its
arms to you’. The tangible image of support and embrace reinforces the sincerity of
the Church’s desire to save her. Even after abandoning her voices, she still turns to
God, and attributes her commonsense to Him, saying that he cannot ‘will’ her to walk
into a flame. The evocation of God’s ‘will’ suggests that Joan places complete trust in
His judgement, reinforcing her religious faith even in times of crisis. Joan’s attribution
of her commonsense, which is one of her positive qualities and strength, to God, also
underscores her faith in God. While Joan had previously remained adamant trusted
only in her own judgements and voices as being from God, in abandoning her voices
as being diabolical, Joan turns her trust to the Church, whom she believes (initially) as
being God’s representatives on Earth. Her helpless statement, ‘What must I do?’ and
the reliance on the Church to guide the pen in signing the statement, renders Joan a
passive agent who is guided by the Church, conveying her complete trust in the
Sun Shuwei
18A01E St Joan Faith PBQ
Church as representatives in God. Later in the scene, when Joan discovers that the
Church wants to confine her, she is convinced that they are not of God, as confinement
would deprive her of the church-bells and turn her against God. Joan’s ‘relapse’ into
heresy is thus a strong reaffirmation of her faith in God, choosing God and death over
confinement without God.

The extract also offers an account of the Chaplain’s loss of trust in the institutional
processes of the court, and presents his rather childish attempts at defiance towards
the court in protest. While the Inquisitor presents the outcome of the law as an obvious
and inevitable one, from how the law ‘must’ take its ‘course’, with the modal ‘must’
suggesting inevitability and the word ‘course’ suggesting an established process, the
Chaplain clearly disagrees with this view. He rises, ‘purple with fury’, the hyperbole of
the colour purple conveying the degree of his anger, and accuses the French court of
intending to betray Warwick in ‘[allowing]’ the woman to escape, with the word ‘allow’
connoting allowance and a passive standing-by of the court in condoning such an
action. The strength of the word ‘betray’ upsets the French court, and the outrage of
such a comment in their eyes can clearly be seen from their stage direction of ‘Tumult’
which the Chaplain has to shout over, creating a cacophonous din of accusations
towards the Chaplain such as being mad and drunk. The extent of contempt of the
Chaplain for the court process in allowing Joan to recant can be seen from his use of
the intensifier ‘damnable’ in a formal court context, and the inaccurate description of
the court ‘begging’ Joan ‘on [its] knee’ to recant, which creates the image of the Church
supplicating Joan, connoting the Church’s subordinate status to Joan during the trial
in the Chaplain’s eyes. In an attempt to obstruct the Church to show his displeasure
at the perceived betrayal, he refuses to sit after his impassioned outburst, and the
capitalisation of ‘NOT’ emphasises the angry tone of his refusal. His obstinate refusal
to comply takes on a childish and immature overtone, when he stands when the
Inquisitor asks him to sit, and sits when the Inquisitor says he must stand. Such
absolute refusal to comply, while immature, may be the only way the Chaplain has to
inconvenience the Court through showing his displeasure.