Bernard Shaw’s ‘Joan’: the Naïve Dissenter

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Bernard Shaw’s ‘Joan’: The Naïve Dissenter In a letter written to Professor Sarolea (as a reply to his article “Has Mr. Shaw understood Joan of Arc?”) Shaw claims to ‘… have evidently got her (Joan) alive…’ He also says that he did not have any ‘theory’ about Joan and that he understands her just the way he understands himself. He further writes ‘Necessarily I take a certain view of the facts, and it will be very interesting if you can give another view of them…so beware of my simplicity.’ It is true that Shaw deals with a subject essentially taken from the pages of history and keeps close similarity with the real historical facts. He does not distort the historic figure of Joan but brings out the very significance of the character. Shaw’s response to this historical character is rather analytic and his interpretation of history is based on the law of probability. Thus Shaw’s Joan is not only a peasant girl with extraordinary imaginative power and leadership quality but an unconscious voice of Protestantism. And at the same time in Joan Shaw illustrates his concept of the unwomanly woman through whom he wants to revolutionize the Victorian sex-gender system which degraded women to a lesser state because of their sex. In this way the conflict between Joan and the Christian Church (and society at large) becomes the conflict between private judgment and constituted authority. The play is based on incidents that are already known to public. In the first four scenes of the play Shaw dramatizes the French national movement while in the last two scenes Shaw moves his ground and dramatizes ‘The conflict of the Regal, Sacerdotal and prophetic power in which Joan was crushed.’ () The characters in St Joan are all historical , so are the incidents. But though realistic the characters are sometimes made to follow the Shavian prescription. Shaw has not merely
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