In contrast to earlier works, Robert Southey’s ten-book epic Joan ofArc( 1796 ), the first Romantic depiction of Joan, presented her in a heroic
light. In Shakespeare’s The First Part of Henry VI ( 1592 ),for example, the
male characters variously refer to Joan as “witch,” “strumpet,” “vile
fiend and shameless courtesan,” “foul fiend of France and hag of all de-
spite,” “railing Hecate,” “giglot [wanton] wench,” ugly witch,” “fell ban-
ning [cursing] hag,” “sorceress,” “wicked and vile,” and “cursed drab.”
In one scene Pucelle, as she is called in the stage directions, conjures
devils to help her defeat the English, and in a second she denies her fa-
ther, who wishes to save her. Elsewhere she falsely claims to be a virgin
and then just as falsely accuses three different men of having made her
pregnant in an attempt to avoid being burned at the stake. That is,
Shakespeare establishes a binary opposition between evil, the feminine,
France, and the rejection of rightful male authority, on the one hand, and
virtue, the masculine, England, and the acceptance of rightful male au-
thority (Henry VI), on the other. Voltaire presents Joan no more heroically
in his semipornographic mock epicLa Pucelle( 1730 ), an account of the
sexual escapades of the French and the English during the Hundred
Years War and especially the supposed fate of Joan’s virginity.^39
Although Southey in his preface to his epic virtuously declares thathe never has “been guilty of looking into [the Pucelle of Voltaire]” (Poet-
ical Works, 1 : 18 ) and does not mention Shakespeare, he appears to be
responding to both. In making Joan the subject of an epic, as opposed
to a satiric mock epic, he could depict her as pure in heart and mind. And
Southey deliberately reverses Shakespeare’s binary oppositions: in his
work female virtue, France, and nature oppose male corruption, En-
gland, and the organized church. Southey’s epic was considered politi-
cally radical and even subversive when it appeared. In his preface
Southey stated that the work was written in “a republican spirit” and in
the belief that “a happier order of things had commenced with the in-
dependence of the United States and would be accelerated by the French
Revolution” (Poetical Works, 1 : 19 ). Discussing his modification of the
epic form he wrote that he had “acted in direct opposition” to the rule
“that the subject [of epics] should be national,” choosing instead for his
subject “the defeat of the English.”^40 Southey further challenged epic
conventions and the conservative politics of his times not only by cre-
ating a female epic hero—a rarity—but also by having her echo
Rousseau’s ideas about the goodness of nature. In book 3 a group of
priests in Chinon examine Joan’s religious beliefs before allowing her to
150 Karolina Pavlova