cally echoes her previous metaphorical usage: ardents aureoles(blazing
haloes) and ardent archange(ardent archangel). In a direct response to
Schiller’s “Romantic” and fantastic tragedy, Pavlova in her poem more
realistically balances the glory of Joan’s fate with its horror.
Unlike Shakespeare and Voltaire, who punish Joan for being effectiveand independent, Schiller, who punishes her for having desire, and
Southey, who depicts her as a Ka ̄lı ̄-like phallic woman for the delecta-
tion of his men readers, Pavlova presents Joan with empathy.^42 Pavlova
attributes to Joan not so much national-political as sexual-political sig-
nificance. Her portrait of Joan as an extraordinary woman—and a type
of woman artist—challenges cultural assumptions that women could
not experience and communicate the sublime. Rather, Pavlova shows
that both Joan of Arc and the woman poet risk being destroyed—be-
coming both more and less than human—by the very power of the
forces they contain. Nonetheless, neither Joan nor the woman poet re-
ceive recognition from “the crowd,” that is, society:
[C]e peuple insensé, qui maintenant te crie
Sa malediction.h
(These foolish people who now scream
their curse at you.)Of course, Pavlova’s male contemporary poets also describe society’srejection of them (“the poet and the crowd” motif). But Joan as an ex-
traordinary woman suffers an additional curse, the accusation of witch-
craft—of violating divine order—something the man poet does not
face. Unlike extraordinary men, Joan as an extraordinary woman expe-
riences no glory, only a lonely and reviled end—as did Pavlova herself.
In “Jeanne d’Arc” Pavlova creates a complex but believable depiction of
Joan in her own terms. Pavlova’s is the least sentimental and sensational
depiction of Joan’s glory and the most frightening vision of the inhu-
manity of the divine.
Pavlova depicts the same pitiless cosmology in her “Tri dushi” (Threesouls), a poem that also concerns extraordinary women with a divine
mission. In contrast to Joan, however, these women, who are poets, are
not even granted the satisfaction of accomplishing their mission before
they perish. As I have suggested elsewhere, in “Tri dushi” Pavlova uses
the Biblical parable of the sower and the seeds (Matthew 13 ) to describe
the fates of three women poets—Delphine Gay (1804–55), Lucretia
Maria Davidson (1808–25), and herself—all born around the same year.
Karolina Pavlova 155