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Unit 23: Saint Joan: Detailed Analysis of the Text

word and has rid France of the English. And the soldier who fashioned the cross for Joan at her Notes
burning makes his entrance, also making the rather startling announcement that he is in hell, but
receives one “day off” each year for that good deed that he did for Joan. Charles and the others also
glimpses the future canonization of Joan as a saint, thanks to the entrance of a gentleman from the
1920s who announces the news of Joan’s elevation to sainthood.
The epilogue and play end with a striking contrast of “litanies.” One by one, the characters in the
dream offer their praises to Saint Joan, reciting the various reasons why she is to be lauded. Joan
then declares, “Woe unto me when all men praise me!” She asks who among her chorus of admirers
would want her to return from the dead. One by one, each character rejects her. No one, given, the
choice, would have her back. Only the anonymous solider stays with her, until he, too, leaves,
summoned back to Hell at the stroke of midnight. The last line of the play echoes biblical language
of lament as Joan cries out, “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive
Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?”

23.8.2 Analysis

When the anonymous soldier who made the cross for Joan tells her that his fifteen’ years service in
the French wars was worse than his eternal damnation in Hell, Joan flings up her arms, a gesture,
the stage directions inform us, of “despair of humanity.” That phrase could be seen as an apt summary
of Shaw’s epilogue. Repeatedly, the playwright makes the point, through his characters, that Joan
would be no more welcome in the modern world than she was in the medieval one. The litany of
rejection that follows immediately after the litany of praise makes this point in a dramatic fashion,
as does the play’s famous final line. Some readers may feel that Shaw exercises a heavy hand, but he
does not want the moral of his version of Joan’s story to go unnoticed and unheeded. Joan’s
lamentation in the face of men’s praise makes the point-as the Archbishop warned her in Scene
V-that Joan is alone in death, even as she was in life. Shaw leaves his audience and his readers with
a vision of Joan as imaginative genius, one of those singular members of the human race who embody
its super-personal drive for evolution, for advancement, for change and who also embody the
resistance to such development that is inevitably encountered. The plaintive question on Joan’s lips
as the curtain falls, surely, is Shaw’s own.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
8. Two years after scene V, May 30, 1431, Joan’s trial is coming to its close
(a) at the castle of Rouen (b) in a room in Orleans
(c) in a room in Vaucouleurs (d) in the battle field of Orleans.
9. All the arguments that Shaw has been making about Joan throughout the play—her
Nationalism, Protestantism, her Rationalism, her Imagination—come to fruition in
(a) scene V (b) scene VI
(c) epilogue (d) scene IV.
Fill in the blanks:
10. Several battles after Joan and Dunois recaptured Orleans, ......, the Earl of Warwick; and
Chaplain Stogumber are in a tent in an English camp.
11. Joan thanks Dunois for his friendship, and wonders why all these courtiers and ...... hate
her.

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