![]() No wonder the British historian Helen Castor begins her highly satisfying biography of Joan of Arc by stating the obvious: “In the firmament of history,” the Maid of Orléans is a “massive star” whose “light shines brighter than that of any other figure of her time and place.” Indeed, Castor insists, Joan’s star still shines. And she’s the single thread that unites a bewilderingly diverse crowd of playwrights, writers, philosophers, poets and novelists, from Shakespeare to Voltaire, Robert Southey, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Vita Sackville-West and Bertolt Brecht. She has over a dozen operas and several dozen movies to her name. ![]() ![]() Exhibit A is Joan of Arc, simultaneously canonized by Pope Benedict XV and the women’s suffrage movement sometime mascot of 19th-century French republicans, 20th-century Vichy France and the 21st-century National Front. Stripped of truth, deprived of personhood, they can be claimed and used by anyone for any purpose. ![]() These women - and they’re almost always women - become the public’s playthings in perpetuity. For the lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view), with the emptiness comes the possibility of a long afterlife as one of the blowup dolls of history. ![]() It feeds off its host - infecting, extracting, consuming its victim until there’s nothing left but an empty husk. ![]()
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