A Review of Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ The Messenger Is Already Dead

Central Question: How Does Joan of Arc Translate to a Feminist Icon for the 21st Century?

Joan is back (or maybe she has been there all along, signaling to us through the flames across time). Either way, her presence is more and more obvious and progressively cooler. In 1999 Luc Besson gave us an action movie with Milla Jovovich as the teenaged warrior-maiden of Orleans, which seems now to have been preparation for Jovovich’s main gig for the last fifteen years as the unstoppable uber-warrior Alice in the Resident Evil films. Four years ago Arcade Fire released the album Reflektor with the song “Joan of Arc,” half in French and all bass-pounding disco redux. In Anne Carson’s 2016 book (or collection of 22 chapbooks in a slipcase), Float, there is an essay called, “Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” about translating Joan of Arc’s interview. What Carson finds so exciting about Joan here, before weaving in discussion of Holderlin and painter Francis Bacon, is Joan’s courage in silence and a resistance to cliché.

But who is Joan to us today? The brave young warrior? A woman who wore men’s clothing in her efforts to join and lead in a man’s world? She led a country to victory, crowned a king herself, and eventually she was burned at the stake for continuing to believe in the voices that originally led her to victory. Centuries later she was made a saint. All her actions were specific for her time and place during the Hundred Years’ War in France. Above all she was a Catholic Christian. How does that translate to a feminist icon for the 21st century?

In Mary Gordon’s 2000 brief, yet lyrical, study Joan of Arc for the Penguin Lives series she talks around Joan in the introduction and synopsizes her importance thusly:

…she stands as a triumph of the invisible over the visible, of the potency of pure intention, of acts that shimmer and endure beyond the life of the actor or the efficacy of the acts. We have always needed someone like her, someone who can disinfect us of our disreputable and petty tendencies. If we can love her than we are not a people who hate women. If we can call her death a triumph, we are not time servers, pension collectors who measure success only by what seems to work. If we devote ourselves to her, we are higher creatures than the way we live our lives suggests. We need her as the heroine of our better selves.

Released this month from Stalkinghorse Books, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens’ collection of poems, The Messenger Is Already Dead, gives voice to “she...