Joan of Arc: The Patron Saint of Gen Z
Words: Lydia Eliza Trail
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A teenage girl in boys' clothing; a fifteenth-century Christian martyr; Zendaya wearing Versace chain-mail at the 2018 Met Gala. An androgynous icon: Chloe Sevigny holding a Walkman on your teenage Tumblr feed, or Fiona Apple photographed by Mcnally. In 1999, she was Milla Jovovich with a fuck-ass bob and ruddy cheeks. Videos discussing her life under the hashtags “history” and “mental health” appear on TikTok. Sad girls cry while thinking about her death. Now Baz Luhrmann has announced he’s set to direct a biopic of her life, and her status as the romantic heroine of popular culture is set in stone. Resplendent in armour, wielding the sword of mutability, Joan of Arc is the patron saint of generation Z.
Morbidity, so often dismissed as the domain of the gothic, is at the forefront of our celebrity culture. We are obsessed with the youthful martyr. As Charlie Fox describes in This Young Monster, celebrities must “live fast, die young, and make a pretty corpse” to achieve immortality. Born during the hundred years' war between England and France, at thirteen, Joan of Arc began to have visions. These were interpreted as a sign from God, although to quote Cecilia Lisbon: “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl”.
At seventeen, Joan was leading the siege of Orléans in the name of King Charles VII of France. Her contemporaries viewed her as a witch, a female prophet, a heretic, their virginal saviour. In an era where the closest thing to recognising the torment of a teenage girl was child marriage, Joan’s crusade infamously met with a violent end. In 1431, the saint was burnt at the stake for heresy. Like the Lisbon sisters, she is forever young.
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On TikTok, almost-cringe testaments to the saints' purity dominate my for-you page. In one video, E-girls on Instagram wearing chain-mail costumes are contrasted with images made by nineteenth-century male pre-raphaelite painters. “Jeanne does not belong to you,” it reads. I flick to the comments below.
Anonymous user: “Idk who Joan Of Arc is, but it hurts to see people aren’t respecting her or her religion”.
@royalhistory, the video creator, responds: “She was burnt at the stake [sad face emoji]” The costumes are “sexualising a child martyr and a saint”.
Joan of Arc has become an icon to the online generation without anyone knowing who she really is. As the It Girl costume of recent Halloween, most people understood her suit of armour through the signifiers of other interpretations presented by “Joan of Arc” Pinterest pages. As we re-assimilate the saint into a context that makes sense to us, we can ask, what makes a 21st-century saint?
Joan’s real appearance is unknown. We project our vision onto her. Vita Sackville-West initiated the formation of Joan as a feminist icon in her biography Saint Joan of Arc (1936). A “girl boy-captain” wearing the armour of a man, Joan used gender ambiguity to infiltrate a patriarchal society. Despite more traditional depictions of the saint with long flowing red hair, she was almost totally de-feminised in her disguise. Some academics have labelled her as the patron saint of gender dysphoria. Re-entering the canon of queer history in 2024, Joan of Arc is the chosen costume for singer Chappell Roan at the VMA’s. A pop-artist saviour for our century - Roan enters the stage in a full suit of metal armour, carrying a crossbow. She turns her back to the audience and shoots a flaming arrow behind her, setting fire to a camp replication of a medieval castle. Flames of martyrdom are transformed into the tortuous pangs of unrequited love. The sapphic ballad “Good Luck Babe!” plays, and once again, Joan catapults into the popular imagination.
“Joan’s overriding identifiable features; her girlhood, her potency for hearing voices, the fact she's misunderstood, tend to stand above of association as a symbol of French reactionary nationalism.”
A historical symbol of ultra-traditional catholic belief and a cross-dressing peasant: Joan of Arc was complicated. Her current cultural status is a result of this dichotonous identity. Take the Joan meme format. It’s an image of Joan, usually the 1903 engraving by Albert Lynch, with white text formatted over that reads “how it feels to be a girl”. Bigmouth Strikes Again plays over the image. In the cult of the Sad Girl, as Rayne-Fisher Quinn states, women construct their identities “through an artfully curated list of things they consume”. It appears that historical figures have entered the identity consumption list under the service economy. Joan was a misunderstood medieval heroine who died for her fifteenth-century subculture. Joan’s overriding identifiable features; her girlhood, her potency for hearing voices, the fact she's misunderstood, tend to stand above of association as a symbol of French reactionary nationalism.
When I ask the admin of @joan.of.arca about our generation's pre-occupation with her account’s namesake, she explains, “I think she's the perfect subject for these ‘online girl’ memes…she exists in our collective imagination, she is the quintessential relatable, toxic, sad-girl heroine. She’s trad-cath, she’s androgynous, she’s nineteen and she feels things more deeply than everyone else.” Inquiring with @joan.of.arca about the choice of username, they replied that she “was super into the musician Arca at the time” and while the username had little to do with the actual saint, she sometimes wanted close her eyes and channel her spirit).
Contrasting the introspective outlook of the sad-girl’s ideation of Joan, the saint did die for a cause outside of herself. Despite the largely secular fantasies in which she appears - on screens large and small - she remains a figure of action rather than complacency. Compared to the lackadaisical heroine of Ottessa Moshfegi’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she is a heroine with a capital H. As Marina Warner describes in Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) “She is a heroine of history”. The constant flux of Joan’s identity says more about our own self-mythologising tendencies than it does anything truthful about her short, tragic life. She is a blank slate onto which thousands of young woman may project their romantic vision of themselves, noble in their misery, (metaphorically) dying for a cause.
