The Book of Joan

The character type of the tough, violent woman is important to this book. Other examples of this type might be Gal Gadot’s recent portrayal of Wonder Woman, in the 2017 film, and Charlize Theron’s role as Imperator Furiosa in the film Mad Max: Fury Road. These women rely on their skill at violence to defeat male antagonists who exploit other women as victims, often in hyperbolic ways like torture. How is this type of protagonist supposed to exemplify a way to live for us? Does this novel simply celebrate righteous strength, similarly to what we’d find in any action movie, regardless of the gender of its protagonist? Does it want us to take a war on (de) Men literally? Is it a fantasy? A symbol? Are you satisfied with the moral universe this novel describes?

Given that most people in this novel lack sex organs or secondary sex characteristics, what defines a woman, within its universe? A man?

Are the ways this novel portrays happiness satisfying? Is sex the highest virtue, or most-valued emotional experience, to be found in this book? Alcohol? Family? Friendship? Childhood? Are these virtues more conservative than the radical world of science fiction would suggest? What does this book want?

Whom is this book written for?

The author of The Book of Joan has a Ph.D. in literature and the novel contains many literary references. The most obvious of these is the characters’ names, which point to the conflict between Christine de Pizan and Jean de Meun over the nature of woman. This was a medieval debate roughly contemporary with the life of the real Joan of Arc. De Meun wrote that women were inherently immoral, beings created to be sexual temptations and distractions to men. De Pizan argued the opposite, citing Joan of Arc and other famous women of the past as examples: women could lead independent, virtuous lives. Given that Yuknavitch sees this conflict over women’s agency as still active in the world of 2017, how does she characterize Joan beyond her sexuality? Beyond her relationship to men?

Christine writes her epic poem about Joan on her own body, with an electric needle. Given that this is not the most transmissible way of writing—she cannot loan her book to a friend, for instance—what does writing as scarification afford her? Why write on the body? Does she suggest that writing is most necessary as a way of reliving and working through traumas, or painful past experiences?

How does the future this novel portrays intensify, or distort, issues of the real-life 2017 present, such as reproductive rights, income inequality, drone warfare, child soldiers, and, obviously, climate change? Is it optimistic or pessimistic?

This novel often insists that “everything is matter,” and that destruction and creation are necessarily combined: really the same event. We might think of this as advocating a certain relationship between human beings and the Earth, akin to environmentalism. We are all “star stuff,” and should recognize our involvement with our surroundings rather than trying to consume them for resources. Do you agree that the novel advocates this message? And, more specifically, does this book, and the emotional lives of the characters within it, live up to its promises that life and death are the same, that death is only a return to matter, from which we were never that differentiated in the first place?