Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

than they had ever been but not humble enough; so she washanded a paper with writing on it and told to put her mark onit (she could not read or write). She was told that she would beburned that day if she did not sign it. It was read to her; shesigned. According to witnesses, the document she signed wasshort, perhaps six lines; the document published in the trialrecord was forty-seven lines.Joan was sentenced to life imprisonment in women’sclothes.On May 27 or 28, she dressed in men’s clothes. Questionedin her cell by the Inquisitors as to why, since this act of defiancewould cost her her life,She said, o f her own will. And that nobody had forced her todo so. And that she preferred man’s dress to woman’s. 24She said that she had recanted “only through fear of the fire” ;that she “would rather do penance by dying, than bear anylonger the agony of imprisonment” ; and that she had nevermeant to “revoke anything. ”25On May 30, Joan the Maid was burned at the stake. Walkingtoward it, she asked if someone would not give her a cross. Asoldier gave her two twigs, formed into a cross. Legend saysthat a white dove emerged from the fire at her death; that theword Jesus was legible in the flames; and the executioner insistedthat he could not burn her heart, that “when the bodywas burnt in the flames and reduced to ashes her heart remainedintact and full of blood. ”26The indestructible heartbecame, as Marina Warner says, “a new touchstone, of her integrity,her incorruptibility. . . ”27The indestructible heart islikened to her body undestroyed by sex in life, her virginity, a