The Beginning of His Last Years: Mark Twain's Joan of Arc and His Attempt to Deal with Transgressions

The Beginning of His Last Years: Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc and His Attempt to Deal with Transgressions Ryoko Okubo Mark Twain’s last finished novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), is his only full-length novel to focus on a female character. Comprising the life of Joan of Arc shortly after her birth in Domremy, France, in 1412, up until her death at the stake in 1431, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, as a matter of course, can be categorized among Mark Twain’s historical novels. However, when compared to other historical novels, such as The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), this novel is often regarded as a “serious” historical novel. Because Mark Twain feared that people would not take this novel “seriously” if he attached his name to it, Mark Twain arranged for Harper’s Magazine to publish it anonymously in monthly installments that began in April 1895 and continued through April 1896 (Rasmussen 262, LeMaster 569). Critics have also determined that this is a less creative, more faithful to history, and more genteel and sentimental novel; thus, “the most incongruous product of Mark Twain’s imagination” and “the least known and least read of Twain’s major novels” (Stone 204), even though this work may prove his interest in history and his ability to write “serious” novels. Although this work is anonymously published, Mark Twain hints at －25－ his identity by an elaborately worked-out narrative structure. He presents the book as Jean François Alden’s modern translation—“Alden” apparently named after H. M. Alden, the editor of Harper’s Magazine (Rasmussen 262)—of the authentic narrative by Sieur Louis de Conte, an eighty-two-year-old bachelor with initials identical to the author’s real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Stone 210, Emerson 197). Mark Twain himself was well aware that this book was unfit for Mark Twain’s popular image. It was written out of personal interest: “Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love” (qtd. in Camfield 428). Unlike Huck Finn, Joan is a heroine without a narrative voice to tell her own experience—it is Joan’s page, secretary, and childhood friend, Sieur Louis de Conte, who narrates her life. In his memoirs written in 1492, the eighty-two-year-old storyteller recalls their childhood in Domremy, when they played together in the woods where Joan received the oracles to save France. He describes Joan’s five major military deeds, namely, raising the siege of Orléans, the victory at Patay, the reconciliation at Sully-sur-Loire, the king’s coronation, and the bloodless march; he depicts Joan’s wise and noble defense in the Inquisition, as well as her last moments at the stake, condemned as a heretic for her cross-dressing. De Conte also idealizes eighteen-year-old Catherine Boucher, the daughter of Jacques Boucher (treasurer of the Duke of Orléans) and confesses his unfulfilled love for her. His narrative voice often shifts between the past, during which he served the heroine, and the present, in which the old man recollects his life. Considering the fact that these women, Joan and Catherine, affected the life of this now aged bachelor, we can read this historical romance as the wishful memoirs of de Conte’s unfulfilled love. In other words, the －26－ old man, who grieves over his miserable, lonely life, depicts Joan and Catherine as he wishes them to be rather than as they actually were. While he writes that his life was to serve under Joan as her page, as narrator he has control over Joan’s life in his narrative.1 Apparently, when he recalls these women, de Conte deprives them of physicality and sublimates them into idealized innocent “images” of young maidens. Why does the narrator with the same initials as the author asexualize the women he loves? Why does Twain distance himself from the story by elaborating the narrative structure he uses to tell about the life of Joan? Joan’s characterization, or more precisely the way in which Mark Twain tries to refigure his most beloved daughter, Susy Clemens, into this saintly heroine, may help us understand the narrator’s desperate need to asexualize the two women. If we take a close look at the narrative structure of this novel, as well as at its biographical backgrounds, we will see Mark Twain’s cautious or even timid attempt to deal with transgressions under the semblance of historical romance. This paper will first survey how critics have responded to this historical novel, considering it unfit for the popular image of Mark Twain. Next, it will examine the backgrounds of his writing from two angles: the radical social change in sexology in the late nineteenth century and Mark Twain’s relationship with his daughter, Susy. These backgrounds will help us understand Twain’s treatment of sexual transgression in this seemingly genteel historical novel. It will also show that Twain’s interest in transgression already appeared in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc ahead of the later works in which he explicitly tackled gender and female sexuality with motifs such as cross-dressing and same-sex marriage. －27－ 1. Vicissitudes of Critical Responses to Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Twain regarded Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as “the best” of all his works, confessing that he wrote this novel not for profits but for “love” (Paine 2:1034, Brooks 211), while critics have depreciated Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc as sentimental, as a sort of work that spoils the masculine persona of the southwestern humorist. 2 To begin with, Twain had a strong interest in this historical figure since his boyhood. Twain’s fascination with Joan of Arc began as early as 1849, during his printer’s apprenticeship in Hannibal, Missouri, when a leaf from a history of Joan of Arc blew into the hands of thirteen-year-old Sam Clemens (Wecter 211). The scene described on the page was Joan in a prison, wearing nothing but undergarments—in the cage, she was caught in a debate with two ruffian soldiers who had stolen her clothes. Sam asked his family why she was caught in prison but he was not able to get an answer. For this anecdote of Sam’s first encounter with Joan of Arc, Albert Bigelow Paine comments that “[t]here arose within Twain a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history” (Paine I, 81). However, it should not be neglected that the scene he devoured was sensual and sinful enough for the thirteen-year-old boy who was familiar with Calvinistic education as his mother converted to the Presbyterian in 1841 and he started to go to Sunday school of the Presbyterian Church when he was ten. In addition, he was brought up in the “atmosphere of reserve” unlike the family of Olivia, who passionately showed her affection in kisses and caresses to the point where it astonished him—“I never knew a member of my father’s family to kiss －28－ another member of it except once, and that at a deathbed. And our village was not a kissing community” (Autobiography of Mark Twain 321). Furthermore, in Hannibal, “idealized conceptions” of women, who were “divided into pure girls and elderly mothers” dominated the public discussion (Hoffman 23). For an adolescent boy brought up in such environment, the experience of devouring the page of a saintly girl he picked up on a street must have been, in the first place, sexually stimulating and sinful one. It is presumable that the mysterious, saintly, and patriotic Joan became his idol for whom he must repress his germinating desire—therefore Joan of Arc became such an unforgettable historical figure of his longstanding passion and forbiddenness. Joan of Arc’s modern popularity began in 1841 when Jules Quicherat published a history of her, based on the court records from the trial, other historical documents, and rehabilitation. In the meantime, Quicherat’s mentor, Jules Michelet, wrote the fifth volume of the Historie de France, separately titled Jeanne D’Arc, and gained more readers—the page Sam picked up in Hannibal in 1849 was very likely the English translation of this volume published in America by 1845 (Stone 205-206). Michelet’s book was influential because it “spawned new approaches to the heroine in all manner of ways during the ensuing century, from the extreme rational to the sublimely mystical” (Morris 97). Joan of Arc became a figure of new fascination to many writers and artists, including Mark Twain, who used both Michelet and Quicherat as primary sources for his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Two other books about Joan of Arc were published in the same year as Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, “one by Francis C. Lowell and the other by Mrs. Oliphant” (Morris 92). Morris points out that each portrayal of Joan reflects the writers’ interpretation of the historical figure as a －29－ quintessential female activist (92). Recent feminist critics have re-examined Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, expecting that the writer’s progressive view toward women and gender may be reflected in the transgressive heroine of this feminine text. However, they have been disappointed to find that Twain’s “ideal woman,” after all, falls into the category of the stereotype Victorian “True Woman” rather than being a “New Woman.” Joyce Warren insists in The American Narcissus that Joan is the epitome of Twain’s stereotypical ideal of a woman, namely, “more selfless, more modest, purer, and more pious than any other one female character” (156).

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