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Home , Clara Clemens, Mark Twain, Susy Clemens

The Beginning of His Last Years: ’s 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 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 ’s Magazine to publish it anonymously in monthly installments that began in April 1895 and continued through April 1896 (Rasmussen 262, LeMaster 569). 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 —“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, , 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 . 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, , 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 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 asa

－29－ quintessential female activist (92).

Recent feminist critics have re-examined Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, expecting that the ’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). On the other hand, biographers have tried to explain why Mark Twain’s Joan remains timeless and sexless, being an innocent, pure image of a “girl,” without being allowed to mature physically—in Michelet’s biography of Joan, there are quotes from the testimony of Domremy women who told that Joan never menstruated, to which Twain wrote in the margin of his copy that “The higher life absorbed her & suppressed her physical (sexual) development” (Stone 209, Kaplan Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain 315). Stone sees that the notion “Joan was believed to have remained a child in body as well as in spirit must have pleased” Twain and “added force to his iterations of her immaculate girlishness” (209-210). and Peter Stoneley point out that Twain made this work genteel enough to satisfy his female family members, who were raised in the genteel tradition (Kaplan 315, Stoneley 85). Most critics have agreed with Susan Gillman, Albert Stone, Jr. and Joyce Warren in regard to the fact that ranging from his wife to a group of schoolgirls called “Angelfish,”3 Mark Twain’s ideal woman is a “child woman” (Gillman 106), which underscores his conservative view of women.

－30－ While Justin Kaplan only sees the “unfortunate influence” of Susy Clemens on this genteel novel, recent biographical studies on female family members spotlight Joan’s model, Susy’s hidden side of her private history. After the death of his second daughter, , in 1962, biographical information and unpublished works that Clara had kept away from the public have gradually become available to researchers. Among others, his first daughter Susy Clemens’s same-sex love is now being featured for re-evaluating her literary influence upon her father’s later works. Shortly after entering Bryn Mawr College in 1890, Susy Olivia Clemens fell in love with her senior schoolmate, Louise Brownell. Susy, who began to name herself as “Olivia” in her college days, confessed her love in dozens of letters to Louise:

 Please come to me and let me lie down in your arms and forget everything….Write me that you will let me see you once, one little once before you go. Ah & write soon and say you love me. Forgive whatever there is wrong in this letter. It’s my love that’s so violent and demanding, my poor terrified love that cannot give you up.  Goodnight, darling, darling my beloved. I take you in my arms & see you so clearly as you were in London. What a fated friendship ours is!—Oh I lo[ng] for you so[.] The loneliness of life is the hardest. Yours for ever and ever. Olivia (qtd. in Morris 17)

Having inherited her sensitiveness from her father and her abundant affection from her mother Olivia, who “poured her prodigal affection in

－31－ kisses and caresses” (Autobiography 321), without reservation, “Olivia” revealed her passionate love, including her carnal desire, in this letter to Louise dated July 29, 1894. As the so-called “Boston marriage” exemplifies, female “friendship” was relatively accepted until the turn of the century, when homosexuality/lesbianism came to be categorized as a mental illness. Susy’s case was no exception. Though it might have been a temporary “crash” common to the schoolgirls of the era or a candid expression of affection, Twain seemed to take it too seriously caring about his daughter’s respectability. Mr. and Mrs. Clemens withdrew their daughter from the college after only one and a half year, and took her to —purportedly to cut expenses for the Clemens’s extravagant lifestyle at the magnificent mansion in Hartford and to improve the declining health of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens. Andrew Hoffman, however, speculates that Twain probably intended to cure her “disease” in spas in Europe and to separate Susy from Louise (367–68).

Twain began writing Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in August 1892, after twelve years of preparation, and he tackled the massive novel in the middle of an exhausting series of turmoil—from Susy’s infatuation for Louise to his bankruptcy in 1894. When we examine Twain’s portrait of Joan of Arc, we should take his daughter, Susy Clemens, into account, for Twain modeled his long-time heroine, particularly in her physical appearance, after Susy Clemens in her seventeenth year, and this novel instantly became their favorite and best work. Susy told Clara that this book is promised to be “his loveliest book,”

“perhaps even more sweet and beautiful than The Prince and the Pauper.” For her, hearing her father read aloud from his manuscript was “uplifting and revealing” (Kaplan Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain 315). In The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain, Gregg Camfield points out that Twain always

－32－ needed an audience for his writing, and that “the circumstances of this book’s production made it almost a collaborative effort between Sam, Olivia, and Susy, who was old enough now to have an adult’s reactions, rather than the child’s reactions she had to The Prince and the Pauper over a dozen years earlier” (428). The writing process, too, must have been one of the happiest times for Twain, who had previously suffered from financial failures and worried about the respectability ofhis daughter, who showed “deviation” (at least to his eyes) in sexual propensity. In addition, Twain wrote this book with such ease that it seemed that the book wrote itself: “I merely have to hold the pen,” he told his English agent and friend, Henry Rogers. He wrote as much as “fifteen hundred or two thousand words a day, sometimes three hundred” (Kaplan

Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain 331). However, he lost Susy to a sudden illness in 1896, soon after the publication of his and her favorite novel. Thereafter, he was not able to complete a novel, and in his short stories, he came to deal with transgressive female characters and motifs such as cross-dressing, same-sex marriage, female respectability more overtly, as we can see in “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson,” “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” and “Wapping Alice.” Few critics have re-examined this seemingly “asexualized” work in terms of transgressive sexuality. John Cooley and Linda Morris see the possible influence of Susy on his literary interest in cross-dressing and transgender. Morris, however, dismisses the female “friendship” expressed in the text and concludes that the asexualized Joan underscores Twain’s conservatism, namely, his inability to admit to his daughter’s maturity into female adulthood (122–23). J. D. Stahl focuses on sexuality in the text, concluding that the asexualized, heavenly image of the saint is, after all, the nineteenth century’s typical view of the ideal woman

－33－ (141-151). However, Twain’s favorite daughter’s transgressive desire should not be disregarded, along with the social change in sexology that occurred in the late nineteen century. On the basis of these biographical and social backgrounds, the following sections will examine how transgressive sexuality is expressed in the ostensibly asexualized text. It will reveal a narrative structure that sublimates women into the “image” of girls that are forever beautiful, divine, and childlike.

2. Various Ways of Looking at “Fairies”

Mark Twain spent twelve years to research on Joan of Arc, including reading histories, biographies, historical romances, and studying the French language. He used Jules Michelet’s Jeanne d’ Arc (as the primary French source) and Janet Tucky’s Joan of Arc (as the primary English source) to write the first two-thirds of the book, and ten other sources to write the last third, Joan’s trial (Morris 94-95). He was generally faithful to the historical facts. However, he created childhood episodes of “fairies” living in the woods, which produces a fairy-tale atmosphere in this historical novel. For many generations, children in Domremy had a habit of playing around a majestic beech tree in which fairies lived: they sang, danced, and hung beautiful wreathes of flowers on the beech tree to please the fairies, and the fairies, in return, did many favors for the children, such as keeping the spring always full and clear, and driving away serpents and insects. All children reared in Domremy were called “the Children of the Tree” and reportedly were given a mystic privilege: a vision of the fairy tree would appear when a sinless child was dying forlorn in a distant land to solace him/her, as the last dear reminder

－34－ of his/her home. However, one day a woman witnessed the dancing fairies at night, and the church authorities banished the fairies from the earth forever, judging that they were “blood kin of the Fiend” (Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc I:14). Stahl and Stone identify Joan with these asexualized fairies and point out that the fairies’ episodes foreshadow the doom of Joan, who is to be executed by church authorities (Stahl 135, Stone 223). Admittedly, Joan and the fairies share the same fate on a textual level. However, when we refer to the social backgrounds of the late nineteenth century, especially the radical change in sexology, we will find further connections between the fairies and Joan, who was burnt at the stake, charged with “cross-dressing,” among other things. There are many reports on cross-dressers from the late nineteenth century, when variations of transgressions such as cross-dressing and homosexuality came to be categorized as mental derangement. Newspapers and magazines featured transgressors, including female intellectuals and African American males. For example, female cross-dressers at Cornell University were in the news from 1879 to 1882—the university expelled a “handsome girl student” who showed up in a concert in town escorted by an apparently a “young gentleman” who turned out to be a “woman dressed up in a man’s suit.” Later on the school let her in and she graduated successfully. There was also a report on a female cross-dresser who was sent to an asylum in 1880: “Her voice was coarse and her features were masculine. She was dressed in male attire throughout and declared herself to be a man, giving her name as Joseph Lobdell, a Methodist minister; said she was married and had a wife living.” Furthermore, in an 1893 note to a medical journal article on morbid eroticism, Dr. Charles Hughes writes about a gathering of African

－35－ American cross-dressers: “I am credibly informed that there is, in the city of Washington, D.C., an annual convocation of negro men called the drag dance, which is an orgie [sic.] of lascivious debauchery beyond pen power of description” (Kats 230–31, 221, 42–43). The word “fairy”—a term informally used to signify a male homosexual at present—was first featured in a psychological journal in

1895, the same year Twain finished writing Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. In his article entitled “Sex and Art,” Collin Scott reports on a group of “inverts” that appeared in New York, following those in European cities:

Coffee-clatches, where the members dress themselves with aprons etc., and knit, gossip, and crotchet; balls, where men adopt the ladies’ evening dress, are well known in Europe. ‘The Fairies’ of New York are said to be a similar secret organization. The avocations which inverts follow are frequently feminine in their nature. They are fond of the actor’s life, and particularly that of the comedian requiring the dressing in female attire, and the singing in imitation of a female voice, in which they often excel. (Scott 216)

The “fairies” of New York and Europe were reportedly singing and dancing gaily in female attire at balls. Interestingly enough, the

“fairies” from Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc also show similar characteristics in the crucial scene where they are judged as heretics. One night, a good country wife, Edmond Aubrey’s mother, passed by the Tree and saw the fairies stealing a dance. The fairies were “so intoxicated with the wild happiness” and “with the bumpers of dew sharpened up with honey which they had been drinking,” that they did not

－36－ notice she was there watching them:

[S]o Dame Aubrey stood there astonished and admiring, and saw the little fantastic atoms holding hands, as many as three hundred of them, tearing around in a great ring half as big as an ordinary bedroom, and leaning away back and spreading their mouths with laughter and song, which she could hear quite distinctly, and kicking their legs up as much as three inches from the ground in perfect abandon of hilarity—oh, the very maddest and witchingest

dance the woman ever saw. (PRJA I:15)

As Stahl points out, the fairies themselves are asexual, an innocent existence strongly tied to childhood; however, the adult woman who witnesses their dance at night judges the hilarious dance of fairies as the “maddest” and “witchingest” she ever saw. The woman reads something sexual and obscene in the supposedly innocent creatures—gazing at the cancan dance of fairies at night, she expresses the size of the ring with that of a “bedroom.” Defending the fairies, Joan accurately points out that sexuality can be read into an innocent object: “If a man comes preying into a person’s room at midnight when that person is half naked, will you be so unjust as to say that that person is showing himself to that man?”

(PRJA I:17). It should be pointed out that it is the good country mother who sexualizes the friends of children and exiles them from the earthly paradise. While in Twain’s most popular boy books all the motherly figures try their best to keep the young protagonists in childlike innocence, Edmond Aubrey’s mother, on the other hand, unintentionally exposes the otherwise inconspicuous existence of sexuality to children as she tries to exclude everything that somehow hints at sexuality from the

－37－ village, or at least everything overtly sexual to her eyes. Regardless of the children’s and Joan’s efforts, the paradise is lost forever because adults read sexuality into the innocent creatures. Once fairies are expelled from the Edenic woods, being judged as “blood kin of the Fiend” (PRJA I:14), the paradise of the children and fairies deteriorates into an evil and malicious place teeming with snakes and vermin. It is noteworthy that we can see another description of a drunken “fiend” in one of the most violent scene of the war field, and thescene, too, assumes a tint of homoeroticism. Since Troyes surrendered without a fight after the Loire campaign, Joan permits the English and Burgundian soldiers to carry away their goods. However, Joan’s men are outraged to see that each enemy soldier marches out with a French prisoner on his back. One of Joan’s vassals tries to persuade a Burgundian, but he eventually strangles him to death when the Burgundian soldier insults the maiden. This triggers a series of bloody assaults:

The Burgundian’s eyes began to protrude from their sockets and stare with leaden dullness at vacancy. The color deepened in his face and became an opaque of purple. His hands hung down limp, his body collapsed with a shiver, every muscle relaxed its tension and ceased from its function. . .  [The freed prisoner] flew at the dead corpse and kicked it, spat in its face, danced upon it, crammed mud into its mouth, laughing, jeering, cursing, and volleying forth indecencies and bestialities like a drunken fiend.  [Another] Burgundian promptly slipped a knife through [a prisoner’s] neck, and down he went with a dead-shriek, his brilliant

－38－ artery blood spurting ten feet as straight and bright as a ray of light. There was a great burst of jolly laughter all around from friend and foe alike; and thus closed one of the pleasantest incidents of my

checkered military life. (PRJAⅡ: 36–37)

All Joan’s orders to her soldiers are strict: to ban prostitution within the troops, to forbid rough carousing, to have her soldiers confess before the priest and absolve themselves from sin, and to have them pray twice a day

(PRJAI:186). De Conte’s overtly curious gaze at the sadistic violence and grotesque bodies suggests that repressed male carnal desire is transformed into insatiable appetite for excessive violence between men, and thus finds a way to be released, as friends and foes equally find pleasure and excitement in watching this series of abnormal violence. Described with phallic and sexual motifs such as protruding eyes, a dance on the body, a shivering body, and spouting blood, this sadistic violence between the men creates a horrible, alluring, and homoerotic atmosphere and brings catharsis to the male soldiers. In this scene of a latent homoeroticism, Twain links the dancing prisoner of war to a “drunken fiend”—drunken “fairies” dancing in the woods in the childhood episode, too, are mentioned as “blood kin of the Fiend.” This atmosphere is immediately swept away when Joan appears on the scene. The narrative of the man who curiously gazes at abnormal violence between men and bodies inclines to be grotesque and homoerotic, which is a clear contrast to his narrative on the women whom he adores, as is discussed in the following section.

－39－ 3. Male Eyes Wide Shut and Female Passionate “Friendship”

De Conte’s narratives of the battlefield inevitably tend to be grotesque, teeming with sordid physical expressions. For example, the maiden is put in the following situation in the theater of war: “a great crowd following and anxious, for she was drenched with blood to her feet, half of it her own and the other half English, for bodies had fallen across her as she lay and had poured their red life-streams over her”(PRJA I: 266). De Conte, however, tries to retell the scene in such a way as to immediately recover her divine and innocent image. For example, he emphasizes that it is not Joan but her armor that is soaked with blood and that she was carried “as easily as another man would carry a child” (PRJA I: 266). When Joan receives a serious wound to her chest, she is tended by a crowd of curious male soldiers. The narrator, however, refuses to describe the sight, insisting that “I did not wish to see, and did not try to”

(PRJA I: 266). Similarly, he does not talk much about Joan in prison, where she is tied to a bed and watched constantly by malicious enemies. De Conte refuses to sexualize the maiden, because she must not be the object of his bodily desire—she is always the object of his love, admiration, and worship. Depriving Joan of physicality, de Conte idealizes her into a heavenly “image”:

[A]s for Joan of Arc, there where she sat her horse gazing, clothed all in white armor, dreamy, beautiful, and in her face a deep, deep

joy, a joy not of earth, oh, she was not flesh, she was a spirit! (PRJAⅡ : 39)

－40－ By sublimating Joan into a heavenly image, de Conte liberates her from the brutalities of the battleground. Joan is a personification of virtue, gentility, and courage for him; the idol should not be defiled with the savage violence of war. In Orléans, de Conte and other fellow soldiers fall in love with the same person at the same time, i.e., the beautiful daughter of Boucher, Catherine, at whose house they are billeted. Described as being “as beautiful as Joan herself if she had had Joan’s eyes” (PRJAⅡ: 206), the eighteen-year-old maiden becomes an idol within their reach. De Conte has a fantasy of marrying Catherine, while he understands that the

“DELIVERER OF FRANCE” (PRJA iv) is too holy and too perfect to be an object of desire, as he confesses at the beginning of his narrative: Joan is the most noble person that was ever born into this world, except for

“One” (PRJA xviii), the Savior, Jesus Christ. It is presumable that through his love for Catherine he obliquely and vicariously experiences a forbidden love for his idol. De Conte spends a whole night writing a poem in Catherine’s honor, entitled “The

Rose of Orléans” (PRJAⅡ: 209). Although he does not dare to record the poem in his memoirs, he gives a detailed account of the love poem and the effect it has on the audience when recited. He pictures a “pure and dainty white rose as growing up out of the rude soil of war” which turns red blushing for “the sinful nature of man,” as it turns its tender eyes upon

“the horrible machinery of death” (PRJAⅡ: 209). The rose has a power to touch the soldiers’ heartstrings, as Joan always does: when the rose sends its sweet perfume to the men-at-arms in the battlefield, theylaid “ down their arms and wept” (PRJAⅡ: 210). Furthermore, he embellishes the poem by putting Catherine unto the

“similitude of the firmament” (PRJAⅡ: 210), and likens her to the moon

－41－ while he often compares Joan to :

That is to say, she was the moon, and all the constellations were following her about, their hearts in flames for love of her, but she would not halt, she would not listen, for ‘twas thought she loved another. ‘Twas thought she loved a poor unworthy suppliant who was upon the earth, facing danger, death, and possible mutilation in the bloody field, waging relentless war against a heartless foeto save her from an all too early grave, and her city from destruction. And when the sad pursuing constellations came to know and realize the bitter sorrow that was come upon them—note this idea—their hearts broke and their tears gushed forth, filling the vault of heaven

with a fiery splendor, for those tears were falling stars. (PRJAⅡ: 210)

He explains that in the poem for Catherine, he celebrates “that sweet girl’s charms, without mentioning her name, but anyone could see who was meant” (PRJAⅡ: 209). However, as he depicts the anonymous object of his love, its image reminds readers of Joan on the battle front rather than of Catherine, who is always safe at home; for throughout his narrative, he has romantically celebrated Joan’s sweetness and deep compassion in her relation to soldiers—friends and foes—on the battlefield. De Conte satisfies his own literary gift, which his friends also admire, but when he lets a friend recite this sentimental poem in front of Catherine and his fellow soldiers, “the effect of the poem was spoiled”

(PRJAⅡ: 216). Only his friend Paladin weeps excessively, which makes the audience burst into laughter, while it leaves the would-be poet with an

－42－ embarrassment and a “bitterness” of life he does not wish to dwell upon, for “only one thing more and worse could happen”—his object of love,

Joan of Arc, enters the house and the maid herself begins to laugh (PRJA Ⅱ: 216). Furthermore, de Conte’s sentimental love is discouraged when he witnesses the intimate friendship between Joan and Catherine. After receiving a prophecy that she will be terribly wounded during the assault on Tourelles, Joan tells Catherine not to worry in vain. De Conte watches how Joan tenderly holds Catherine, who becomes upset and implores Joan not to go to the battlefield, as if she were speaking to a boyfriend:

[Catherine] broke down and began to cry, and I did so want to take her in my arms and comfort her, but Joan did it, and of course I said nothing. Joan did it well, and most sweetly and tenderly, but I could have done it as well, though I knew it would be foolish and out of place to suggest such a thing, and might make an awkwardness, too, and be embarrassing to us all, so I did not offer, and I hope I did right and for the best, though for the best, though I could not know, and was many times tortured with doubts afterward as having perhaps let a chance pass which might have changed all my life and made it happier and more beautiful than, alas, it turned out to be. For this reason I grieve yet, when I think of that scene, and do not like to call it up out of the deeps of my memory because of the

pangs it brings. (PRJAⅡ: 258–59)

Focusing on this “friendship” between the two women, Stahl points out that de Conte shows an attitude similar to Laurie in Louisa May Alcott’s

Little Women; that is, “he envies women their freedom of emotional

－43－ expression, especially of affection” (144). Considering that he envisions a “happier and more beautiful” married life with Catherine that would be realized if he could have been in Joan’s place, we can say that de Conte feels something more than envy. Namely, he perceives that the two women he idealizes can be sexual enough to tantalize him. Moreover, being always superior to de Conte on all points, Joan exceeds him in love; because of her sex and emotional behavior, Catherine can easily and openly enjoy the love of the idol, while he has no other way but to watch the two women he loves. De Conte once again painfully and helplessly watches as the two women passionately embrace each other in the scene where Joan and her men make a triumphant return to Catherine’s home. Looking at Catherine, who gathers Joan to her heart and “smother[s] her with kisses,” de Conte confesses, “my heart ached so! for I could have kissed Catherine better than anybody, and more and longer; yet was not thought of for that office, and so I famished for it” (PRJAⅡ: 293). Joan becomes a sexual threat once again—although he can never be her equal. Unable to replace Joan, he has no choice but to miserably repress his desire, which eventually dooms him to a life-long desolate bachelor life. As he recalls the moment when he finally gives up his fantasy of a married life with Catherine, he immediately reconstitutes her as a beautiful “image” that will not torture him:

I have carried her image in my heart for sixty-three-years—all lonely there, yes, solitary, for it never has had company—and I am grown so old, so old; but it, oh, it is as fresh and young and merry and mischievous and lovely and sweet and pure and witching and divine as it was when it crept in there, bringing benediction and

－44－ peace to its habitation so long ago, so long ago—for it has not aged

a day! (PRJAⅡ: 293)

He envisions Catherine being alone—never with his sexual threat and idol, Joan of Arc. Since he lost the possibility to possess her as his wife, Catherine becomes an idol beyond his reach, just as Joan is; thus, he can possess them secretly in his mind as an image. The image of Catherine, recalled as forever young and beautiful, in his mind inevitably resembles that of Joan in his memoirs—except for the fact that Catherine is still “witching.” For de Conte, his idol Joan of Arc has been a personification of ideals that cannot be a sexual object. When he falls in love with Catherine, who looks as beautiful as Joan except for her eyes, he also finds a vicarious way to love the maiden. However, at the moment when he bitterly watches the two women embracing each other passionately, the maidens doom him to a miserable life, shattering his fantasy of marriage. Unable to possess them in reality, he asexualizes them and depicts them as celestial, innocent images of girls, rather than recalling them as the women who they were. Thereby he is finally able to possess both girls safely forever in his mind, never being troubled by them sexually. Many critics have pointed out that Mark Twain was, after all, conservative in his portrayal of women; that he just could not allow girls to grow into female adulthood. However, can we simply conclude that Mark Twain was a stubborn father, who never tried to see his daughters’ sexual maturity nor understand it, and therefore, that he was unable to depict mature women? After losing his beloved daughter, he insisted without hesitation that this was his “best” work he wrote for “love.” No matter what critics say, this work is certainly a link between him and his

－45－ daughter, who enjoyed listening to her father read out the manuscripts and loved this novel best among her father’s works. Examining the text against the background of biographical information on his relationship with Susy illuminates the naked feelings of the narrator and the author—his permanent love, admiration, and a mixed feelings of disappointment, resignation, and alienation he feels when he admits the intimate relationship between the women he truly loves. By creating the now-aged narrator with the same initials as the author, Twain dares to set his eyes on the passionate relationship of the two women, though looking at it still makes him/the narrator uneasy and ends up choosing to asexualize them into celestial images to keep them forever as his idols. Nevertheless, this final evasion does not mean that he turned his eyes away from the female passions and transgressions thereafter. In his last years, as if he was trying to settle the anxiety, he began to explore these themes more explicitly in a series of short stories, in which we can see his wavering emotions. In his real life, he found a solace in his notorious friendship between the “Angelfish” girls who played his little daughters’ role, while in his writings, he experimentally prepared various situations both in reality and fantasy for his female transgressive heroines. As time went by since the birth of his Joan’s book and the death of Susy, the image of the short-lived, beautiful martyr might have overlapped with that of his beloved daughter in his mind. In the middle of his enduring sorrows and the last struggles as a writer, the old writer unexpectedly had an honor to see and be laureated by his idol in real life, thanks to the chapter of the Society of Illustrators that prepared a girl in Joan’s costume as a sincere tribute for the writer, but this dramatic (or should have been so) encounter, as it unexpectedly

－46－ turned out, gave the artist a great shock. The society did not understand the nature of Twain’s affection for Joan of Arc: it was not a mere creative interest in a historical figure—it was more personal, secret, and passionate love he did not want to bring it out before the public. In 1905, when Mark Twain was going to give a speech for the society, he saw a girl who had her hair cut just below her ears, and wore a white robe and the armor of a French soldier. Looking straight into the writer’s eyes, she walked to him carrying a laurel wreath placed on a satin pillow. “Twain had every appearance of a man who had seen a ghost. His eyes fairly started out of his head, his hand gripped the edge of the table.” He accepted the wreath wordlessly, and remained silent until she left the room. When the writer finally spoke to the audience, he said,

Now there’s an illustration, gentlemen — a real illustration. I studied that girl, Joan of Arc, for twelve years, and it never seemed to me that the artists and the writers gave us a true picture of her. They drew a picture of a peasant. Her dress was that of a peasant. But they always missed the face — the divine soul, the pure character, the supreme woman, the wonderful girl. She was only 18 years old, but put into a breast like hers a heart like hers and I think, gentlemen, you would have a girl — like that. (Crown “The Riddle of Mark Twain’s Passion for Joan of Arc” n. pag.)

For Mark Twain, Joan of Arc had been an idol of a long-term obsession since his first encounter on a Hannibal street. Writing Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc can be considered as a private act of enshrining Joan to pacify the haunting image of the idol, just like Sieur Louis de Conte tries to asexualize and enshrine Joan as well as Catherine

－47－ in his narrative and own them secretly. Twain might have wanted to get through the sorrow at his daughter’s death by replacing it with the good, pleasant memory of their favorite book of love, although in the stern reality, he had desperately suffered from the lingering sorrow for over nine years, and it was so unbearable that he had to find a solace in his fleeing from reality, namely, his associations with schoolgirls of his little-daughter-substitutes, the “Angelfish.” It should be noted that Twain himself was one of the artists who had failed to illustrate Joan as she was— he eventually sublimated her into heavenly images by depriving her of physicality and decorating her with a series of elegant words that praised her beauty, including her morality. Given this fact, at the moment of the sudden encounter with real-life “Joan of Arc,” he must have felt as if he had literally seen a “ghost”—his beloved one all of a sudden resurrected after the nine years of her enshrinement, and was shocked to see what a real-life, eighteen-year-old Joan may have looked like. Historical Joan, as a matter of course, had the swell of her breasts under the armor like the young woman in her costume, and was much more (and, of course, quite naturally) matured than the child-like Joan he had created— and so was Susy. It might have given him a that what he had created and loved was nothing more than an illusion. After this unexpected encounter in 1905, he once again portrayed a Joan-like transgressive character modeled partly after Susy Clemens in “A Horse’s Tale” (1906). Although its transgressive protagonist written in the “Angelfish years,” namely, during his prominent association with the schoolgirls from 1905 to 1910, is only about half as old as eighteen-year-old Joan of Arc, her story curiously includes an overtly sexual connotation; and his latest works are characterized with a rather

－48－ outspoken comments on female sexuality.

Notes 1. Yoko Tsujimoto correctly points out that de Conte’s ambiguous position sways between subjective/objective and masculine/feminine (137). As a writer of the original manuscript in archaic language, he has no way but to subject himself to the modern translator, Alden, as well as to the readers who turn over the “pages” he wrote. While, as Joan’s page, he serves under Joan, as narrator he controls the life of Joan in the narrative of his own making, in which Joan has no voice to tell her own story and becomes, as it were, an obedient object of his passionate faith.

2. James Cox, for example, regards this anonymously published novel as a denial of Mark Twain’s identity, for Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc seems to approve of the conservative morality that Mark Twain had attacked with his humor throughout his literary career so far (264). However, it should be pointed out that Cox was one of the first critics who appreciated the literary influence of Twain’s wife, Olivia Clemens, whom he idealized into the “image” of a “muse.” Nevertheless, Cox neglects the literary influence of another muse, Susy Clemens. He also jumps to the above conclusion without examining the narrative structure of the male narrator who sublimates his idol into an image.

3. Troubled by his adult daughters, he tried to sanctify innocent girlhood by forming a community of schoolgirls/substitute daughters in his private life. In his last years, particularly from 1905 to 1910, Twain began corresponding with little girls he met during trips and “collected” schoolgirls from ten to sixteen years old, calling them “angelfish” after the lovely tropical fish he observed in Bermuda.

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－49－ /the-riddle-of-mark-twains-passion-for-joan-of-arc> Emerson, Everett. The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens. : Pennsylvania UP, 1984. Print. Gillman, Susan. Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print. Hoffman, Andrew. Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. New York: William Morrow, 1997. Print. Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Print. Katz, Jonathan. Gay American History: Lesbians & Gay Men in the U.S.A. New York: Meridian, 1976. Print. Le Master, J.R. and James D. Wilson, eds. The Mark Twain Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Print. Morris, Linda A. Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2007. Print. Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain, a Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912. Print. Rasmussen, Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York: Fact On File, 1995. Print. Scott, Colin A. “Sex and Art.” The American Journal of Psychology 7 (1896):153-226. Print. Stahl, J. D. Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. Print. Stone, Albert E., Jr. The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination. New York: Yale UP, 1961. Print. Stoneley, Peter. Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Tsujimoto, Yoko. “Twain-no-Isou-no-Kokoromi.” In Kyouwakoku-no-Furiko: America- bungaku-no Dainamizumu. (“Twain’s Tackle on Transvestism.” In A Pendulum in the Republic: Dynamism in .) Ed. Koji Ooi. Tokyo: Eihou-sya, 2003. 125-42. Print. Twain, Mark. Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 1. Ed. Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: U of California P, 2010. Print. - - -. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. New York: Harper, 1896. Print. Warren, Joyce W. The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth- century American Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. Print. Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Print.

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