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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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).
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). Justin Kaplan 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.
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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, Clara Clemens, 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
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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
Europe—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
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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 of his
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
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(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
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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
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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
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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
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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 the scene,
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
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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.
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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, they “laid 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
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while he often compares Joan to the sun:
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 foe to
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
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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
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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
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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
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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 New York City 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
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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
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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 revelation 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
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outspoken comments on female sexuality.
Notes
1. Y
oko 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. J
ames 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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