Mark Twain's Joan of Arc: The Child as Goddess

Abstract

wEW NATURAL EVENTS in the history of American letters seem in ret11 rospect less accidental than the wind which, one day in I849, supposedly blew the stray leaf from a book about Joan of Arc across the path of a thirteen-year-old printer's apprentice in Hannibal, Missouri. Clearly Mark Twain himself, who came to believe in a world wholly determined from the beginning, regarded it as the first, if not the last, turning point in his life.' As he told the story years later, the random page fascinated the boy. It described the Maid's persecution in prison by the rough English soldiery who had stolen her clothes. Young Sam hurried home to ask his mother and brother whether Joan of Arc was a real person. For the first time, apparently, the remote past touched Sam Clemens. From this casual beginning the worlds of history and literature opened simultaneously to Clemens. For the rest of his Twain was absorbed by the past and by the urge to represent it through fiction. For a professional writer, this choice of theme sometimes ran counter to the expectations of Twain's audience; this was particularly true of the four medieval stories; none of these, except possibly A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, was written primarily to make money. Least of all Joan of Arc. That is private & not for print, it's written for love & not for lucre, & to entertain the family with, around the lamp by the fire. So he described to Mrs. A. W. Fairbanks in January, I893, the romance he was composing amid the serene and noiseless life which the Clemenses were momentarily