Mark Twain & Joan of Arc

MARK TWAIN AND JOAN OF ARC

Eric Leif Davin

In 1994 Laura E. Skandera-Trombley published an interesting work on Mark Twain entitled Mark Twain in the Company of Women.  Her thesis was that “Clemens needed a female audience to whom he could read drafts and receive feedback” (p. 20).  That female audience, headed by his wife, Olivia, reflected “the insights and opinions of individuals who were in their own way as rebellious toward restrictive Victorian society as the Southerner Clemens was toward literary, Brahmin New England or as Huckleberry Finn was toward the slaveholding society of St. Petersburg, Missouri” (p. 25).  To support this thesis, she painstakingly establishes the cultural background of the Langdon family and the town of Elmira from mid-century through the 1890s. 

Based on her research, she contends that, far from endorsing the constraints of upper-middle-class Victorian society, the Langdons, and by extension Olivia Langdon-Clemens, traditionally viewed as Twain’s “censor”, challenged traditional social mores: “Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the Langdon women and their female relatives and friends continually and knowingly transgressed the boundaries delineating what was considered socially acceptable for women by becoming involved in educational, political, religious, dress, and medical reform” (p. 126).

Of particular interest to her study is Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), which was written, she asserts, specifically to please his family, especially his beloved daughter, Susy, who was by then 23-years old.  As a young woman, “Susy had assumed Olivia’s mantle as didactic monitor” (p. 156).  Even more than her mother, Susy wanted Twain to use “his talents for a higher, moral purpose” (p. 158).  Reading Joan of Arc as a response to the Clemens family’s “reformist beliefs,” Skandera-Trombley sees Joan as “the archetypical WCTU reformer.”  It is likely, she suggests, that Twain was “hiding an allegory of 19th century progressive concerns within the covers of a historical novel” (p. 160). 

However, Skandera-Trombley doesn’t sustain this interpretation to the point of showing us what we might make of the novel if we read it as the allegory she suggests.  Would such a reading help us reconcile Twain’s fondness for this novel with the general neglect it has experienced at the hands of modern scholars?