The Democratic Reconfiguration of History in Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was an unexpected source of fascination for Mark Twain, who otherwise rejected the Middle Ages as an age of obscurantism, barbarity and submission to the Crown and the Catholic Church—the exact reversal of the American ideal based on democracy, progress, and intellectual enlightenment, which he had previously celebrated in so many texts. In 1895–96, when Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was published, his once adamant faith in American democracy had been crumbling for about a decade, in a political context that Twain perceived as inconsistent with the nation's founding principles. Just as puzzling as his veneration of a Catholic icon, French at that, is thus the ultimate paean to democracy that makes its way through his historical romance, fueled it seems by the interplay of two major sets of sources. Twain's fascination with the saintly but not yet canonized heroine, the roots of which reach back to the legendary stray leaf episode of 1849, led him to spend some twelve years studying her life as mentioned in his autobiographical dictations.¹ He gathered material first of all from the sources officially acknowledged in the paratext, which he added in 1896 when the text appeared in book form, one year after its serialized and anonymous publication in Harper's Monthly.² These include the eleven historiographical texts which are listed at the beginning of the book as "[a]uthorities examined in verification of the truthfulness of this narrative"—in fact twelve, since Ronald Jenn and Linda A. Morris have shown that Twain by mistake amalgamated two of them in one³—and, according to the note signed by "The Translator," two primary sources: the "official records of the Great Trial of 1431, and of the Process of Rehabilitation of a quarter of a century later, [. . .] still preserved in the National Archives of France." His marginalia as well as the intertextual dialogue of these sources—the alleged warrants of the historical objectivity of the text—suggest that his reading of these texts between 1873 and 1895, essentially after September 1891 when the writing project really got under way (following the chronology established by Jenn and Morris),⁴ in fact fed his rejection of monarchy, aristocracy and church rule while reviving his attachment to democracy. Yet another, unacknowledged stratum of influence comes into play, resonant with the Joan of Arc subtext—the books by Lecky, Carlyle, and Macaulay that he drew on while composing his previous historical romances, The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and principally A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). As Joe Fulton indicates, Twain first read some of these books in the early 1870s but mostly marked them while composing Connecticut Yankee between 1885 and 1888.⁵ Consideration of the narrative's multi-layered subtext may throw light on how its composition gave a new impulse to Twain's faith in democracy and inspired him to reconfigure medieval history along democratic lines. Joan of Arc may well be his democratic muse, his inspiration to a renewed and short-lived, song-of-the-swan-like celebration of democracy that nonetheless runs deeper than the narrator's oft over-explicit and anachronistic political discourse. The novel's very politics indeed—following Jacques Rancière's notion of a "politics of literature" defined by writing strategies—proceeds from a democratic writing regime that brings marginal figures, themes and linguistic registers to the fore.⁶ The democratic reconfiguration of history, which takes its start in the margins of Twain's sources and in the novel's subtext, depends on a narrative perspective that gives prominence to the margins of history while making visible and audible what historical representation ordinarily keeps mute and out of sight.

Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc bears the stamp of American nineteenth-century political culture, with its mistrust of Catholicism and monarchy and its commitment to republicanism. As early as 1896, W. D. Howells deplored the failed "archaism" of the text resulting from the encroachment of the narrator's modern and American perspective on...