Renascence

Volume 67, Issue 4, Fall 2015

Essays on Values in Literature

Sunday School Books and Twain’s Joan of Arc

This article considers Mark Twain’s 1896 novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in the context of his earlier satirical treatment of nineteenth-century Sunday school books. Though often classified as an anomaly among Twain’s works, Joan of Arc in fact proves perfectly consistent with the author’s most pointed critiques of the moral and religious training of children. Close analysis of Twain’s earlier works on children illuminates his presentation of his ideal child and ideal human Joan. Twain’s novel makes clear that Joan’s virtue is not the result of the type of behavioral training operant in nineteenth-century Sunday school books. By highlighting Joan’s selflessness and emphasizing that she is not motivated by rewards or punishments, Twain distinguishes her from self-seeking Sunday school book heroes and heroines. And by telling the true story of her persecutions, sufferings, and martyrdom, his narrative completely inverts the pattern of the Sunday school books in which “good” children are always abundantly rewarded and “bad” children are always dreadfully punished. Joan remains untouched by the corrupt values of her society because of her moral conviction, courage, and immunity to both threatened punishments and promised rewards. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc is not, as some have argued, a sentimental departure from Twain’s lifelong pattern of criticizing the social and religious training of children. In Joan, Twain finds a heroine who subverts Sunday school book standards of “goodness” and in the process achieves true virtue.