“Discourses of Faith vs. Fraud in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Christian Science.”

Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “Discourses of Faith vs. Fraud in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Christian Science.” American Literary Realism 51, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 111–35. 

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Twain’s hagiographic, romanticized rendering of Joan is “a frank affirmation of the better angels of humanity’s nature” and an “idolization of innocent young women”—mirroring how he saw his own daughter Susy (116). Susy took an interest in Phineas P. Quimby and his ‘Mental Science,’ as did Eddy before she founded Christian Science. When Susy died, Twain’s “jeremiads against …Eddy… are thus partly the revenge of a bereaved father” (116). But his primary target was what he considered the plagiarism, inconsistencies and fraud of Eddy’s writings and autobiography. Twain viewed Joan as using her authority and words for good purposes, whereas Eddy’s “pretty words” were “scheming” machinations (117). Both women were seen as blurring gender roles. Eddy possessed too-manly a hunger for power, whereas Twain “resolves Joan’s gender contradictions by suggesting her maternalism” and selfless devotion (119). Both were visionaries, but Eddy was “delusional” (119). Joan’s voice, in her trial record, is “under oath at pain of death… unmistakable, … consistent” (120). Eddy uses her mentor’s words [Quimby] for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his personality on full display.

ISSN: 1940-5103
Print ISSN: 1540-3084

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/amerlitereal.51.2.0111

See also annotations:

Rolling Away the Stone by Stephen Gottschalk

Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill

“Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy: Gendering the Transpersonal Subject” by Cynthia D. Schrager