The Question and Narrative Structure of Personal Recollections

To help prepare Twain’s readers to see the significance of Joan’s effort to liberate herself from neediness in a way that is scrutable for others, this chapter proceeds in two steps. The first highlights the challenges posed to Joan by the Catholic Church only to conclude that it is Joan whose success challenges the Church. Her remarkable career challenges the Church either to become more worldly, more political, and more rational or to retain its spiritual purity at the risk of becoming a mere abstraction in the minds and hearts of men. This can only effectively challenge the Church and the divine right of kings that it authorizes if its believers demand that the Church be both spiritually pure and politically relevant. The second section of this chapter argues that Personal Recollections is structured in such a way as to make the political and religious psychology of the narrator, the Sieur Louis de Conte, the central focus of the novel.