“She is the lone example that history affords of an actual, real embodiment of all the virtues demonstrated by Huck and Jim and of all that he felt to be noble in man, Joan is the ideal toward which mankind strives. Twain had to tell her story because she is the sole concrete argument against the pessimistic doctrines of his deterministic philosophy.”10 For Twain Joan represented at least the possibility that other human beings could be free, even if in fact they seldom were.
