Mayella Ewell is a character in “To Kill a Mockingbird”. She lives in the town of Maycomb, Alabama where the inhabitants are very sexist and judgemental. In the book Mayella is not powerful considering her class, race, and gender. The community members she lives near are a very large contributing factor to her powerlessness. Mayella is mistreated a great amount throughout her lifetime. After all that physical and mental abuse she faces becomes enough Mayella does something drastic. She accuses an African American man of rape knowing, her being a white woman, he would get in tremendous trouble. People cannot say whether it was right or wrong of her to do what she did. What they can say is that at the moment she was powerless to do otherwise.
For example, even though her race can be deemed as an upside to her
Since Mayella is white her dirtiness is a lot more amplified. African Americans at that time were depicted to be the dirty ones. So when Mayella walks out of her house looking dirtier than them, people around her talk. Her whole community has standards of how your suppose to act, and look. Mayella Ewell fits none of those standards, which is completely out of her control. The way she acts towards people whom meet these standards says a lot about her character. When in court she says “you keep on makin’ fun o ' me.”(Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird) When really her prosecutor was only being polite. It is not her fault she misunderstood the man, and it only makes her look worse since she is a white woman. Her community would expect a colored person to be uneducated in that matter, but Mayella being the race she is should have known better. She could not help the family she was born into. In the end the court rules in her favor against the African American, but even that doesn 't mean she is powerful. Sure she has power in that instance, but any other
With lots of children to take care of Mayella was only able to get two to three years of education and she had no friends. This is why when Atticus asks her about her friends she thinks he is making fun of her. After having to live a life like this we don?t know why Mayella would like to defend her hard-hearted father, but she probably did this because she was scared of what he would do to her if she told the truth. We feel sympathetic towards her at this point but there is still a sense of hatred towards her as she is letting an innocent person being jailed who actually helped her a lot when no one did.
Let us put each other in the shoes of the jury, friends, and family observing in on a discrimination case. Jem and Scout the son and daughter of a lawyer named Atticus Finch get a taste of what the real world is like when, Tom Robinson a poor black man who is married and has kids is falsely accused of raping and assaulting a white woman named Mayella. Mayella Ewell is a young girl considered to be “white trash” who is all by herself to take on the role raising her little siblings while her father Bob Ewell, who is an alcoholic, abuses her. The question arises, is Mayella Ewell Powerful? Mayella Ewell is powerful in this discrimination case because of her race as white woman, her higher class than Tom Robinson, and her gender as a female.
While Mayella did lie which ended up killing Tom Robinson, she is still sympathetic as she demonstrates that she does not want want to be a dumb, dirty Ewell. She is isolated from society and a victim of domestic abuse. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird leaves a lot of details in the novel for the reader to decide. Lee’s role, was to simply scatter evidence for readers to formulate their own conclusions on her characters, events and themes. Mayella Ewell’s personality and character was a scattered jigsaw puzzle and Lee created each individual piece which represents her words. Those who solve the puzzle correctly can conclude that Mayella is a very sympathetic character that was conceived to embody the evils of Bob Ewell and southern
Mayella uses this case to cover up the shame in her life because she is extremely lonely, has no self-esteem, and overwhelmed with the amount of unhappiness in her life. Mayella gets extremely defensive in this quote because she knows that everything Atticus has brought up is good evidence and she can’t hold her own. In the jury, it was full of all white men. Mayella acted timid and helpless and suggested in her comment that the man of the jury be brave and heroic. She becomes someone who is vulnerable, valuable, and needs to be protected.
In Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, a small town in Alabama exemplifies one of the many towns that has clearly defined social classes. Some of these stereotypes are determined by one’s class, nationality, and gender, and the authority that people believe they may possess, which leads to conflict. During the 1930’s in the south, Mayella Ewell’s gender and class did not provide her with a voice. However, her skin color outshone her disadvantages, and allowed her to be highly respected, and this also gave her power over all black people. Due to Mayella’s white race, she was able to have an influence over a majority of her neighbors, and her class and gender did not matter in most scenarios,
Mayella Ewell and her family live on welfare and hunting. They do not have their own money to spend when they want to. There was a whole different perspective on the way that Mayella’s house looked like: “Maycomb’s Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin. . . . Its windows were merely open spaces in the walls . . . What passed for a fence was bits of tree-limbs, broomsticks and tool shafts . . . Enclosed by this barricade was a dirty yard . . .” (Document A). Mayella never got to see the goodness behind living in a nice environment. Where she grew up was not a typical white family house. Everyone that the Ewell’s know, knows that they live in what is called the “dump”. It is a trash old run down spot where their house is. The life that Mayella was living was not healthy at all. She was poor and had no one to be friends with her: “Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world” (Document E). Mayella was not social due to the fact that she was poor and of course no one wanted to hang out with poor people. Mayella was not social due to the fact that she was poor and of course no one wanted to hang out with poor people. She was not used to people being kind to her so she never thought that it could actually happen. With the poor environment that Mayella lives in, allows her have no one to talk to. No one was a fan of her and would rather not be around her. She was always on the opposing side as everyone, even when she tried to show respect for the
Some may say that this is the final nail in the coffin for her status as a mockingbird, but this may just represent another facet of the definition of mockingbirds. Corruption of innocence is violence, in a way, and Mayella Ewell has been conditioned many a time, that she should do whatever her father tells her to, regardless of that action's moral ambiguity, and that if she doesn’t, she will have to face the consequences, often at the price of physical harm from her father. The loss of Mayella’s innocence through the corrupted lifestyle of her father, is often more telling of her mockingbird status than, say, her geraniums. Innocence, of a child or otherwise, is all the more precious when it is taken away, piece by piece, until the last scrap someone holds on to is more than anything ever was or will be, and these Mockingbirds, Mayella foremost among them, has had that last little bit of themselves torn away, leaving a wretched husk where there used to be a glimmer of
During the 1930’s, there was this evil assumption that Atticus draws attention to which is that “....all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women…”( Harper Lee TKAM 273). With that in the minds of all the townspeople, Mayella being a “helpless” female amongst the lowest of the low gave her continuous power in the case against Tom Robinson. Moreover, being a female prompted the town to want to protect Mayella even more. The white to black ratio was unwavering in the 1930’s. Even though white people look down upon her, when it came time for Mayella’s case against Tom Robinson her class was disregarded and her race and gender trumped all.
To Kill a Mockingbird integrates the non-fictional use of plaintiffs Victoria Price and Ruby Bates as victims and accusers with the comparable story of the fictional Mayella Ewells to tell a tale of how society shapes us as individuals. Hannah Arendt’s take on society should lead as a role for how we view everyday people: “Evil rarely comes in the form of monsters, but rather in the form of relatively normal people who, for reasons of careers, ideology, or a desire for society’s approval, are indifferent to the human consequences of their actions.” So when Mayella Ewells, a fictional, strong-minded woman, Ruby Bates, a quiet, well-behaved younger sister, and Victoria Price, a working prostitute by night and mill-worker by day whom was married
Mayella is forced to put an innocent man in prison because she wants to put the " evidence of her crime away from her" and save herself from another. punishment. The snare of the snare. She has reason to be afraid, as Atticus implies she was " savagely beaten" by Bob Ewell. Therefore not only does she fear being driven out of society but also fears physical abuse.
Under the circumstances of that she is poor, but her race gives a more higher point of view on the subject of her race. Of course being formal is right when in front of a lady, but when Atticus is
“... Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s garden’s. They don’t nest in the corncubs. They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” (pg.103)Mayella is innocent because she grew up in an abusive household. The book gives hints that her father Bob Ewell sexually assaults her and leaves her to take care of her so called “brothers and sisters.” Mayella Ewell was put on stand and was made to lie to the judge and jury by her father, Bob Ewell, who beats her and abuses
Power is the important thing that everybody wants. Power is the ability to control one’s own life or the life of other. The book “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee is the story about power. In the story Mayella Ewell accuses Tom Robinson of raping her. Mayella wins the case against Tom showing how much power she has. But is my Mayella truly powerful? When it comes to class and gender she is powerless but when it comes to race she is powerful. Her race makes her truly powerful.
Mayella, the woman defending against Robinson, comes from a low income and low educated family, making them a poor family. Yet Mayella’s word is still favored against Tom because she still holds a higher social status than Tom just because she is white. In fact, in the novel, Atticus has an important quote regarding the court system that is still true today, “In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins.” (Lee, H. (1960). To kill a mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott. pg. 251-252).
Hypocrisy is as much a part of Maycomb’s society as church and community spirit. For example, Mrs. Merriweather talks about saving the poor Mruans from Africa, but she thinks black people in her community are a disgrace (p.234). The hypocrisy of this teaching is shown as soon as she mentions the word ‘persecution’. This is due to the fact that she herself is persecuting the black people of Maycomb by not raising an eyebrow at the killing of innocent black men. Furthermore, it is obvious Bob Ewell is abusive to his daughter, Mayella, and that he is the one who violated her, not Tom Robinson (p.178). Since there is such hypocrisy in Maycomb, there are excuses made for whites. The jury probably thinks that if they pronounce Tom innocent the citizens will mock them as they do to Atticus. Harper Lee uses hypocrisy to show how the people of Maycomb are so engulfed in a variety of elements that they unknowingly complete acts of unjustified discrimination.