Wednesday, July 20, 2016

In To Kill A Mockingbird, why did Mayella Ewell live a miserable life?

Mayella is the isolated, unattractive daughter of Bob Ewell. She is part of a very poor family considered white trash by the rest of the community. Bob Ewell, an alcoholic, is a violent man who beats Mayella, and spends what little money he has on whiskey. His eight motherless children live in a ramshackle shack with him, and the family relies on poaching to survive. As the narrator states, the Ewell family "had been the...

Mayella is the isolated, unattractive daughter of Bob Ewell. She is part of a very poor family considered white trash by the rest of the community. Bob Ewell, an alcoholic, is a violent man who beats Mayella, and spends what little money he has on whiskey. His eight motherless children live in a ramshackle shack with him, and the family relies on poaching to survive. As the narrator states, the Ewell family "had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations."


While it's clearly miserable to live in a shack with an abusive father and to be an impoverished outcast in the community, Mayella also feels forced to turn on Tom Robinson, a man who has treated her with kindness, simply because he is black. Although she is the one who most likely approached him, and while there is no good evidence he raped her, she has no mechanism for fighting back against a code that insists the racial line cannot be crossed between black men and white women. For the rest of her life, she will have to fight to deny to herself that she wronged an innocent person. 

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