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Symbolism of harper lee killing a mockingbird
Symbolism of harper lee killing a mockingbird
To kill a mockingbird describing justice
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Power is like having the advantage over someone else. Mayella is held at the court, saying Tom Robinson raped her, and now he is said guilty when clearly he wasn’t. Because of her class and gender, Mayella lacks power, but her race makes her powerful. For instance Mayella lacks power because of her class in that she is poor, her dad is a drunk and he can barely make a living. “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…” is an example why she lacks power because of her class, she lives in basically a dump. “White people wouldn’t
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“Except when he’s drinking?’ asked Atticus so gently that Mayella nodded” she couldn’t lie and help them even more she lacked power. “He said you goddamn whore, I’ll kill ya.’” “We don’t know, but there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone…” This shows that she has no power to stand up for herself. However she has power due to her race because she is white and at this time period the whites had power over the colored. “‘Long’s he keeps on callin’ me ma’am and saying Miss Mayella. I don’t hafta take his sass, I ain’t call upon to take it’” she is making commands and acting like she has power over him. “That all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women…” “‘You felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?’ The witness realized his mistake and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.” Because she is white, they make the colored person have certain things they can do and can’t. Therefore Mayella is powerless because she is poor, a woman and she is seen to have no authority. Although she is powerful in a way because she is white and the whites are seen to have the most power over all. Which leads to her having more power against Tom Robinson because they don’t want to make a white person guilty so they guilty the
...uth to fully understand that it is typical to act superior to those with colored skin. All Dill sees is a man being rude to another, just because of his skin color. While Atticus clearly shows everyone in the court that it was almost impossible for Tom Robinson to have beat Mayella, he still loses the case just because he was a black man against a white woman. Lee includes, “Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” (Lee 323) This enforces how it didn’t matter what Tom was really doing or why Mayella was screaming, but just by the way Tom looked they were able to essentially pin the rape and the beatings on Tom. Of course this was not true and he did not receive the justice he deserved, but that didn’t matter to Maycomb. All that mattered was the color of his skin and what the teenage white girl named Mayella Ewell said about him.
Is Mayella Ewell powerful?That is the question that is asked and must be answered.Throughout the story” To kill a mockingbird” Mayella shows some glimpses of power, but not enough to say she is powerful.For example, in the beginning she shows that she cannot even control her home life so how can she be powerful.Also she shows that she is just too poor for her to have power.Now in the next three paragraphs I will explain my thinking on why I believe Mayella is not powerful.
With this being said, even though Mayella was a low class female she inherited the superiority of being white making it easy for her during the trial. Mayella used her individualistic self pity against Tom Robinson. The little town of Maycomb Alabama knew the truth, but the Ewell’s plan backfired on them. They gained no respect, and are still considered white pieces of trash. As for Mayella individually, she’s not educated but she is very smart. Mayella did have power through race, class, and
Overall, Mayella is not a powerful figure in To Kill a Mockingbird. Even though she was powerful because of her race, the areas she lacked in was her social class and gender. Despite the fact that Mayella won the trial, the only reason why she won was due to her race. She is also a very weak character since she even allowed her own father to assault her and just the way she lived in general. For the most part, this is important because if this trial happened in a different time period like today, then it would’ve been certain for Tom Robinson to win the
During the trial for Tom Robinson, Atticus is questioning Tom on what Mayela had done while he was with her. Tom Robinson explained she was kissing him on the side of the face and was explaining how she had never kissed a grown man before. “......She says what her papa do to her don’t count….” (Lee, Chapter 19). Given this quote from the book, it is implying that Mayella’s father sexually assaults her because he is the “man of the house” which seeing that Mayella is female, it renders her powerless against Bob. Mayella’s gender takes away her power greatly. “...Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left….” (Lee, Chapter
In the book “To Kill A Mockingbird”, Mayella Ewell is the conflict of the story. To challenge herself to see if she is powerful based on class, gender, and race. Mayella is powerful due to her race; however, she would not be powerful due to her class and gender. One might think she is powerful over all; however, she does not have power in the eyes of some readers. Proceeding on to see if Mayella has power in race.
To some, it is very unclear whether Mayella is powerful or powerless. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, a family tries to defend a ‘Mockingbird’ who is being charged with crimes of rape. The book ironically takes place in the mid 1930s after similar events have just recently happened relating to blacks vs. whites. While Mayella Ewell can be considered as powerful based on her race, her class and gender indicates that Mayella is powerless based on the circumstances during the mid 1930s. In the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mayella possibly demonstrates a woman who is powerful because of her race.
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.
To conclude, Mayella should be fully responsible for her actions. She is someone that should be condemned instead of pitied because she is conscious while deciding to kiss a black man, kills Tom Robinson by giving false testimony in court, and knows in advance the consequences of her actions. Tom’s miserable fate is in sharp contrast with Mayella’s, as this event in To Kill a Mockingbird is meant to reflect how white people are easily forgiven even when all evidence is pointing against them. Unfortunately, Scottsboro Boys’ end is the same as Tom’s – all but one of them were convicted and sentenced to death for something that did not happen.
However, it is understandable that one can argue that Mayella’s two disadvantages trump her one advantage, socially, and make her a less powerful character in the story. Although it can be debated that women were looked at as a minority and class drives a person’s reputation (which can also lead to the amount of power one possesses), this topic’s evidence is irrelevant to the time that this story took place. Maycomb, Alabama was a very small town filled with conservative and stereotypical people who were stuck in their old ways and were very stubborn when it came to changing their ideas. Race was such a social hurdle that no one could overcome, due to it being a physical trait, during the 1930’s. Even if there was a poor, white woman, she would be automatically respected at a higher level than a wealthier black man. If one’s cultural group were to be ignored in this scenario, a wealthier man would have been at a higher advantage compared to a poor woman. However, race played a large role in this society, and during the court case, “(The Ewells had) presented themselves to you gentlemen (the all white jury), to this court… confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption- the evil assumption- that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women.”
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
As the United States developed and grew, upward mobility was central to the American dream. It was the unstated promise that no matter where you started, you had the chance to grow and proceed beyond your initial starting point. In the years following the Civil War, the promise began to fade. People of all races strived to gain the representation, acknowledgement and place in this society. To their great devastation, this hope quickly dwindled. Social rules were set out by the white folk, and nobody could rise above their social standing unless they were seen fit to be part of the white race. The social group to be impacted the most by this “social rule” was the African Americans. Black folk and those who were sympathetic to the idea of equal rights to blacks were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. (Burton, 1998) The turning point in North Carolina politics was the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898. It was a very bold and outrageous statement from the white supremacists to the black folk. The Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from the local government and destroyed the neighborhood by driving out the African Americans and turning it from a black-majority to a white-majority city. (Class Discussion 10/3/13) This event developed the idea that even though an African American could climb a ladder to becoming somebody in his or her city, he or she will never become completely autonomous in this nation. Charles W. Chesnutt discusses the issue of social mobility in his novel The Marrow of Tradition. Olivia Carteret, the wife of a white supremacist is also a half-sister to a Creole woman, Janet Miller. As the plot develops, we are able to see how the social standing of each woman impacts her everyday life, and how each woman is ...
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.
Her spiritual and religious influences helped shape her and prepare her for the positions she would one day fill. Yet it is her own formation of religion and spirituality that garnered her success. although her grandmother’s words gave her the confidence to speak out against violence it was her own belief in the sinfulness of segregation that caused her to act. Her family’s ignorance of the racial problem could have stopped her from attending anything that discussed race. But her own morals told her she needed to participate in some group that retaliated or caused action. She would not let herself sit idly by. She
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).