Looking Beyond the Character
Many times people have said that appearances can be deceiving, or that appearances are not what they seem. This can be proved true with the characters in a novel. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, she shows many examples of this in her writing. The story covers a few characters who the readers eventually get to see and know more about, who demonstrate a theme of how people are not always what they seem to be. As a result, the readers learn about these characters that they are not as crazy and irregular as they are viewed, but far different than their appearances suggest. The author of this book presents the fact that people’s demeanors can often be misleading.
Specifically, one of the characters in To Kill a
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Mayella is a Ewell, therefore she is immediately categorized into a filthy, disgraceful person, as all Ewells appear to be. When Scout is listening at the trial, she begins to remember the red geraniums that she had seen at the Ewell’s dump of a house. She also figures out, “As Tom Robinson gave his testimony, it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. She was even lonelier than Boo Radley, who had not been out of the house in twenty-five years” (Lee 195). Mayella Ewell is someone who wants a better life, or a better situation to be in, so she tries to improve it anyway she can, like planting the little geraniums to make her space a little nicer. As a result of the Ewells’ situation, she gets lumped in with the older people who do not deserve a good life. Thereafter, Scout recaps the fact that Mayella does not have any friends, and when Atticus asks Mayella about her friends, she assumes he is mocking her or making fun of her. Furthermore, Tom Robinson was probably the only thing she had that was close to a friend to her. Again, we see how Harper Lee expresses the fact that appearances are not what they