In To Kill A Mockingbird, compassion is most important throughout the story’s lessons and understanding. Compassion is used throughout the book by a few different characters that most likely didn’t see compassion in the same way. The different ways that compassion was used in the story was extremely important due to the amount of change it caused in the story and the reader’s view of the story. Everyone deserves compassion in their life, and one of the characters in the book that could use compassion is Mayella Ewell. It was easy to tell that Mayella was a pitiful character and she deserves compassion because of how she grew up, how lonely she is, and she is most likely desperate. Mayella deserves to have compassion given to her because her …show more content…
Ewell also is racist, so he probably wants his children to think the same as him, which makes her household even more toxic. She has lived a life where she has been taught to not trust and even be afraid of people who are different from her, which led to the entire trial in the first place. Scout describes Mayella as “fragile-looking” which shows how much pain you can tell she is in. Mayella put effort into things unlike her father and probably the rest of her family because of how she tried to clean herself up for the trial unlike her father, as Scout described. She has to also act like a mother due to how negligent her father is to her and the rest of her siblings and this shows that not only is she being abused but she also has many responsibilities and burdens to take on. Her life has been filled with racism, abuse, and conditions that no one should grow up in and no one deserves that kind of life. The definition of compassion is, “sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings and misfortunes of others.” This definition shows that Mayella has suffered suffering and misfortune, which clearly shows why she is deserving of compassion in this book. Mayella deserves compassion because she has had such a lonely life that she doesn’t even know what friends