“Evil rarely comes in the form of monsters…” This quote from The Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt is shown in the book To Kill a Mockingbird and from the real-world trials of the Scotts borough Boys. Society clearly influenced the outcome of the trial both in book and in life. The plaintiffs in both scenarios were seen as both victims and accusers. Victoria and Mayella were both victims of society in similar ways, whether through being a nobody that was ignored or simply shunned. In Mayella’s case the because of how her drunk lazy father was viewed she became an outcast of society and was viewed negatively causing others to never offer help or socialized with her. Victoria was also viewed this way by her neighbors and police, it also didn’t help that her only parent, her mother in this case, self-proclaimed “At her age I was just as much a whore as her”. In both cases …show more content…
Victoria was a standard street whore and a nobody with only Ruby as her friend. Mayella became an accuser because though she had been raped by her father, he was the only parent she had forcing her to accuse Tom Robinson so that she would retain her only parent and be spared by the community for having incest-related relations. Victoria, being the whore that she is accused the Southborough Boys of raping her and her friend Ruby, the reasons she did this was to avoid being caught for prostitution, but also to spare her the public ridicule. Though Mayella and Victoria are victims of society, Ruby is different. Ruby did not accuse the boys at first, until she was coerced by investigators and Victoria herself to frame them, and at around the end of the trials testified that Victoria, and her were lying about the entire thing. Society forced the girls to lie about their true experiences because of the public ridicule and the legal trouble that they would have been subjected