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The Theme Of Prejudice In To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee

561 Words3 Pages

What is power? In the book To kill a Mockingbird there is a girl by the name of

Mayella Ewell. Mayella is very powerful, and she shows it through three things Race, Gender,

and Class. In this paper the question, how is Mayella powerful, will be answered. Almost all the

way through the book she remains powerful, which makes Mayella a great character.

One of those characteristics I mentioned was race. She uses race in the story by

trying to get Tom Robinson an African American man in trouble. Tom is trying to help Mayella

clean or rearrange one day and somehow it turns into Mayella kissing Tom and Bob Ewell,

Mayella’s dad see’s it and takes it to court. This makes Mayella feel powerful because the jury is

all white and dressed in overalls. Reverend Skyes told Jem in chapter twenty one, “now don’t …show more content…

Jem, I ain’t ever seen any jury decide in favor of a colored man over a

white man.”1 I think it was wrong for Mayella to get Tom in trouble because all he was the only

one that was ever nice to her.

Another characteristic used by Mayella is class. She does not have a good home

because she lives behind a dump, on a pig farm. She shows class by not letting this bother her

when people make comments to her or look at her kind of funny. Also this shows her class

1 Lee, Harper. "Document D: The "evil Assumption"" To Kill a Mockingbird. EV ed. DBQ. Print.

because she is poor and her house stinks. When Bob takes Tom to court Document A says “He

thought he’d be a hero, but all he got for his pain was… okay, we’ll convict this Negro but get

back to your dump”.2 If I were Mayella, I would want to stay at home all the time, so I would not

get criticized.

The last characteristic used is gender. Bob Ewell has never really been there for

Mayella. He beats her sometimes for no reason and Mayella says that it is worse when he

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