What Is The Argument In To Kill A Mockingbird

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The novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” is a dramatic story that may play with your emotions, it is very cheerful and exciting at times but still can be unpredictable and saddening. The story is about the changes that the main characters go through over the span of three years in a secluded southern town known as Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression in the 1930’s. The argument that is going to be discussed in this essay is about Mayella Ewell, who is a “victim” of rape by an African American male named Tom Robinson, who is being represented by a man named Atticus Finch, who is the father of Scout and Jem Finch and that is who the novel is mostly centered around. The Argument is how much power does Mayella Ewell have in the forms of race, class, and gender. Mayella is a poor white woman who lives in Maycomb as well. She lives with her drunk and abusive father, Bob Ewell but is …show more content…
That gave Mayella some power at least over the African Americans because in the story even though all of the evidence pointed to Mayella's father. Bob Ewell the judge still convicted Tom Robinson for rape, but everyone knew that it was her father. It shows that Mayella has a lot of power just because she is white. Atticus had said while in the courtroom “The Ewells have presented themselves to you gentlemen, 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, and that all Negro men cannot be trusted around our woman”.(DBQ Project, p.19 2013) This shows us that Bob Ewell knew that a lot of the white men in the courtroom would be on his side just because Tom Robinson was an African American and Mayella was a white woman, in which shows she has power over Tom because of her