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To Kill A Mockingbird Dbq

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The Choice of Power Power is claimed to be a necessity when it comes to having control over a certain situation. In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell, a poor white girl who lived in the dump, claimed that she was raped by a black man named Tom Robinson. After a while, Tom was finally convicted for rape and sent to prison, while Mayella won the case. After she won the case, many people began thinking she was powerful, but unfortunately, she is not. Power is the ability to have power over yourself and others around you, and Mayella did not have that. Although Mayella is not powerful within her class and gender, she is still given a degree of power due to her race. Mayella is able to have some power of the people around her, …show more content…

The time period all this happened, the 1930s, women were still undersized and thrown into the shadow of men still. During the trial, while Mayella was being questioned, her father continued to intimidate her from afar and give sign with body language, scaring her into changing her answer, "'He does tollable, 'cept when.' 'Except when?' Mayella looked at her father, who was sitting with his chair tipped against the railing. He sat up straight and waited for her answer" (Doc B). Also, Mayella's father, Bob Ewell, is clearly abusive to her as well. Atticus mentions that Tom is not able to use his left hand, and Bob is left-handed: "[…] but there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left […]" (Doc B). Mayella is still downsized compared to men, and therefore her gender does not give her a speck of power. Mayella's class certainly does not give her power at all. What we mostly know about Mayella is that she is dirt poor and lives in the dump, so her class does not give her power. She was in the worst part of the social structure there is, "Maycomb's Ewells lived behind the town garbage dump in what was once a Negro cabin […]" (Doc A). Unfortunately, because she's so poor, no one above her wanted anything to do with her, "[…] white people wouldn't have anything to do with her because she lived among pigs […]" (Doc E). Unfortunately, Mayella turned out

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