I agree with auntlori's response--Mayella is a character
who evokes sympathy from readers, simply because her words and actions show her to be a
young woman whose isolation from society, along with the responsibilities she's been
given with regard to raising her siblings, elicits pity from
readers.
With that said, we still must remember that
Mayella, though she is a pitiful girl with whom readers sympathize, is still at the
center of a trial in which an innocent man's life is at stake. While she is being
questioned by Atticus, she cannot keep her story straight and often changes her
responses once she figures out what she "should" say to support her accusations. (For
instance, when Atticus asks Mayella if she remembers Tom hitting her face, she says "No,
I don't recall if he hit me. I mean yes I do, he hit me." Atticus's questioning soon
becomes too much for her, and she concludes her testimony with the
following:
I
got somethin' to say an' then I ain't gonna say no more. That nigger yonder took
advantage of me an' if you fine fancy gentlemen don't wanta do nothin' about it then
you're all yellow stinkin'cowards, stinkin' cowards, the lot of
you.
Again, while we can
feel sympathy for Mayella because of the situation in which she has been brought up, we
cannot excuse the fact that she knowingly puts a man's life at stake to cover up what
she has really done--she kissed a black man, her father saw her, and he beat her. My
guess is that this is the "disgusting" behavior you're to find in the novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment