In To Kill a Mockingbird, our sympathies are with Tom Robinson. However, we also sympathize with his accuser, Mayella Ewell, because Lee deftly portrays her not as immoral but as a victim.
As Tom Robinson gave his testimony, it came to me that Mayella Ewell must have been the loneliest person in the world. (ch 19)
Mayella Ewell is the young girl who accuses Tom Robinson of rape. Since we know that there was no rape, the reader would expect to have no sympathy for Mayella. However, Lee carefully paints her as a victim of circumstances.
Our first introduction to Mayella is the description of the squalor she lives in, which is broken by “six chipped-enamel slop jars holding brilliant red geraniums” (ch 17). Mayella is a spark of brightness is an otherwise dismal world. The reader begins to wonder about Mayella.
When Mayella’s father takes the stand, the...
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reader instantly develops sympathy for her. He is coarse, vulgar, stubborn and violent. He describes her as a “stuck pig” and jokes that he doesn’t know if he is really her father and can’t do anything about it because her mother’s dead. WhenAtticus questions him, he admits he did not call for a doctor when he supposedly caught Tom Robinson raping her. His questioning goes on to make it clear that it was Ewell, not Tom, who hurt Mayella.
When Atticus questions Mayella, you feel even sorrier for her. She tells a story of a sad, lonely life of abuse and neglect. Atticus does not want the jury to hate or blame Mayella. He wants them to sympathize with her and realize that her father put her up to everything, and she only accused Tom Robinson of rape because she got caught having a friendship with him, which was unacceptable because he was black.
Lee carefully contrasts Mayella and her father. While Bob Ewell is covered in a layer of grime, Mayella “looked as if she tried to keep clean” (ch 18). When Atticus is polite to her, she thinks he is making fun of her. Scout begins to wonder about Mayella, and asks her brother if she has got “sense.”
I wondered if anybody had ever called her "ma'am," or "Miss Mayella" in her life; probably not, as she took offense to routine courtesy. (ch 18)
Scout wonders what Mayella’s life is like, and Atticus carefully coaxes it out of her. Her father subjects his family to a life of poverty and depravity, where Mayella is the only one taking care of a brood of dirty, ungrateful kids. By the time her testimony is over, we don’t just feel sorry for Tom Robinson, we feel sorry for Mayella too. She clearly did not want to accuse Tom. She was in a situation beyond her control.
How does Harper Lee create bias against or sympathy for Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird?
Lee creates bias against Bob Ewell from early on in the novel. She does this first by having the trustworthy Atticus make negative comments about him. We learn from Atticus that the Ewell children don't have to go to school and that Mr. Ewell is a shiftless alcoholic who doesn't take care of his children. Atticus tells Scout that Mr. Ewell spends "his relief checks on green whiskey" while his children go hungry. To make things worse, his bad behavior is rewarded, as he is allowed to hunt illegally because the other white people in Maycomb feel sorry for his children and want them fed from the game. From Atticus, Scout learns, too, that Mr. Ewell is "white trash."
As the trial opens, Lee has Scout offer a detailed description of the miserable conditions that Bob Ewell forces his children to live in. Then, Atticus makes it clear that it was Bob and not Tom Robinson who beat up Mayella by showing that Bob is left-handed. Scout notes,
If her right eye was blacked and she was beaten mostly on the right side of the face, it would tend to show that a left-handed person did it.
If Bob Ewell beat his daughter, the implication is that he may have sexually assaulted her, too. All of this sets us against Mr. Ewell so that we feel little, if any, sympathy for him.