Examples Of Compassion In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Forgiving is a hard thing to do. When someone has hurt us, especially repeatedly, we as humans typically find forgiving to be against our nature. Likewise, feeling compassion or sympathy towards someone who has wronged us in the past takes patience, understanding, and love, which is not only difficult to do, but difficult to want to do. Scout and Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird are surrounded both by people who love and care for them – figures such as Atticus, Calpurnia, and Arthur Radley – and by people possessing hearts sullied by negative emotion. These unstable, rude, cruel, or even downright evil characters include Bob and Mayella Ewell, and Aunt Alexandra. Perhaps there is a way to defend the fact that all of these people deserve compassion,…show more content…
The eldest Ewell daughter, Mayella is constantly surrounded by both poverty and swarms of untamed children. Her father is abusive and negligent (and just a hick in general), her siblings are wild, and the only person who ever comes to visit is a Negro man named Tom Robinson, who helps around the house not because he wants to, but because he is asked to by Mayella herself. Mayella is overwhelmed by twenty-something years of loneliness, solitude, and abuse, and in her desperation “did something that in [the] society [of that time was] unspeakable: she kissed a black man” (Lee 272). Did Mayella do some sort of crime in kissing a black man? No, not at all – she was a grown woman and he a grown man. Now, she had, of course, taken Tom Robinson by surprise, and he most likely didn’t want it. But Mayella was so lonely. She didn’t know what else to do. No one would go out of their way to kiss her, so she went out of her way to kiss the only man outside of her family unit that was a comfortable distance away. She picked a man that could not tell on her, could not resist, not because she enjoyed watching him suffer, but because she was just so desperate. Her intent was not to feel sadistic pleasure – it was to feel loved. Did she do a crime in accusing Tom Robinson of rape? Yes, a rather large crime, and a despicable one, too. But Bob Ewell seems a much more likely candidate of someone who would concoct such a scheme. The…show more content…
Alexandra, the aunt of Jem and Scout, broke no laws or moral codes when she arrived at the Finch household, though she was the cause of many fights. Her strict and dictating nature made life hard with her at first, especially for Scout. Being a tomboy simply was not the way of her time period,so Alexandra made it her personal duty to make Scout up to be a “lady”. The woman “hurt[s] [Scout’s] feels and set [her] teeth permanently on edge” (Lee 108), but she does genuinely care about the family. When Scout arrived home after Bob Ewell’s attack, “Aunt Alexandra’s fingers trembled as she unwound the crushed fabric and wire from around [her, asking] ‘Are you all right, darling?’...over and over as she worked [Scout] free” (Lee 353). Alexandra makes life a living hell for Scout, but she treats Jem rather well. Is this because she is sexist, or because she plays favorites with Jem? Not at all. Alexandra’s making Scout upset isn’t intentional, but she does so due to her “darkness” – traditionalism. The aunt isn’t trying to hurt her brother’s children or upset them in the slightest. She’s trying to bring them up the way children have been brought up for generations, regardless of how tomboyish Scout truly is. Though she is strict, and though she is sometimes cruel, Alexandra is, deep down, a very caring, concerned aunt. She may occasionally go about it in the wrong way, but she wants the children to grow up right. She is the
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