Who does atticus suggest beat mayella

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Chapter 18

• Mayella Ewell is called to the witness stand.
• Unlike her father, who looked like he had prepared for his appearance in court by bathing for the first time in months if not years, Mayella looks like she actually has an ongoing acquaintance with soap and water.
• Mr. Gilman asks Mayella to describe what happened that night in her own words, but she doesn't answer, so he switches to more specific questions.
• Her answers are still minimal, so the judge asks her to just tell the court what happened, and she bursts into tears.
• Judge Taylor tells her that she has no cause for shame or fear, so long as she tells the truth.
• The judge asks Mayella what she's scared of, and she points to Atticus.
• When the judge asks Mayella how old she is, she says nineteen and a half.
• The judge tells Mayella that Mr. Finch isn't going to scare her, and that his job as judge is to stop him if he tries.
• Mayella, soothed, finally gets going on her testimony.
• What she says: she was on the porch when Tom Robinson came by, she asked him to chop up an old piece of furniture for kindling, and when she went inside to get a nickel to pay him he attacked her from behind.
• Did she scream and fight back? Yes.
• What happened next? She can't really remember, but eventually her father and Mr. Tate were there.
• Mr. Gilmer asks again if Mayella tried to fight off her attacker, and if he took "full advantage" (18.38) of her, and she answers yes to both questions.
• Now it's Atticus's turn.
• Mayella takes offense to Atticus's calling her "ma'am" (she thinks he's making fun of her), and Scout wonders what her life is like that she thinks normal courtesy is rudeness.
• Some facts about Mayella: she's the eldest of seven kids, her mom's been dead for a while, she can read and write but she only went to school for two or three years.
• Does she have any friends? Again, she thinks Atticus is making fun, since the idea seems so absurd.
• Atticus asks Mayella about her father (who's still in the room), whether he's ever beaten her, and she says, after a hesitation, that he's never touched her.
• Yeah, we're not so sure we believe that.
• Finally Atticus's questions turn to the day of the alleged crime. Mayella says that Tom passed the house every day, but this was the first time she had asked him to come into the yard (though she jumped when he asked that question), but she might have asked him to do odd jobs before, she can't remember.
• We're getting the picture that this testimony isn't exactly going to hold up.
• Atticus quotes Mayella's previous testimony and asks her whether the defendant hit her face; she says no, then yes, then that she can't remember, then cries.
• When asked to identify the man who raped her, Mayella indicates Tom, but Atticus tells him to stand up so that Mayella can have a good look at him.
• Tom stands up, revealing that his left arm is a foot shorter than his right and his left hand is shriveled.
• Booyah!
• Up in the balcony, Reverend Sykes tells Jem and Scout that Tom caught his hand in a cotton gin when he was a boy.
• Atticus asks how this man could have raped her, and she says she doesn't know how it happened but it did.
• Mr. Gilmer objects that Atticus is browbeating the witness.
• Judge Taylor replies that if anyone's doing any browbeating it's Mayella, but he's the only one laughing at his joke.
• Does Mayella want to reconsider any of her testimony? Nope. She even adds some new details to try to make it make more sense.
• Atticus asks a series of questions that Mayella simply refuses to answer: why the other children didn't hear her screams, if she screamed when she saw her father in the window instead of at Tom, if her father was the one who beat her up.
• After meeting all these questions with silence, Mayella makes her final statement: "That n**** 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" (18.167).
• After that Mayella bursts into tears and refuses to answer any more questions, whether from Atticus, from Mr. Gilmer, or from Judge Taylor himself.
• Scout thinks that somehow Atticus had wounded Mayella in a way Scout doesn't understand, and that it made Atticus sick to do it.
• Mayella leaves the witness stand, directing a dagger-look of hatred at Atticus on the way.
• Time for a break.
• Scout wonders what nuances of the case she might be missing, since it all seems fairly straightforward to her, and remembers that Atticus told her that Judge Taylor is a good judge.
• The judge and the lawyers return to restart the case.
• Jem, Scout, and Dill are pleased to see that the Judge has brought a cigar with him, which he proceed to begin eating, spitting out the bits once he chews them up.
• It's now almost 4 p.m., and Judge Taylor asks Atticus if they can finish the case up this afternoon.
• Atticus says he thinks they can, and he has just one witness to call.

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The trial continues, with the whole town glued to the proceedings. Mayella, who testifies next, is a reasonably clean—by the Ewells’ standards—and obviously terrified nineteen-year-old girl. She says that she called Tom Robinson inside the fence that evening and offered him a nickel to break up a dresser for her, and that once he got inside the house he grabbed her and took advantage of her. In Atticus’s cross-examination, Mayella reveals that her life consists of seven unhelpful siblings, a drunken father, and no friends.

Atticus then examines her testimony and asks why she didn’t put up a better fight, why her screams didn’t bring the other children running, and, most important, how Tom Robinson managed the crime: how he bruised the right side of her face with his useless left hand, which was torn apart by a cotton gin when he was a boy. Atticus pleads with Mayella to admit that there was no rape, that her father beat her. She shouts at him and yells that the courtroom would have to be a bunch of cowards not to convict Tom Robinson; she then bursts into tears, refusing to answer any more questions. In the recess that follows, Mr. Underwood notices the children up in the balcony, but Jem tells Scout that the newspaper editor won’t tell Atticus about their being there—although he might include it in the social section of the newspaper. The prosecution rests, and Atticus calls only one witness—Tom Robinson.

Summary: Chapter 19

Tom testifies that he always passed the Ewell house on the way to work and that Mayella often asked him to do chores for her. On the evening in question, he recounts, she asked him to come inside the house and fix a door. When he got inside, there was nothing wrong with the door, and he noticed that the other children were gone. Mayella told him she had saved her money and sent them all to buy ice cream. Then she asked him to lift a box down from a dresser. When Tom climbed on a chair, she grabbed his legs, scaring him so much that he jumped down. She then hugged him around the waist and asked him to kiss her. As she struggled, her father appeared at the window, calling Mayella a whore and threatening to kill her. Tom fled

Link Deas, Tom’s white employer, stands up and declares that in eight years of work, he has never had any trouble from Tom. Judge Taylor furiously expels Deas from the courtroom for interrupting. Mr. Gilmer gets up and cross-examines Tom. The prosecutor points out that the defendant was once arrested for disorderly conduct and gets Tom to admit that he has the strength, even with one hand, to choke the breath out of a woman and sling her to the floor. He begins to badger the witness, asking about his motives for always helping Mayella with her chores, until Tom declares that he felt sorry for her. This statement puts the courtroom ill at ease—in Maycomb, black people aren’t supposed to feel sorry for a white person. Mr. Gilmer reviews Mayella’s testimony, accusing Tom of lying about everything. Dill begins to cry, and Scout takes him out of the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, Dill complains to Scout about Mr. Gilmer’s rude treatment of Tom Robinson during the questioning. As they walk, Scout and Dill encounter Mr. Dolphus Raymond, the rich white man with the Black mistress and mixed-race children.

Analysis: Chapters 18–19

Mayella Ewell is pitiable, and her miserable existence almost allows her to join the novel’s parade of innocent victims—she, too, is a kind of mockingbird, injured beyond repair by the forces of ugliness, poverty, and hatred that surround her. Lee’s presentation of Mayella emphasizes her role as victim—her father beats her and possibly molests her, while she has to deal with her unhelpful siblings. She has lacked kind treatment in her life to such an extent that when Atticus calls her Miss Mayella, she accuses him of making fun of her. She has no friends, and Scout seems justified in thinking that she “must have been the loneliest person in the world.” On the other hand, though, Scout’s picture of Mayella as a victim is marred by her attempt to become a victimizer, to destroy Tom Robinson in order to cover her shame. We can have little real sympathy for Mayella Ewell—whatever her sufferings, she inflicts worse cruelty on others. Unlike Mr. Cunningham, who, in Chapter 15, is touched enough by Scout’s human warmth to disperse the lynch mob, Mayella responds to Atticus’s polite interrogation with grouchy snarls.

Read more about the symbolism of mockingbirds.

Pity must be reserved for Tom Robinson, whose honesty and goodness render him supremely moral. Unlike the Ewells, Tom is hardworking and honest and has enough compassion to make the fatal mistake of feeling sorry for Mayella Ewell. His story is the true version of events: because of both Tom’s obviously truthful nature and Atticus’s brilliant and morally scathing questioning of the Ewells, the story leaves no room for doubt. A number of critics have objected that the facts of the case are crafted to be—no pun intended—too black and white. But, as Atticus’s awareness of his defeat as a foregone conclusion suggests, Lee was not interested in the believability of the trial. The exaggerated demarcation between good and bad renders the trial more important for its symbolic portrayal of the destruction of an innocent by evil. As clear as it is that Tom is innocent, it is equally clear that Tom is doomed to die.

Read more about why the jury finds Tom Robinson guilty.

Link Deas represents the diametric opposite of prejudice. The fact that Tom is black doesn’t factor into Deas’s assessment of him; rather, he is particularly conscientious about scrutinizing Tom only in respect to his individual character. However, just as the court refuses to accept the undeniable implications of the evidence that Atticus presents, so too does it refuse to accept the implications of Deas’s validation of Tom’s character. The judge expels Deas because his interjection during the proceedings threatens the integrity of the formal manner in which court proceedings are run; the grim irony, of course, is that the blatant prejudice of the trial does so as well, though the judge does nothing to alleviate this prejudice.

The reader is spared much of Mr. Gilmer’s harsh cross-examination of Tom when Dill’s crying takes Scout out of the courtroom. Dill is still a child, and he responds to wickedness with tears, much as the reader responds to Mr. Gilmer’s unabashed prejudice with disgust. The small sample of his cross-examination that Scout and the reader do hear is enough. Calling Tom “boy” and accusing him at every turn, the racist Mr. Gilmer believes that Tom must be lying, must be violent, must lust after white women—simply because he is black.

Read more about how the tone of the book changes in these chapters.