Pg 188: “I got something to say and ‘then I ain’t gonna say no more. That Nigger yonder took advantage of me, an’ if you fine fancy gentleman don’t want to do nothing about it then you’re all stinking yellow belly cowards, stinkin’ cowards, the lot of you. Your fancy airs don’t come to nothin’- your ma’amin’ and Miss Mayellerin’ don’t come to nothin’, Mr. Finch-. Then she burst into real tears. Her shoulders shook with angry sobs. She was as good as her word. She answered no more questions, even when Mr. Glimmer tried to get her back on track. I guess if she hadn’t been so poor and ignorant, Judge Taylor would have put her under the jail for the contempt she had shown everybody in the courtroom. Somehow, Atticus had hit her hard in a way that was not clear to me, but it gave him no pleasure to do so. He sat with his head down, and I never saw anybody glare at anyone with the hatred Mayella showed when she left and stand and walked by Atticus’s table.”

The description and look of Mayella we get from the perspective from Scout gives us a sad girl who’s tough and hard on the outside but soft and unsupportive in the inside; like an egg. Atticus however breaks this egg and gets the true emotions from it meanwhile it tries to recover itself by giving a firm point. We see that these words are a desperate outcry by Mayella. She knows that she’s lying but is determined that she’s sticking to her story she is selfishly putting young Toms Robinsons like at risk, she is morally wrong.

In another part of the novel that links to another chapter is Jem. We see from the part when Dill dares Jem to go up to the Radly’s place. Jem is scared, but of course Jem, being a dare devil, could never take down a dare. We see another hardshell egg; hard on the outside, but soft in the inside.

This incident is linked to the theme moral education. Mayella has no sense of moral education because she has been brought up in the company of her evil father Bob Ewell and witnessed his way of dealing with things; the way he gives white lies to get away with situations. Then we see that Harper Lee uses dialogue to reveal Mayella’s character to us in more detail. Her morals are wrong and horrid. Thus so, Mayella acts upon these ways because of her influential father. Another moral we see is innocence and young mind. It says, “Somehow, Atticus had hit her hard in a way that was not clear to me.” Scout with her young mind only sees the main point in things, but cannot see between the lines of how Atticus does what he does. We can also relate Mayella to Scouts young mind. They’re both hypnotised by Atticus’s ways.