How can I compare and contrast Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and Mayella Ewell from To Kill A Mockingbird?

There are many differences between Daisy Buchanan and Mayella Ewell. To begin with, Daisy is an adult woman with a marriage and baby of her own, while Mayella is still living in her father's house and taking care of her younger siblings. Daisy is rich, beautiful, and lives a shallow life of material excess, while Mayella is dirt-poor and unkempt. Daisy's home is in an affluent neighborhood, while Mayella lives on the outskirts of town next to the town dump. Daisy's attitudes about life are revealed in her lifestyle choices, including her flapperish drinking and smoking, her lack of time spent with her daughter, and her marital problems. Mayella does not have the financial means to experience the lifestyle that Daisy leads, and her problems are thus not of the same flavor as Daisy's. Mayella's attitudes about life stem rather from living in poverty, being abused and neglected by her father, and harboring resentment due to racial and economic tension.

While their lives are very different, Daisy Buchanan and Mayella Ewell do have some important things in common. Both young women are very lonely people who desperately want to find affection from others. Both are trapped in the lives that they lead (Daisy's loveless marriage and Mayella's membership in the universally-disliked and poverty-stricken Ewell clan). Daisy's flirtatious friendship with Jay Gatsby damages her marriage further than it already was damaged, and Mayella's advances with Tom Robinson put her and Tom both into trouble with Mayella's father. Eventually these attempts by both Daisy and Mayella to feel loved lead to the death of other characters: Daisy kills Myrtle Wilson in a hit-and-run car accident while emotionally upset due to an unpleasant scene with Daisy's husband, thus is also not blameless in the eventual killing of Gatsby by recently-deceased Myrtle's enraged husband; Mayella inadvertently causes the death of Tom Robinson by falsely implicating him in a rape trial, after which he was killed as he tried to escape custody that he should never have been put into.

The reactions of both Daisy and Mayella to the grief and harm they cause to other people are also noteworthy. Daisy, while too shaken up to continue driving after the accident, does not stop to help her victim or appear at any time to receive any consequences for what she has done. Mayella, while emotional during the trial for her alleged rape, shows callous disregard for the fact that she is putting Tom Robinson in danger of being killed if he should be found guilty. In fact she is adamant that her accusation is true and that she does not want to talk about it any further. There is evidence that Mayella has been abused by her father instead of Tom and is accusing Tom in order to protect herself from further punishment. Daisy is also guided by fear in the aftermath of killing Myrtle. Ultimately both women had an opportunity to do the right thing for their victims by stopping and acknowledging their own wrong-doing, but neither woman was strong or free enough to do it.