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¶ … Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
One of the lasting moments in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the explicit rape scene in the novel. In the story, the young narrator is raped by her mother's boyfriend. This moment in the book has been mislabeled as a form of child pornography, but anyone reading the story can testify that this is not a moment told in a way to stimulate in any way. The rape scene is a nightmare and the reader is put directly into the position of the poor, frightened child who cannot comprehend what is happening to her. The theme of the novel in its entirety is presented in these two scenes of violence; childhood is destroyed by adults. A conflict between the adult world and childhood innocence and how the destructive forces of the former forever destroy the latter.
There are two scenes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings which deal with the illicit actions of a corrupt adult male and the consequent destruction of an innocent child which serve as a metaphor for all the oppression faced by this young woman throughout the course of her short existence up to this point. Throughout her life, she...
In response to the first molestation, she says, "There was an army of adults, whose motives and movements I just couldn't understand and who made no effort to understand mine. There was never any question of my disliking Mr. Freeman, I simply didn't understand him either."[footnoteRef:1] This is the crux of the conflict between childhood and adulthood as presented thematically in the story. Had the young girl been able to understand what it was Mr. Freeman truly wanted from her, she could have potentially prevented his taking of her virginity.[footnoteRef:2] [1: Angelou, Maya (2004). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Chelsea ] [2: Vermillion, Mary (1999). "Reembodying the Self: Representations of Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: a Casebook. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton. New York: Oxford. ]
After the incident rape, the child is sent out into the world and knows that she no…
Works Cited:
Angelou, Maya (2004). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Chelsea
"Removing the N Word from Huck Finn: Top 10 Censored Books." (2011) Time.
Vermillion, Mary (1999). "Reembodying the Self: Representations of Rape in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: a Casebook. Ed. Joanne M. Braxton. New York: Oxford.
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Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, she illustrated her coming of age as an intelligent but unconfident black girl in the American South during the 1930s and afterwards in California during the 1940s. Angelou's parents' divorce when she was three years old and sent her and her older brother, Bailey, to stay with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, which was rural Stamps, Arkansas. Annie, whom they
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been widely classified as an African-American autobiography, which chronicles the experiences of a young, black girl in the America of the 1930s. While undoubtedly the work is a valuable contribution to the genre of African-American history, describing as it does the plight of black women living during a time of racial and sexual oppression, it
In McTeague, Norris applied the caged bird motif to illustrate the protagonist's chained existence that was at the mercy of naturalistic forces. As the canary is moved from place to place, so is the protagonist forced to move from one experience to another until he dies. It symbolizes the protagonist's life and death experiences. When McTeague finally dies near the end as he is handcuffed with a corpse, we see
This attempt at banning this book cannot be seen as anything but another example of prejudice and racism, this time against a woman who is attempting to share her life and warn other young girls at the same time. Probably one of the most eye-opening parts of the book is when Angelou acknowledges that for decades, blacks in the South acquiesced to whites simply to survive, and they taught these
Maya Angelou has several points in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her primary point involves both the strength and the beauty in inherent to the human spirit. Despite all adversity, her book and life story stresses, greatness can still be accomplished. It is impossible to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings without a sense of what the girl in the book would become; not only does
San Francisco is a place of greater opportunity than anywhere in the South offered her; there are fewer freedoms than she discovered in Mexico or in the junkyard, perhaps, but these restrictions are attendant on the opportunities afforded her. Angelou's ability to imagine those opportunities carried on the sea breeze or just over the crest of each successive hill of the San Francisco marks her successful journey in the