Know Why the Caged Bird Sings One

¶ … 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 has been shifted from one home to another and so her understanding of the outside world or the motivations of indecent beings is not developed enough to protect her. 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 longer first into the realm of childhood. "I couldn't sit long on the hard seats in the library (they had been constructed for children."[footnoteRef:3] The rape is symptomatic of all the harm adults do to children who cannot understand. All she knows is that her childhood was robbed of her and that she believes some action she has done made her deserving of the punishment, that it was in fact, her fault. Children internalize the evils performed upon them and that is what Angelou is trying to make the reader understand. [3: Angelou, Maya (2004).]