I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Introduction May

Maya Angelou's (1993) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the author's account of her life experiences from early and middle childhood through puberty and adolescence. Her experiences encompass many aspects of developmental psychology and theory, including development of self-concept and self-esteem, the impact of abuse, child-rearing styles, identity formation, the influence of peer pressure, gender issues and a number of others. Among this plethora of developmental issues, this analysis will focus on three in particular: 1) the impact of abuse; 2) the impact of child-rearing styles; and 3) the impact of gender issues. Regardless of which issues one chooses to analyze from Angelou's early development process, the over-riding capability that comes to mind is resiliency. As Boyatzis (1992, p. 221) maintains, the book "�corresponds so well to work on resiliency, it seems as if Angelou read the research before writing her story." This analysis will examine abuse, child-rearing, and gender issues as portrayed in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in order to illustrate Angelou's development of resiliency despite an often harsh and abusive environment.

The impact of child abuse is readily evident in Angelou's account of her early developmental experiences. Angelou was sexually abused as a child by her mother's boyfriend. We see later, during adolescence, she describes herself as blundering around from one sexual experience t

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e is one Angelou (1983, p. 47) seems to imply is not one of courage, when she says of her mother, "�if she had been asked and had chosen to answer the question of whether she was cowardly or not, she would have said that she was a realist." Child-rearing also resulted in Angelou's inability to think of herself as a valid person of worth in comparison to white people. We see this most clearly whenever she suffers a toothache and must go to a dentist in the white section of town. Because of her mother's belief that even if you were dying in the white section of town you should never express pain, Angelou suffers with her toothache in silence as she trods through the white section of town. Angelou's (1993, p. 187) description of that walk illustrates her feelings of low self-esteem as a black individual, "On the other side of the bridge the ache seemed to lessen as if a whitebreeze blew off the whitefolks and cushioned everything their neighborhood-including my jaw�If the pain didn't diminish then, the familiar yet strange sights hypnotized me into believing that it had." The impact of gender issues on Angelou's development is clearly illustrated by her experiences in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou's childhood

Category: Literature - I