I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
Introduction
May
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Maya AngelouÆs (1993) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the authorÆs 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 AngelouÆs early development process, the over-riding capability that comes to mind is resiliency. As Boyatzis (1992, p. 221) maintains, the book ôàcorresponds so well to work on resiliency, it seems as if Angelou read the research before writing her story.ö This analysis will examine abuse, child-rearing, and gender issues as portrayed in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in order to illustrate AngelouÆs development of resiliency despite an often harsh and abusive environment.The impact of child abuse is readily evident in AngelouÆs account of her early developmental experiences. Angelou was sexually abused as a child by her motherÆs 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, ôàif 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.ö
Child-rearing also resulted in AngelouÆs 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 motherÆs 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. AngelouÆs (1993, p. 187) description of that walk illustrates her feelings of low self-esteem as a black individual, ôOn 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 jawàIf the pain didnÆt diminish then, the familiar yet strange sights hypnotized me into believing that it had.ö
The impact of gender issues on AngelouÆs development is clearly illustrated by her experiences in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. AngelouÆs childhood
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Approximate Word count = 1501
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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Introduction
May
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