Proposal

I Know Why: Exploring Maya Angelou’s Role in the Birth of the Literary Autobiographical Genre

Since its publication in 1970, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been considered a modern classic of American literature. The book, unique in it’s autobiographical nature and novelistic form, tells the story of Angelou’s early childhood in Stamps, Arkansas at the height of the Jim Crow South. Touching on issues from segregation, identity, family, motherhood, rape, and varying instances of injustice, Angelou’s confessional look at her early years eventually reveals an unfathomably resilient spirit and ability to draw knowledge and meaning from hardship.

In order to understand the striking cultural relevance of Caged Bird, one must first understand the context of its publication. During the late 1960s, due to her status as a female writer with next to no renown, as well as her being African American, publishers were virtually uninterested in who Maya Angelou was on paper. Moreover, her style was unique to say the least. Put simply, “there was very little autobiography or memoir being published, and there had been almost no autobiography written by African Americans since the days of slave narratives,” (Wagner-Martin, 3). In a day where only male-driven fiction alone was at the heart of literary circles, Angelou’s form was undoubtedly pioneering. Yet, it was that uniqueness that caught the attention of Robert Loomis, Angelou’s eventual Random House editor. Drawn in by her unapologetic yet somehow un-resentful approach to the bleak and often grim episodes of life as a black girl in the Deep South, Loomis encouraged her to attempt an autobiography. What resulted (Caged Bird) is now celebrated as luminous, moving, and a quintessential read to understanding both “the black experience” and the birth of autobiography as a respected genre in American lit, especially those written by women and African Americans.

In this essay, I explore I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the context of the literary autobiographical genre. Critics have often noted that autobiography can take on an “imaginative” form, tediously bridging the gap between the historic and the invented, stating also that a successful writer need not have necessarily lived a fascinating life to accomplish this. I hope to look more closely at why Angelou, whose slice of life depicted in Caged Bird was certainly “ordinary,” chose to formulate her autobiographies as literature, employing character and theme development mechanisms characteristic of the novel. Additionally, by digging deeper into her style and the cultural effect of her writing, I hope to offer an account of how this choice contributes to the overall meaning readers and critics alike have been able to draw from her transcending first autobiography. In his article on literary criticism and the genre, critic Robert Bell called autobiography a “problematic hybrid” that, to be successful, “demands a theoretical mind capable of explaining the elusive relationship between art and life.” I would argue that Angelou takes such a challenge in stride, taking her work beyond the constraints of one genre or another to create a work of art that truly does imitate the realities of her life, simultaneously inspiring a literary movement of her own making. This paper aims to understand the role Angelou played in the shifting topography of the previously white-washed, heavily fictional publishing world, as well as unraveling her choice of form using specific instances from Caged Bird.

 

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