LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:3 March 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Death, Disillusionment and Despair in Maya Angelou’s
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Nidhiya Annie Jacob

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult. (Caged Bird 9)

Death, A Major Theme

Death forms a major theme in Angelou’s Caged Bird. Here, she conceives herself to be a cursed instrument of violent death. Death is viewed at various levels in the text. Angelou deals with a story of girl’s growing up and surviving as a young girl in the South of the 1930s and early 1940s.This survival is a painful experience, for a young girl whose world is colored by disillusion and despair; aloneness, self-doubt and a diminished sense of self. Indeed Angelou underscores her diminished sense of self and ruthlessness of her early childhood years when she proclaims in the prologue: “What are you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay...” (Caged Bird 7). In, “Initiation and Self Discovery” Dolly A. Mcpherson observes, “The words are painfully appropriate, for, the young Angelou, then Marguerite Johnson, is a shy, tensely self-conscious child who believes that her true beauty is obscured” (Order out of Chaos 34). As she struggles to remember her lines, she is conscious of her dual self, which is the constant subject of her fantasies. Beneath the ugly disguise-a lavender taffeta dress re-made from a white woman’s discard, broad feet and gap teeth-is the real Marguerite. Such fantasies are ephemeral and the time comes when the young girl must face the painful reality of her being.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Nidhiya Annie Jacob
Assitant Proffesor
Department of English
Yuvakshetra College
Ezhakkad
Palakkad District
Kerala
India
anniediya1988@gmail.com
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