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Scott Fitzgerald Marcel Proust William Faulkner Flannery O’Connor Margaret Atwood William Gaddis Franz Kafka Mark Twain William Shakespeare Gabriel García Mary Wollstonecraft William Wordsworth Márquez Shelley Zora Neale Hurston Geoffrey Chaucer Maya Angelou Bloom’s Modern Critical Views MAyA ANGELOu New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities yale university Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Maya Angelou—New Edition Copyright ©2009 by Infobase Publishing Introduction ©2009 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New york Ny 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maya Angelou : edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.—New ed. p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-177-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Angelou, Maya—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Women and literature—united States—History—20th century. 3. African Americans in literature. I. Bloom, Harold. PS3551.N464Z76 2008 818’.5409—dc22 2008044406 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New york at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. you can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com. Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the united States of America Bang BCL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Breaking Out of the Cage: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou 3 James Robert Saunders Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 17 Pierre A. Walker Only Necessary Baggage: Maya Angelou’s Life Journeys 37 Clara Juncker & Edward Sanford Hurston’s and Angelou’s Visual Art: The Distancing Vision and the Beckoning Gaze 49 Marion M. Tangum & Marjorie Smelstor The Heart of the Matter: Motherhood and Marriage in the Autobiographies of Maya Angelou 67 Siphokazi Koyana “Spinning in a Whirlwind”: Sexuality in Maya Angelou’s Sixth Autobiography 85 Mary Jane Lupton vi Contents Maya Angelou Writing Life, Inventing Literary Genre 91 Eleanor W. Traylor Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird as Trauma Narrative 107 Suzette A. Henke The Poetry of Maya Angelou: Liberation Ideology and Technique 121 Yasmin Y. DeGout Singin’ de Blues: Writing Black Female Survival in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 133 Cherron A. Barnwell Nigrescence: Mapping the Journey in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 147 Remus Bejan Chronology 157 Contributors 161 Bibliography 165 Acknowledgments 169 Index 171 Editor’s Note M y introduction attempts to locate the universal American appeal of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies in our native gnosis. The essays here reprinted are social, political, and popular-cultural in their orientation. As the dozen essayists share a common stance and pro- gram, I will preface them here as a group. They are generous in their insis- tence on human rights, and justly proud of Maya Angelou as an exemplary autobiographer of the social struggle. Not much given to formal analysis— which is not wholly relevant to Angelou’s work—they do explore most of the contours of their author as a benign contribution to our era’s espousal of societal equality. vviiii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction maya angelou (1928– ) M aya Angelou is best known for the initial volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, of her still-ongoing autobiography. Her poetry has a large public, but very little critical esteem. It is, in every sense, “popular poetry,” and makes no formal or cognitive demands upon the reader. Angelou’s achievement has a complex relation to at least two among the principal antecedents of African American memoirs: the slave narrative and the church sermon. Since she is a spellbinder of a storyteller, other elements in African American tradition, including the blues and the oral eloquence of street ways, also enter into her work. Though Angelou is essentially a secular biographer, her extraordinary and persistent sense of self, one that rises both through and above experience, seems to me to go back to the African American paradigm of what I have called the American Religion. What survived of West African spirituality, after the torments of the Middle Passage from Africa to America, was the gnosis that early black Baptists in America spoke of as “the little me within the big me.” Though converted to the slaveowners’ ostensible Christianity, they transformed that European faith by a radical “knowing” that the “little me” or most inward self did not stem from the harsh space and time of the white world, but emanated ultimately from their unfallen cosmos that preceded the Creation-Fall of the whites. Angelou’s pervasive sense that what is oldest and best in her own spirit derives from a lost, black fullness of being is one of the strongest manifestations in African American literature of this ancient gnosis. I think that this is part of the secret of Angelou’s enormous appeal to American readers, whether white or black, because her remarkable literary voice speaks to something in the universal American “little me within the 11