Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African-American autobiography.[30] Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as autobiographical fiction.[31] Other critics, like Mary Jane Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.[32] In a 1983 interview with African-American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies.[33] Dolly McPherson states that Angelou's work demonstrates how a writer can use the autobiography to define her quest for human individuality, identify her struggle with "the general condition of Black Americans", and claim a representative role not only for Black Americans, but for "the idea of America". McPherson goes on to say that "through a study of her work, one gains a closer access to American cultural history".[34]
As Lupton states, what makes Angelou's autobiographies different than more conventional autobiographies is her "denial of closure".[35] Lupton says that no other serial autobiography places the mother/child theme in the center of the conflict, which made it important to the book's narrative.[36] Lupton calls the narrative style in Caged Bird "rich, humorous, intense, engaging".[37] The language Angelou uses can be frightening and her dialogue in the book, which is sharp and direct, conveys her characters' distinctive language and both reflects the language of her literary models and draws on the Southern speech patterns of her characters.[37][38] Her use of metaphor places Angelou "within the stylistic tradition of black protest literature".[37] She also uses precision to describe objects or places and her observations are sensual. As Lupton puts it, "Her writing resembles a series of photographs or fragments of music: snapshots taken from many angles, notes played from a variety of instruments".[38] McPherson agrees, stating that in her autobiographies, Angelou "uses the narrative gifts of an accomplished writer".[39] Braxton compares Angelou's style to that of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson, stating that Angelou also uses "rhythmic language, lyrically suspended moments of consciousness, and detailed portraiture".[40] Braxton, due to Angelou's use of humor and folklore, also calls her a "tale-teller par excellence".[40] Harold Bloom, who does not think as highly of Angelou's poetry and does not find her subsequent autobiographies as compelling as her first, compares the tone in Caged Bird with the tone Rudyard Kipling uses in Kim, stating that Angelou "provides us with a voice that we encounter very infrequently, whether in life or in literature".[41] According to Susan Gilbert, however, while Angelou records African American cadences and speech patterns, she does not limit herself "to the tongues of black Arkansas or ghetto streets".[42] For example, Angelou describes the codeswitching that many in her community engage in; as Gilbert also says, the language Angelou uses "moves between a strong, colloquial simplicity and a sometimes over-blown literary mannerism".[43]
At first, Angelou intended to return to poetry and play-writing after completing Caged Bird and write no more autobiographies, but as she stated in an interview in 1989, she chose the genre as her primary mode of expression because of its challenge and so that she could "change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century", adding that "I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form to carry my work, my expression".[44] McPherson agrees, stating in 1990 that no other American writer had chosen to make their "major literary and cultural contribution so predominately in autobiographical form".[34]
As Angelou told journalist George Plimpton during a 1990 interview, "Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful".[45] She also told Plimpton that like the tradition begun by Frederick Douglass in slave narratives, she used the literary technique of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".[45] As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou was reporting not one person's story, but the collective's.[46] Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and sees Angelou as representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people.[47] Angelou also, throughout her series of autobiographies, seeks to describe the personal, cultural, social, and historical influences that shaped her life and identity. Her experiences, as described in her books, "represent stages of her spiritual growth and awareness".[48] As McPherson puts it, Angelou's autobiographies "creates a unique place within Black autobiographical tradition" and reveal "important insights into Black traditions and culture".[48]
In addition to being classified as an autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has also been called a Bildungsroman, like George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.Joanne Braxton sees Caged Bird as "the fully developed black female autobiographical form that began to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s".[49] The book presents themes that are common in autobiography by Black American women: a celebration of Black motherhood; a criticism of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition.[49] Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Black female from the South, at some points a child, and other points a mother.[50] As Gilbert puts it, "the reader of the book must deal throughout the dual perspective of the child, growing to consciousness of herself and the limits of her world, and the author, experienced, confident, and didactic".[51] Braxton states that Caged Bird has two points of view, the child and the mature narrator/artist; while the child's point of view governs Angelou's "principle of selection", the tone of the adult narrator is personal and compelled to explore aspects of her coming of age.[52] Keneth Kinnamon states that like other Black female writers and unlike many male writers, Angelou was concerned with themes such as community, sexism, sexual exploitation, and relationships with family friends.[53]
George E. Kent states that due to "its special stance toward the self, the community, and the universe", Caged Bird has a unique place within Black autobiography.[54] McPherson says about Angelou: "I know of no other autobiographer in American letters who celebrates and sings her life with as much verve and display of vulnerability", adding that Angelou has demonstrated how the genre of the autobiography "can be transformed into a strong evocation of the human spirit".[55] Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.[56] For example, Angelou was worried about her readers' reactions to her disclosure in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, that she was a prostitute. She went through with it, anyway, after her husband Paul Du Feu advised her to be honest about it.[57]
Angelou has recognized that there are fictional aspects to her books, and that she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth".[58] Angelou discussed her writing process with Plimpton, and when asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she admitted that she had. She stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about".[45] Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she has used these facts to make an impact with the reader. As Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work", adding that Angelou "fictionalizes, to enhance interest".[59] For example, Angelou uses the first-person narrative voice customary with autobiographies, told from the perspective, as Lupton puts it, of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator", although at times the book sounds more like fiction than autobiography.[60] Harold Bloom says that, "like all autobiographies, [Caged Bird] has fictive elements, but whatever they may be, they evidently work to the book's engaging artfulness".[41]
Angelou identifies with slavery, verifying its power in her life and works, but Black womanhood and truth, themes found throughout the history of Black autobiography, is transformed by the period she describes. As Lupton puts it, "In Caged Bird, for example, she records a life story begun in fear of crosses burning in the night, a life that is directly affected by the brutal remnants of slavery".[61] Lupton states that Angelou presents material not found in other autobiographies, written by both Black and white writers, because she addresses topics from the perspective of an African American woman.[62] Lupton also compares Caged Bird and the next four volumes to prison narratives, although, through her use of the caged bird symbol, her prison is symbolic rather than literal.[63]
Caged Bird has been called a bildungsroman; for example, Lupton compares it to other bildungsromans like George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss. According to Lupton, Caged Bird and The Mill on the Floss share the following similarities: a focus on young strong-willed heroines who have solid relationships with their brothers; an examination of the role of literature in life; and an emphasis on the importance of family and community life.[44] Angelou uses two distinct voices, the adult writer and the child who is the focus of the book, whom Angelou calls "the Maya character". Angelou reports that maintaining the distinction between herself and the Maya character is "damned difficult", but "very necessary".[1] Scholar Liliane Arensberg, in her discussion about the theme of death in Caged Bird, suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult self's irony and wit.[64] As Lupton says, Maya "fills readers' imaginations as have very few similar characters in American autobiography"[36] as she evolves from child to woman.
