Why Does the Caged Bird Sing, Anyways?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou is an autobiography. It is also, however, a wonderful story, full of amazingly vivid characters, beautiful metaphors, and simply gorgeous writing.
I was reading this book during my gym class–as one does–and found myself next to a very chatty girl. "Hahahaha," she laughed at her own joke before she said it, "Have you found out why the caged bird sings yet? Hahahaha!" While my classmate was not particularly funny and frankly distracted me from my reading, it did make me wonder. How would Maya Angelou answer that question? It's never said explicitly in the book; that would be too brash. Why does the caged bird sing?
The caged bird is the oppressed one. The caged bird is women, blacks, Marguerite Johnson or Maya Angelou as a child. In her early childhood, Marguerite faced the prejudice of the whites in her town. She was raped and felt the repercussions and shame for years afterwards. Marguerite was attacked by her step mother, forcing her to run away into a dump for a month. She faced many other hardships and became pregnant out of wedlock. Her escape from these trials was also books and learning. From the kindly old lady in her town teaching her about the importance of language to "falling in love with William Shakespeare," books and reading always had a special place in Maya Angelou's life, which is explanatory of her fantastic writing as an adult.
The caged bird, an oppressed child, the singer, a poet. Maya Angelou, and many other artists who are or have been oppressed, utilizes her artistry to express her emotions, beliefs, and life.
I heard one of Maya Angelou’s poems being read on the radio last year, and it transfixed me. I actually sat in my garage for an extra few minutes until the poem had finished. There was nothing I wanted to read more than more Maya Angelou, but my to-read shelf was already. When I was in an independent bookstore in New York City a couple of weeks ago and I found a beautiful and cheap copy of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, I knew I had to buy it and start reading, and it was a wonderful decision on my part. I wept over this book and laughed out loud, I underlined and dog-earred my way through pages of gorgeous prose, I binge-read sections and took others in page by page. I can't wait to read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings again, as I do with all of the books that have been heavily influential in my life.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou has a very interesting combination of voices and tenses. This is because of the childish nature of Angelou's thoughts in the past tense and the present tense, present day Angelou commenting on her past self. When she writes in past tense, her prose is often filled with naivete. This is shown is passages such as, "People were those who lived on my side of town. I didn't like them all, or, in fact, any of them very much, but they were people. These others, the strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were whitefolks" (26).  This passage shows race relations of her hometown of Stamps through the eyes her childhood self. The language is simpler in these sections as well. In the present tense sections, Angelou inserts herself, the accomplished poet and writer, into the story, and the reader is shown her feelings about her childhood from her view as an adult. "Looking through the years, I marvel that Saturday was my favorite day in the week. What pleasures could have been squeezed  between the folds of unending tasks?" (113). These sections, while much more brief, give important insight into Angelou's life.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 

I think that this combination of tenses and styles makes for a really powerful autobiography. The past tense with childlike prose makes the book read more like a novel and less like an autobiography. Angelou furthers this with metaphors and language that are more typical of literature than non-fiction. I'm really enjoying this book so far. The characters are fascinating, and it's really fun to remind myself that these characters actually existed. My favorite character is Mrs. Flowers. I love her quote, "'Your grandmother says you read a lot. Every chance you get. That's good, but not enough. Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning" (98). The concept of the human voice bringing new meaning to words is really intriguing to me, especially because my first experience with Maya Angelou's work was listening to her read a poem on NPR. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been a quick read and I'm hoping to finish it before the next blog post.

Mrs. Clarissa Parry Dalloway

Titles can be complicated or self-explanatory, and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf seems to be the latter. Main character, plot covering that character's life choices, somewhat of a character sketch, obviously the should be the character's name. 

As I approached the end of the novel, I started to realize that few people called Mrs. Dalloway as such, including the narrator. She's Clarissa for the majority of the book, called Clarissa Dalloway or Mrs. Dalloway only occasionally and often in dialogue. Given this, why did Virginia Woolf title the book Mrs. Dalloway? Why not Clarissa or Clarissa or Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway? Any one of these titles that has her first name seems to be more fitting for the character. There is little mention of Clarissa's maiden name, Parry, in the novella. 

The title is, therefore, more of a statement about Mrs. Dalloway's marriage than her character. Throughout the novella, it is revealed that Clarissa was "wrong" in marrying Mr. Dalloway, or rather it is thought so by herself and others including Peter Walsh and Sally Seton. This is explicitly said in the final pages of the novella, when Sally says, "to be quite frank, then, how could Clarissa have done it?–married Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs. Literally when he came into the room he smelt of the stables" (167).  The distaste of Mr. Dalloway by Peter Walsh and Sally Seton occurs throughout, presumably because of the affairs in varying degrees the two have had with Clarissa in the past. It is also significant to note that both Peter and Sally were close to Clarissa before her marriage, and this encourages them to call her by her first name and not Mrs. Dalloway, as some of her and her husband's older friends do. 

The name Dalloway comes up chronologically when Clarissa incorrectly introduces Mr. Dalloway, after they've just met, to a group of people. He awkwardly corrects her, "blurting out 'My name is Dalloway!' Sally got hold of it; always after that she called him 'My name is Dalloway!'" (53). This introduction of Richard Dalloway's infatuation with his name and the pride that comes subsequently continues as a subtle theme throughout the novel. He is generally proud of being in his family, because he is very wealthy and high society. 

Clarissa Dalloway is pondering her regret when it comes to her marriage to Mr. Dalloway. By titling the book Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf is taking away the Clarissa Parry from before her marriage. This emphasizes the regret in the book and the lack of identity that Clarissa has in her marriage as well. 

If This Weren't Virginia Woolf It'd Be Easier

When you read the back cover or a plot summary of Mrs. Dalloway, it seems straightforward. Okay, you might say to yourself, this will be a book about a woman named Mrs. Dalloway and she's basically just going to sit around for the hundred and fifty pages and complain about her life decisions. Simple enough?
The thing is, this is Virginia Woolf.

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We're following a series of characters through their Saturdays, in preparation for a dinner party that night, hosted by Clarissa Dalloway. They are revealing their motivations and regrets, complications and successes, all while, in some indirect way, interacting with Mrs. Dalloway. While the title character obviously has the most time dedicated to her development as a character, the supporting characters are cumulatively extremely significant.
The thing that makes Mrs. Dalloway both challenging and brilliant is the "stream of consciousness" style and the way Woolf jumps from one character to another. There are no chapters in the novella and minimal paragraph breaks. One characters narrative will end and another's will begin with practically no transition. This causes a fluidity between the characters' narratives that foreshadows their  converging at the dinner party later in the novella. The number of characters, their complexity, and the rapidness with which the narrative changes makes it slightly difficult to follow at times, although I believe that this was intentional on Woolf's part.
Two other characteristic aspects of Woolf's writing style in Mrs. Dalloway are the use of parenthetical interjections and free indirect speech. Free indirect speech, or the use of dialogue or thoughts without quotation marks. Woolf does this to blur the lines of who is narrating the story and, to the same effect as the lack of chapters or separation, to create a fluidity with the change in focus of the novel. Something that interrupts this fluid nature and creates contrast is the parenthetical asides that occur throughout all of the characters' narratives. This breaks up the solid text and does allow for characteristic Woolf dry humor.
Mrs. Dalloway is many things, but it is not an easy to navigate, simple character sketch, as it's billed in plot summaries and in bookstores. If it were that, would it be Virginia Woolf?

The Poisonwood Bible: Jesus Christ is Bangala

"'Jesus Christ is Bangala!' declares the Reverend every Sunday at the end of his sermon. Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree. Praise the Lord, hallelujah, my friends! for Jesus will make you itch like nobody's business" (276).

 This passage from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible sets up the basis for the novels title. Kikongo, one of the indigenous languages of Congo, is very much based around tonality and emphasis. This makes it a language that is difficult for the casual learner to grasp. In the novel, the Reverend, who does not respect the people or the culture, does not take the time to fully understand Kikongo, and this causes comical and upsetting errors. Encounters with the poisonwood tree come up throughout the novel, but "Jesus Christ is Bangala!" is the most significant use of the tree as a symbol.

A Poisonwood Tree

Did the Reverend Nathan Price write his own Bible during the Price family mission in Africa? Were there such errors in the translation of his own sermons due to his carelessness that the Bible became convoluted to the point of being unrecognizable and even comical? The phrase "Poisonwood Bible" epitomizes the nature of the Price's mission to Africa in its misunderstanding, attempts, and failures. Adah Price speaks to this in her final narration of the novel, as she says,

"I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible" (553).  

The Poisonwood Bible: Women's Education, Ruined Shoes, and Double Standards

The Price family has gone to the Belgian Congo on a church mission in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Nathan Price, the family's patriarch, is a ferocious baptist minister with no shortage of opinions on everything from the proper way for his wife to cook a meal to how his children should dress. His twin daughters, two of the four, are Adah and Leah. Both are exceptionally smart, despite Adah's deficiency at birth, which left her severely handicapped.  Adah seems even more brilliant than her twin, thinking in anagrams and often refusing to speak.

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We are first introduced to Father Price's opinion about his daughter's education in the first book of the novel, in a chapter that Adah narrates. "'Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.' And so I shall never have the opportunity to have my leather wrecked by college" (57).  This passage makes Father Price's point of view exceptionally and tragically clear--if women go to college, their education will either be wasted or ruin them. This is a revelation to the reader of Nathan as a sexist character, which will appear later in the novel. The double standard women face is a theme throughout as well.

Nathan's views are starkly contrasted by his wife's, Orleanna. She makes them study out of workbooks every day, even though she hardly went to school as a child. Although we hardly ever hear the story through Orleanna's eyes, we can assume that she sees education as the keys to a better life and marriage for her daughters, as she is stuck in an abusive marriage herself.  However, she still teaches them how to cook and be good wives in addition.

Leah, Adah's twin, gives a monologue that reveals one of the profound double standard truths that women faced, and, to an extent, still continue to face:

"But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl's bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you're Adah" (244). 

A cumulation of the three above characters' responses to women's education reveal how Kingsolver feels about modern women's education; that it's important, undervalued, and surrounded by horrible double standards.