I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Critique.

The first 200 words of this essay...

The book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was educational in that it depicts the harsh childhood that the author, Maya Angelou, led. In reading the story, I found myself enveloped in the book. The title of the book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, seems to mean that Maya can relate to a caged bird singing. She has become caged in that she lives in a time of racism and that her gender makes it all the harder. She relates to the reason the bird sings in that at the end of the book she finally accepts her womanhood and her color as what it is not as what it could have been.

At the beginning of the book, the reader sees how far racism has distorted Maya's reality. Maya believes that by wearing a dress that she was going to look 'like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world. (P1)' But the dress was 'a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway.' Because of the blatant racism that Maya faced and the hard life that a black child led, she was made to think that white