Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ( M.A Eng. 3rd)

The Christmas Gifts

When Maya and Bailey receive Christmas presents from their parents one year, they burst into tears. Sounds like a couple of ungrateful brats, right? Who cries over presents? But here's the thing: these presents mean a lot more to Bailey and Maya than any old Princess Unicorn.

The presents reveal to Maya and Bailey that their parents are alive. Not only that, but they live in a land of milk and honey called California—and they don't want their kids (8.13).

So presents—which are usually a symbol of giving—end up symbolizing rejection. Not cool.

A Gift is Worth a Thousand Words

What are these presents exactly? Daddy Bailey's present is a picture of himself—big surprise. We know even before we meet him how vain he is going to be. Vivian's presents are a bit odder: a teacup set and a doll.

Why would you give a teacup set to a poor girl in the South? Good question, us. Later in the novel, when Maya writes about debutantes, she discusses the futility of poor black girls trying to attain Victorian ideals despite their situations (16.1). This teacup set is a miniature example of this. Mother Dear is completely out of touch with her daughter's situation, and she will continue to be even once they live together.

And how about that doll? Did we mention that it's white with rosy cheeks and blond hair? Hmmm. We know from the very beginning of the book that Maya fantasizes about being that pretty little white girl (Prologue.9). It's pretty clear that the doll represents an unattainable standard of beauty for Maya—though maybe not for her movie-star mom. Little Maya sees herself as too black and too ugly to ever be pretty.

One last thing. Maya and Bailey rip the doll apart, but keep the tea set. What gives?

Easter Dress

This dress is going to be awesome. It's made of silk, has ruffles on the hem, and tucks in at the waist. What could be cuter?

Maya wears the Easter Sunday dress during the prologue. For weeks before Easter, she went around dreaming about how beautiful the dress would be and how its magical powers would change her life. She would turn from an ugly black girl to a pretty white girl, complete with curly blond hair. Finally, she would prove to everyone that she was different.

But that Sunday morning, things don't go quite as expected:

Easter's early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway […] The age-faded color made my skin look dirty like mud, and everyone in church was looking at my skinny legs. (Prologue.8)

Instead of waking up from her "black ugly dream," Maya realizes that it's a reality.

What can we take from the image of the dress? Sure, it confirms—from the very beginning—that Maya's ideal of beauty is white, not black. But it also symbolizes Maya's constant frustration that her ideal is unattainable

literally. She can fight racism, but she can't fight race. Luckily, over the course of the novel, Maya comes to accept herself and realize that the color of her skin should be a source of pride.

Food

Maya sure talks about food a lot. We hear about the food that Momma makes, the food in St. Louis, the food in San Francisco. Is she just really hungry, or is there something else to this literary smorgasbord?

We're going to take a stab at this one. Throughout Caged Bird, there are a lot of changes in scenery. The differences between the urban and rural settings are expressed in many ways, but the differences in food are the most mouth-watering.

In Stamps, the whole community (men and women) come together to preserve all the food for the year (4.19). For breakfast, they eat thick slices of meat they have cured themselves. (In order to get fresh meat, the children have to go to the white part of town, where people have refrigerators.) Peanuts are brought in from the field and roasted at home, as a treat.

What does all this tell us about the people in Stamps?

• They are a tight-knit community
• They work together for the common good
• They aren't well off, so they cannot afford for the little food that they have to go bad 
• They aren't very delicate and refined 
• They are accustomed to living off of the earth

The city slickers in St. Louis and San Francisco are quite different. In the city, everything is bought, not made. Maya and Bailey eat thinly sliced deli ham and place little leaves of lettuce on their sandwiches (10.6). Here, peanuts are salted and eaten with sugary jellybeans in paper bags. (Yum.) Their grandmother eats German brätwurst, and their mother takes them on a world tour of ethnic restaurants (26.34).

This is an entirely different world. Food doesn't come from the earth, but from stores. There are luxury foods other than candy bars. And there are enough ethnicities in the city to host a food tour.

Bottom line: pay close attention to the food in this novel. When it pops up, it's not just delicious, it's meaningful.

The Store

The Store dominates the first half of the novel. It's where the workers of the community gather every day and where people come to pass the time. When everyone needs to listen to that famous boxing match, they all crowd into the Store. Where else would they go?

Momma's store is the heart of the community ("[o]ver the years it became the lay center of activities in town" [1.7]), and it helps the people of Stamps survive even through the Great Depression.

The idea of community, particularly black community, is very important to Maya's youth—it gives order to the world around her. The Store is the physical manifestation of that community.

The Baby

When is a baby not a baby? When he's a symbol for everything his mother has ever wanted!

The novel ends with the birth of Maya's son when she is sixteen years old. This would be a big deal under any circumstance, but Maya's experiences seal the deal. After all, motherhood is a tense subject for her. Her mom is mostly not in the picture, and when she does waltz into Maya's life, she's more worried about herself than her daughter. Momma is Maya's stand-in mom for a while, but she won't even say that she loves her granddaughter. Basically, Maya has a huge mommy hang-up.

How does the baby play into this? When Maya has her son, she becomes a mother herself. Okay, so that part is obvious, but get this: she even uses the same language to describe herself that she has used for her mother. Let's take a look:

When we first meets her mom, she says, "I thought she looked just like the Virgin Mary" (10.31). later, after she gives birth to her own son, she writes, "[n]o one could deny that I had had an immaculate pregnancy (36.24)." Hmmm. Who else had an immaculate pregnancy? Oh yeah, the Virgin Mary.

Maya's transition into motherhood gives her the chance to be the mother she never had and give the love she never received. And bonus: her baby is her second chance at receiving all that love that she missed out on as a kid.