SOURCE: McMurry, Myra K. “Role-Playing as Art in Maya Angelou's Caged Bird.” South Atlantic Bulletin 41, no. 2 (May 1976): 106–11.

In the following essay, McMurry discusses the metaphor of the cage in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

As a songwriter, journalist, playwright, poet, fiction and screen-writer, Maya Angelou is often asked how she escaped her past. How does one grow up, Black and female, in the rural South of the thirties and forties without being crippled or hardened? Her immediate response, “How the hell do you know I did escape?”¹ is subtly deceptive. The evidence of Angelou's creative accomplishments would indicate that she did escape; but a closer look reveals the human and artistic complexity of her awareness. For the first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is not an exorcism of or escape from the past, but a transmutation of that past. The...