Maya Angelou (9 page)

Autobiography is a major literary genre, the form that Maya Angelou uses in her long prose works. Broken down, the word
auto/bio/graphy
means
self/life/story
, the narrative of the events in a person's life. It is also known as life writing or the literature of self-revelation. According to Alfred Kazin, autobiography “uses fact as a strategy [It is a] history of a self, [and exhibits a] concern for the self as a character” (1964, 213).

A number of critics have classified Angelou's six volumes as autobiographical fiction and not as autobiographies, for the apparent reason that Angelou amplifies the autobiographical tone by using dialogue—by having another character or characters speak to the narrator. According to Eugenia Collier, the writing techniques Angelou uses in her autobiographies are the same as the devices used in writing fiction: vividly conceived characters and careful development of theme, setting, plot, and language (1986).

At first glance, it is useful to view
Caged Bird
as a
Bildungsroman
, a German word that means a “novel of education” or a “coming-of-age” story. Because
Caged Bird
begins in childhood and ends in young adulthood, with Maya giving birth to a baby boy,
Caged Bird
has been considered a
Bildungsroman
. Looking at the British
Bildungsroman
,
Mill on the Floss
(1860), there are many similarities between George Eliot's novel and Maya Angelou's first autobiography. Both are about the coming-of-age of strong-willed young women; both focus on the heroine's close relationship to her brother; both examine the effects of literature on character; both center strongly around family and community life. But while
Mill on the Floss
is a developed work of fiction, a story that ends, according to Eliot's deliberate plan, with her heroine's death in a flood, Angelou's autobiography is an unfinished narrative, told in the first person by the adult who recollects it years later. Angelou insists on calling her works autobiographies, not novels. For her, autobiography is a special form, consciously chosen as her most effective genre. In an interview, she told Jackie Kay, “I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form as the main form to carry my work, my expression” (1989, 195).

Most readers of autobiographies have clear expectations about the characteristics of the genre. First, it should be written rather than spoken. Second, it must have a first-person narrator. Third, it should be of manageable length, one or two volumes. Fourth, it should be arranged chronologically, in an order that roughly corresponds to the significant events of the narrator's life.

Exceptions to these standards are of course numerous; one of the most extreme is Gertrude Stein's
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
(1933). Although autobiographies are typically written from the first-person point of view, Stein pretends to use the first-person perspective of her partner, the Alice B. Toklas of the title. Stein's autobiography thus approaches fiction in its playful invention of a first-person narrator who is actually a third person. James Weldon Johnson, a favorite writer of Angelou's and an autobiographer in his own right, wrote a unique book that combined the perspectives of both the novel and the autobiography. He called it
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1912), and in the first printing it had an anonymous author, which made readers puzzle about the author's race. Johnson's point of view in this now-famous book was as inventive in its way as Gertrude Stein's was in
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
. Like Stein's contrived Alice, so Johnson's narrator is not actually James Weldon Johnson but a pretend white man, the fictionalized self-portrait of a light-skinned black who passes as white in order to be esteemed and rewarded by others.

The popular Lakota Sioux narrative,
Black Elk Speaks
, is also an exception to the standard autobiography, not in its structure but in its presentation. The very title,
Black Elk Speaks
, indicates an oral or spoken autobiography, told by Black Elk over the course of many years but put into writing by a European transcriber, John G. Neihardt. In his effort to shape Black Elk's story into an artistic whole, Neihardt wrote parts of the beginning and final chapters, thus defining the narrator's identity. This superlative collaboration between Black Elk and his transcriber resulted in the “first Indian autobiography” (Holly 1979, 121).

One critic of the genre, William L. Howarth (1980), has isolated certain elements common to all standard autobiographies. First is “character,” which designates the narrator, the one who tells the story and acts within it, as opposed to the more distanced “author.” The second element, “technique,” includes stylistic concerns such as metaphors, structure, and verb tense. Howarth's third element is “theme,” which addresses not only personal issues like love and death but also political, cultural, and historical matters affecting the autobiographer, in Angelou's case, the Great Depression of the early 1930s; the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s; the liberation movements in Africa in the same decade; and the riots in America following the assassinations of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr.

In addition, autobiographical theme is affected by literary tradition. If a writer reads or thinks about a favorite book, he or she is likely to echo its structure or its ideas, either knowingly or unknowingly. The writer is thus “influenced.” A literary influence occurs when a piece of literature or a specific creative form, existing in the near or distant past, affects the language, metaphors, style, structure, and/or philosophy of any given work. To determine the influence of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson on Angelou's
The Heart of a Woman
, for instance, one needs some knowledge of genres, of titles, of dates of composition, of mutual metaphors, of existing attitudes toward black women, and so on.

Angelou is quite open about her literary influences, naming at least a dozen in
Caged Bird
. Authors and genres are therefore likely to have influenced her autobiographies. Christine Froula (1986) makes the connection between Maya's rape in the first autobiography and Shakespeare's 2,000-line poem “The Rape of Lucrece,” which Maya memorized upon regaining speech. Other influences include authors such as James Weldon Johnson and Edgar Allan Poe; genres such as slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and serial autobiographies; and individual autobiographies in the African American tradition.

Other than their length and thematic material, Angelou's autobiographies conform to the standard structure of the autobiography: they are written, they are single-authored, and they are chronological. As will be observed in forthcoming chapters, they contain Howarth's required elements of character, technique, and theme. However, the six volumes that make up Angelou's series far exceed the standard number of volumes in an autobiography, so much so that they are in a subgenre known as “serial autobiographies.”

A serial autobiography is a set of two or more related texts that reflect on, predict, and echo each other so that they are seen as parts of a whole. For later volumes there are earlier ones behind them that must be recollected, just as in the larger tradition there are authors from the past—Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, and Paul Laurence Dunbar—who must be remembered if the reader is to maximize his or her experience. Some African American critics call this attention to past literary tradition by the name of “signifying.”

Angelou has written six autobiographies. She enjoys the multiple format, the “stretching” required in going from book to book: “I pray that in each book I am getting closer to finding the mystery of really manipulating and being manipulated by this medium, to pulling it open, stretching it” (Angelou, quoted in Kay 1989, 195). While the continuous fluctuation of the serial form allows the writer a freedom not available in the fixed, single autobiography, it also has pitfalls, including the increased need for transitions, for cross-references, for continuity, and for discipline.

There are numerous examples of the multiple autobiography within the black literary tradition. The foremost would be Frederick Douglass's two-part autobiography: the 1845
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
, followed by a second autobiography,
My Bondage and My Freedom
in 1855. The first volume is so widely considered to be the model slave narrative that few contemporary readers have become familiar with its sequel,
My Bondage and My Freedom
, a broader and more detailed work than its predecessor. William L. Andrews calls it that “rare ‘I-narrative' of the American 1850s,” one that explores Douglass's “identity, mission, and message” (1986, xxvi).

Richard Wright (1908–1960), well-known for the best-selling novel
Native Son
(1940), is also the author of a passionate autobiography,
Black Boy
(1945), a recollection of childhood and adolescence which is frequently compared to
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
. In 1977, seventeen years
after Wright's death, a sequel to
Black Boy
was discovered, thus changing its status from single to serial autobiography. The sequel
American Hunger
, written in 1944 at the time he was working on
Black Boy
, is a political autobiography that covers Wright's early involvement with the Communist Party in Chicago and New York. The volumes are ages apart in tone and narrative style:
American Hunger
is dry and abstract in comparison with the painful and compelling
Black Boy
. Reading the two works as a pair makes the reader recognize just how smooth Angelou's transitions are from volume to volume, how consistent her character.

These are but a few of the important serial autobiographies published by African Americans since the Civil War. White authors who have extended the initial autobiographical impulse into a series include Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, and Theodore Dreiser. One of the twentieth century's most admired novelists, Doris Lessing (1919–2013) worked for many years on a three-part serial autobiography. The first,
Under My Skin
, begins with her childhood on a farm in Zimbabwe in southern Africa, while the second,
Walking in the Shade
, chronicles her life as a writer and single mother living in London during World War II. The third was never finished.

But the autobiographer who has the most in common with Angelou is the white American playwright Lillian Hellman (1805–1984). Almost as prolific as Angelou, Hellman wrote a serial autobiography consisting of four volumes:
An Unfinished Woman
(1970),
Pentimento
(1973),
Scoundrel Time
(1976), and
Maybe
(1980). The first of the series,
An Unfinished Woman
, won the 1970 National Book Award for best book in Arts and Letters—the very same year that Angelou was nominated for (but did not receive) the same award for
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
.

Both Hellman and Angelou developed their sense of language and dialogue by working in the theater, with Hellman receiving praise for her early play
The Children's Hour
(1934), a frightening drama about a schoolgirl's destructive behavior toward two women teachers. After her return from Ghana, Angelou was active in the theater in terms of writing, acting, and directing, although she never achieved Hellman's stature as a playwright. Both Hellman and Angelou positioned their autobiographies in America, England, and continental Europe, with Angelou taking her international setting farther, into Africa. Both writers have been publically lauded in their lifetimes. Lillian Hellman received a standing ovation at the 1977 Academy Awards for the film
Julia
, which was based on an episode from her autobiography
Pentimento
, while Angelou has had many similar honors, perhaps her greatest being the invitation to read “On the Pulse of Morning”
at the 1993 inauguration of President Clinton. Finally, both engaged in an unlikely project when they combined the memoir with the cookbook.
Hellman's Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections
, written with Peter Feibleman, was published in 1984, whereas Angelou's ventures in the same genre were not realized until more than two decades later.

Given these resemblances, it is a bit surprising to read the concluding interview in Dolly A. McPherson's
Order Out of Chaos
(1990), only to discover a strong rivalry between Angelou and Hellman. Angelou's resentment of Hellman is supposedly based on literary distinctions. Angelou tells McPherson that Hellman's books are “one-dimensional” or “romantic.” Her black characters are stiff as “cardboard,” while her white ones fail to represent the masses (1990, 135). Angelou seems unnecessarily harsh in her assessment.

In
Design and Truth in Autobiography
(1960), Roy Pascal theorizes that autobiography must be a presentation of truth—truth in characterization, truth in relationship to the world, truth in point of view. Many other critics share Pascal's opinion, including Angelou's biographer, Dolly A. McPherson (1990, 72). Another follower of Pascal insists that autobiographies are “limited by the writer's need to speak in the spirit of the truth.” He warns that the autobiographer should “never allow himself to jeopardize credibility” (Mandel 1968, 224).

Angelou's views to some extent diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth. Angelou, who is well aware of the truth-in-autobiography theory, admitted to George Plimpton that she has on occasion “fiddled with” the truth, combining several characters for literary effect or being considerate to people who are still alive (1994, 18). In this author's interview of June 16, 1997, Angelou said: “Certain things overstate the facts…I want to always leave something for the reader to do, to imagine, to fantasize. I want to tell the truth but I can't because I'd ruin the thing.” When I asked what she meant by “ruin the thing,” she responded: “Well, losing the reader is ruining the thing. If I tell the truth…in language which shocks but does not terrify, which shakes somebody up but doesn't make them run away, I may impart something which might be of help” (“Icon” 1997).