“She doesn’t talk much. Her name’s Margaret.” […] “Well, that may be, but the name’s too long. I’d never bother myself. I’d call her Mary if I was you.” This is a scene where we see Maya’s core identity, her name, being wiped out and tempered with. Throughout ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, we realize the protagonist, Maya, faces several identity crisis in her life and is thus left to write a biography of the culmination of incidents that have occurred throughout her life and hence that have shaped her identity today. Those around her mold Maya’s identity. Her relationships are what define her. There are no two ways about it; Maya’s rape calls her identity into question. Suddenly, she is portrayed as both a woman and child but she feels like neither. Thus, she is left with spending the rest of the book trying on different identities …show more content…
“A boyfriend’s acceptance of me would guide me into that strange and exotic land of frills and femininity.” The quote emphasizes on Maya’s identity by tying it to her emotions and sexuality. Maya struggles with self-identity especially sexually in her life and thus feels that if a boy accepts her, all her problems would be solved. “The gamblers in pinstriped suits and their makeup-deep women whispered to me out of blood-red mouths that now I knew as much as they did. I was eight, and grown.” Due to Maya’s sexual abuse at an early age, amongst pimps and prostitutes, she is considered mature. Her identity perceives that she is one of them. Although she does abolish this perception when she later says, “Just as gratefulness was confused in my mind with love, so possession became mixed up with motherhood. I had a baby.” Regardless of Maya’s experiences’ in life and her identity crisis, now that she’s had a baby, she doesn’t care if she was a woman, child, or black. She’s a mother. Her whole identity shifts and the dynamics of her life