To Kill A Mockingbird Maya Angelou Analysis

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Maya Angelou’s I know Why the Caged Bird Sings both take aim at the same topic: racism in the American South. And they do so through a similar medium too. In both cases, the protagonist of the tale is a young girl, an innocent, who is observing the corruption around her. The biggest difference between them, however, is the difference of race. The protagonist of Lee’s work, Scout, is a white girl born into a position of privilege, and Angelou’s self-styled character Maya is a black girl experiencing the disadvantages that come not just with her skin color but also from living with poverty as well. The experiences that each girl lives through are very different because of their positions in society, but

they also share some unique similarities which we will look at in the body of this paper.
Maya, in I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, presents us a story as told from an individual on the lowest rung of the societal ladder. As a young, black, orphan girl, Maya deals with the realities of her race day in an day out, and is persecuted virtually everywhere she goes. Maya is the direct victim of the violent and bigoted society around and, and through her story we can see what life was really like for those who had to live through an era when racism was the norm. Scout, however, provides us with a more top-down view of the American South’s racist attitudes. Scout is a white girl and as such she is a member of the dominant society of the time. Even more than that, however, her father a respected lawyer and her family well is off. Because of these things, she speaks from a position of privilege, experiencing both white privilege and financial privilege without seemingly realizing it. Through her, we can get a glimpse into the society of the oppressor, and through Maya we understand the society of the oppressed. By looking at both of their stories together, however, we come away with a very clear picture of the injustice that was doled out on a daily basis throughout large parts of the United States.
Both of these books take place in roughly the same time and location, a fact which enables readers to get a better and more complete understanding of the racial dynamic that existed at the time. Scout’s story takes place in an Alabama town during the Great Depression, while Maya’s tale is told from Arkansas at roughly the same period, with the story extending on into the 1940’s. In both locations during that time Jim Crow laws were firmly in place, segregation was the norm, and racial inequality was the accepted policy for most of society. And both girls, as we see here, are quick to realize that the injustice that they see is unfair and speak out against it, although they have little power to really do anything about it themselves.
Additionally, both girls interact with these Jim Crow laws differently. For Scout, they have little effect on her life, and instead they are really just a sad reality that other people need to deal with. For Maya, however, Jim Crow laws dominate her world, and dictate where she can go and who she can interact with. The laws have a much stronger impact on Maya, and as she explains, “it was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life” (Angelou, 301). For Scout, however, these laws are something that affect other people, and serve as a more of a morbid curiosity to her. They do not directly impact her in any real way other than the fact that she witnesses the oppression they cause. She can come and go anywhere she pleases and is not restricted by the racist legislation that rules the land.
For both girls, rape also comes into play as a major factor in their stories.

For Scout, rape shapes her world because her father is locked into a trial in which he must defend a suspected rapist from the unfair views of a biased white society. By dealing with the rape, Scout shows us the oppression that black people face in the country, and she is able to wind her tale of inequality and a miscarriage of justice by using the rape as a lynchpin. Maya, however, is actually the victim of rape. By her experience of rape, we can also see the oppression and miscarriages of justice played out before us, albeit in a significantly different way. In Maya’s case, the rapist is let go, and the judge seems not to really care at all that a young black girl was raped. Instead, after the legal means failed to bring about the desired justice her family sought, Maya’s attacker ends up murdered, proving that if black people want to do anything in the white man’s society, they would have to do it

themselves.
Maya did not have an Atticus to defend her.

There was no white man there hoping to bend the corrupt views of the dominant society to her favor. Instead, there was an uncaring white government figure who took no real interest in the problems that the young black girl faced. Had she been a white girl, however, and was molested by a black Mr. Freeman, we can be almost certain that the situation would have been much different. Conversely, had Tom Robinson been accused of raping another black woman, rather than the white Mayella Ewell, the people would likely have turned a blind eye, and the uproar witnessed in the town of Maycomb would have never taken place. Because of this, and the vastly different ways that society dealt with the exact same crime (in Maya’s case, it may have been even worse as she was a minor), we can more fully see the hypocrisy of the people at the time. They were not really interested in the fact that there was a rapist among them. Instead, the people of the period seemed more pre-occupied with keeping the racial status quo alive, and ensuring that blacks were punished to the fullest extent of the law if they were even suspected of having sexual relations with a white woman. What black men did to black women or girls mattered little, just so long as they kept their business away from the rest of white

society.
In both stories too, we are heavily subjected to the idea of a dominant male gaze. Through Scout we see that Atticus, a white male, is the only person who can possibly bring about any sense of fairness to the world. All of the characters with any sort of influence, in fact, from Boo Radley to Bob Ewell with any real impact on the story, are males and it seems that men are the ones who not only run the show in town, but who also decide the fate of the children and women around them. Scout’s entire point of view, in fact, is largely shaped by the instructions of her father Atticus, and it is her father’s words and actions that are really the most dynamic parts of the book, rather than the actions of the much more passive Scout, who is for the most part relegated to the role of observer.
When people speak out against racism in To Kill a Mockingbird, it is also the white males, while the females remain secondary. For example, we see Dill tell Mr. Raymond to “cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without ever stopping to think that they’re people too,” and the author notes Dill’s “maleness” was “beginning to assert itself”, while Scout simply “mutters” (Lee, 201) in agreement, seemingly not able to confidently assert herself on her own. This similar situation plays out time after time, with male characters speaking out on behalf of the females, and the female characters fading away into the background, or meekly speaking out in support of their male counterparts.
Similarly, Maya’s life is also largely determined by the actions of the men in her life. While, undoubtedly, there are a number of strong women that appear throughout I know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it is the men that occupy any positions of power. Because of the dramatic impact that the men in this story have on the course of events, and the fact that any position of power we see throughout the story is occupied by a male (and typically a white male), we can get a real sense of the dominant male gaze breaking into the work. And it does so despite the fact that the author is not male, nor a member of the dominant society at the time.
The male gaze in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings comes through especially strong in the scenes that depict horrible sexism, but also in much more subtle cases as well. For example, when Maya is talking about the opportunities for children in the future, she states “the white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curies and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) would try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Louises” (Angelou, 179). Here, she recognizes that black women were essentially relegated to a position of powerlessness and really had no opportunity to succeed. The only members of the black society that had any chance in the future were the boys. This realization further helps to paint the bleak picture that young Maya was surrounded with, as not only was she daily subjected to various abuses, but she was also forced to come to the realization that the world simply had no place for a successful black women in the minds of the masses. Instead, black women seemed to only really be destined to be in the house, away from the public eye, catering to the needs of their families and never really making any kind of name for themselves.
Scout and Maya’s experience could not be any more different. Scout is a well-off white girl and a member of the dominant society, while Maya is a violently oppressed member of a persecuted minority. What the two experiences together show us, however, is the complete picture of the society at the time, and despite the differing circumstances there is also significant overlap, and this overlap is important to more fully understand the meaning that both stories are attempting to convey.