Oppression In Maya Angelou's I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The streets sparkled with shattered glass, gleaming with a crimson glow as the flames danced into the night. The date is November 9th, 1938, and this is the Night of Broken Glass, also known as the Kristallnacht. The embers of hatred have began to engulf the country of Germany, as the weakened loser of the first world war ignited the flames of bloodshed once again. This once powerful country had been dismantled under the Treaty of Versailles, oppressed by the allies that feared another war that could be caused by the German people. Such rigorous punishment only brought upon the war machine they had feared would rise once again, as only 3 years later, the world would once again be entangled in war. As the red mist cleared after 1945, the world …show more content…
In Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, the caged bird remains oppressed within the confines of its cage. She writes, “But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage” (Angelou 8-11). As said here, the caged bird, having accepted the entrapment he endures every day, twists his yearning for freedom into a blind rage, knowing that freedom is near impossible. This “blind” animosity is conceived by the caged bird as he can “seldom see through his bars of rage” (Angelou 10-11), by which meaning that one's rage can come to darken their image of the world, since their once strongest feeling of longing has now been replaced with a cohesive rage. This occurrence of passion also pertains to the novel Frankenstein. As the caged bird comes to accept his own entrapment, the creature also acknowledges his ill placement in society, explicitly when he determines that the DeLacey family has fled after encountering the creature. He laments to Victor, saying, “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed? I know not; my feelings were these of rage and revenge” (Shelley 137). Here, the creature reveals that as grief overwhelmed him in that moment, a new, overcoming feeling passed unto him: rage. As seen with the future events of the novel, passion drives the creature to destroy Victor, even compelling him to mass murder. This exact passion the creature experiences can become a very defining and driving motive for any one person, or even any group of peoples. As seen, the future these creatures are set upon are defined by another similar humanistic ideal; that people are defined by their