I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Character Analysis

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by author Maya Angelou, is a gripping tale of a young girl, Maya, and how her world is evolving around her. The book is an extreme tale of racism and abuse, two concepts that would make one forget that this novel is non-fiction. Reading through it, I constantly have to remind myself that this is someone’s life story. This book has multiple strong characters who show archetypal characteristics which makes this easy to examine from an archetypal perspective.

We see that the novel contains many characters who resemble archetypal characters. For example, Annie Henderson, also known as Momma, who resembles The Great Mother. She is wise, strict and able to fight off anything. She was called Momma for the reason that she was the biggest mother figure possible, so she fits the role well. Towards the beginning of the book, Momma had to deal with white children. Whites, at this time, were very disrespectful to
An example of The Child in The Hunger Games is the main character’s little sister, Primrose Everdeen. Primrose is a child who develops throughout the trilogy, but in the original novel, she stayed a child. Although Primrose’s experiences weren’t nearly as traumatizing as Maya’s, she did go through multiple hardships that made her evolve as a character, possessing characteristics of an archetypal figure. An example of a Great Mother figure in The Hunger Games, would either be Mrs. Everdeen, the actual mother of Katniss Everdeen, or Effie Trinket, the mentor of Katniss through two of her games. Mrs. Everdeen, although being the obvious mother figure, was not strong whatsoever throughout the trilogy, definitely not as strong as Momma in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. A better mother figure would have to be Effie Trinket, who mentored Katniss and was a good friend towards