Maya Angelou’s works are renowned for their vivid settings. By giving each and every character depth and complexity, she creates detailed images that help audience’s paint pictures of the scenes within her works. Establishing an accurate and richely-detailed setting is essential to her craft, so it is no surprise that Angelou’s works take place all over the globe.
The cultural setting is a cardinal element of Angelou’s work. Angelou often references customs and traditions within her stories to provide a unique atmosphere and create multiple depths of meaning in her works. She is skilled in taking readers to a place from another culture, and rapidly immersing them in the story.
Her talent for painting such incredible settings is what earned her a nomimation for his book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as prestigiouspullitzer Prize for fiction in 1971. The book has garnered worldwide attention for its personal and honest portrayal of Angelou’s early life.
The setting of her works varies from place to place. She wrote about life in the US, living under the Jim Crow Laws in the Deep South, the countries of Ghana, Guyana and Cuba. Angelou blends the geographies and cultures of her settings to create unique places that are impossible to forget.
She often jumps between settings as her characters move from place to place. By constantly switching patterns, Angelou manages to keep readers entranced by her storytelling. It is one of the most memorable elements of her works, as well as an important representation of identity and community.
Angelou’s settings are so vivid and realistic that it is often easy to get lost in each and every story. Whether it is the rural south or a distant, unfamiliar city, Angelou effortlessly transports the reader to her unique settings with her beautiful and mesmerizing writing.
Settings of Racism
The settings of Maya Angelou’s work often incorporate racism and political unrest. Maya Angelou’s first book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” addresses different issues such as sexual abuse, racism, and violence. According to Andrea Kemp in the Huffington Post, “Angelou’s work deals with the oppression of blacks, specifically during the Jim Crow Era, in which blacks had to use separate buses, entrances and bathrooms from whites, as well as attend separate schools.” The setting of these stories offer insight into the lives of the characters and the people of America in the time period in which these stories take place. Additionally, the settings portray the strength of courage, perseverance and tenacity of the characters and their families.
Settings of Freedom
At the same time, Maya Angelou often portrays settings of freedom in her works despite the violence and oppression that many of her characters have to overcome. Her stories offer a counterweight to the more grim themes that are common within her writing. Angelou shows how the characters in her stories create a world of their own where they can be safe and free within their minds, if not their bodies and souls. These characters use their minds to transcend their physical limitations and experience a sense of freedom and hope in the midst of their sometimes difficult circumstances, constructing a world of freedom within the barriers of their day-to-day lives, as Kemp also points out.
Settings of Hope
Ultimately, Angelou’s settings involve a balance between the darkness of racism and oppression, and the light of freedom and hope. Her stories often involve a strong sense of perseverance, as the characters strive to break free from their prison of circumstances, but ultimately learn to embrace the world that is offered to them. Angelou often uses symbolism and creative storytelling devices to illustrate the balance between darkness and light, between oppressive and emancipating forces, to portray a powerful and encompassing setting in her stories.
Settings of Endurance
The characters in Maya Angelou’s stories often struggle. They endure difficult circumstances and attempt to find their own identities and outlets for expression within them. Characters such as Kunta Kinte in “Roots” or Celie in “The Color Purple” all express a kind of survival, as they overcome their situations by blending into the settings around them and learning to use their sorrow and anger for strength. These characters demonstrate a kind of endurance and fierce spirit of survival in their settings that give the stories a sense of atmosphere and mood.
Settings of Empathy
The settings in Maya Angelou’s work also communicate a sense of empathy. Through her writing, Angelou creates a bond between the reader and the characters, as they learn to understand, and even relate to, the stories and experiences of Angelou’s protagonists. In this way, Angelou is able to craft settings of empathy, where readers are shown a world of understanding and common ground, not just with the protagonists, but with everyone.
Settings of Extravagance
Maya Angelou’s settings also invoke a sense of extravagance. Rather than focusing on the mundane, Angelou’s settings often focus on the grand and luxurious. Through her writing, Angelou transports her readers to a world of magnificence and wealth. Even if the setting is something more common or everyday, Angelou subtly underscores its beauty and grandeur through her creative descriptions.
Settings of Vulnerability
Angelou’s settings also reflect the characters’ vulnerability. As the protagonists of her works struggle to find their place, the settings show a tenderness and fragility that the characters must learn to embrace. Angelou’s settings thus become not just places for the characters, but learning grounds in which the characters must face their own fragility and vulnerability, and eventually come to terms with it.
