| The Heart of a Woman | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Maya Angelou |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | 1981 (1st edition) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 336 pp (Hardcover 1st edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-8129-8032-5 (hardcover 1st edition) |
| Preceded by | Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas |
| Followed by | All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes |
The Heart of a Woman (1981, ISBN 0-553-24689-5) is an autobiography by African-American writer Maya Angelou, and was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1997.[1] The book is the fourth installment in Angelou's series of six autobiographies, thus enlarging the autobiography in both form and content, something critic Mary Jane Lupton calls "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography".[2] The title is taken from a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, which connects Angelou with other African American female writers for the first time. Lupton also calls this book Angelou's "most introspective".[2]
The Heart of a Woman recounts events in Angelou's life between 1957 and 1962, and follows her travels to California, New York City, Cairo, and Ghana, as she raises her teenage son, becomes a published author for the first time, becomes involved with the civil rights movement, and becomes romantically involved with a South African freedom fighter. Like Angelou's previous volumes, this book has been described as autobiographical fiction, but most critics and Angelou herself have characterized it as autobiography. Angelou continues to critique, change, and expand the genre, but is able to present herself as a model for living for the first time in her series.
As African-American literature critic Lyman B. Hagen states, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood".[3] Angelou continues to focus on and add to themes central in all of her books thus far, including those of race, journey, writing, and motherhood. She sees herself as a personal historian of the civil rights movement and of the Black literary scene of the late 50s and early 60s, and becomes an activist and protestor. The book follows Angelou to several places in both the US and Africa, but the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self".[4] One of the most important themes of The Heart of a Woman is motherhood as Angelou continues to raise her teenage son. The book ends on a hopeful note, with Angelou's son leaving for college, and with Angelou looking forward to new-found independence and freedom.
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The Heart of a Woman, published in 1981, is the fourth installment of Maya Angelou's series of six autobiographies. The success of Angelou's previous autobiographies and the publication of three volumes of poetry had brought Angelou a considerable amount of fame by 1981. And Still I Rise, published in 1978, reinforced Angelou's success as a writer. Her first volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.[5][6]
As writer Hilton Als states, Angelou was one of the first African American female writers to publicly discuss her personal life, and one of the first to use herself as a central character in her books, something she continues in The Heart of a Woman.[7] Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou's first autobiography, "a work of art that eludes description",[7] states that Angelou's work sets a precedent not only for other Black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.[7]
Als called Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.[7] For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband Paul Du Feu talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and "be honest about it".[8] Through the writing of her life stories, however, Angelou has become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women.[9] It made her, as scholar Joanne Braxton has stated, "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".[10]
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
-"The Heart of a Woman", by Georgia Douglas Johnson[11]
According to writer Lyman B. Hagen, Angelou takes the title of her fourth autobiography from a poem by Georgia Douglas Johnson, a Harlem Renaissance writer. Lyman states that although the title is "less striking or oblique than titles of her preceding books",[12] it is an appropriate title because Johnson's poem mentions a caged bird and provides a connection to Angelou's first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, whose title was taken from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. American literature scholar Wallis Tinnie stated that the title suggests a "lonely aching"[13] and exposes a spiritual dilemma also present in Angelou's first volume. Lupton believes that Johnson's use of the metaphor is different than Dunbar's because her bird is female whose isolation is sexual rather than racial. Critic James Robert Saunders states that the caged bird refers to Angelou after her failed marriage,[14] but Lupton disagrees, stating that "the Maya Angelou of The Heart of a Woman is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage".[15]
Lupton states that The Heart of a Woman is the first time Angelou identifies with a female African American writer. Up to this point, her early literary influences were men like James Weldon Johnson, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Shakespeare. She has stated that she always admired women writers like Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, but she does not mention them in her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. By choosing the title of this book, Angelou has included herself among other female writers and is an acknowledgment of her legacy as a Black woman writer.[16]
The Heart of a Woman, which takes place between 1957 and 1962, begins shortly after the end of Angelou's previous autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. Angelou and her teenage son Guy have moved into a "houseboat commune in Sausalito".[17] After a year, they move to a rented house near San Francisco. Singer Billie Holiday visits Angelou and her son there, and Holiday sings a song to Guy. Holiday tells Angelou, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing".[18]
In 1959, Angelou and Guy move to New York City. The transition is a difficult one for Guy; Angelou is forced to protect him from a gang leader. No longer satisfied with performing in nightclubs, she dedicates herself to acting, writing, political organizing, and her son. On the invitation of her friend, novelist John Killins, she becomes a member of the Harlem Writing Guild. She meets other important African American artists and writers, including James Baldwin, who would become her mentor. She becomes a published writer for the first time.
Angelou becomes more politically active, participating in African American and African protest rallies, including a sit-in at the United Nations following the death of Zaire's prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, that she helps organize. She meets Malcolm X, and is struck by his good looks and magnetism. After hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak, she and her friend, activist Godfry Cambridge, are inspired to produce a successful fundraiser for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), called Cabaret For Freedom. King names her coordinator of SCLC's office in New York. She performs in Jean Genet's play, The Blacks, with Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, and Cicely Tyson.
In 1961, Angelou meets South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make.[19] They never marry, but she and Guy move with him, first to London and then to Cairo, Egypt, where she plays "official wife to Make, who had become a political leader in exile".[7] Their relationship is full of cultural conflicts; he expects her to be a subservient African wife, and she yearns for the freedom as a working woman. She learns that Make is too friendly with other women and is irresponsible with money, so she accepts a position as assistant editor at the Arab Observer.
Eventually, Angelou and Make separate, but not before their relationship is examined by their community of friends. She accepts a job in Liberia. She and Guy travel to Accra, Ghana, where he has been accepted to attend college. Guy is seriously injured in an automobile accident, so she accepts a position at the University of Ghana and remains there while he recuperates. The Heart of a Woman ends with Guy leaving for college and Angelou remarking to herself, "At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself".[20]
All six of Angelou's installments of her life story continue the long tradition of African American autobiography. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou makes a deliberate attempt, while writing her books, to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.[21] Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development has often led reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction.[22] Angelou states in a 1989 interview that she is the only "serious" writer to choose the genre to express herself.[23] As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou reports not one person's story, but the collective's.[24] Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and views Angelou as representative of the convention in African American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people.[25]
Critic Mary Jane Lupton insists that all of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.[26] In a 1983 interview with African American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies.[27] When speaking of her unique use of the genre, Angelou acknowledges that she follows the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".[9] Lupton compares The Heart of a Woman with other autobiographies, and states that for the first time in Angelou's series, she is able to present herself as a model for successful living like other autobiographies. However, Angelou's "woman's heart"[2]—her perspective as a woman with concerns about her self-esteem and the conflicts she experiences about her lovers and her son—is what makes Angelou's autobiography different. Lupton insists that Angelou's feelings as described in The Heart of a Woman, which Lupton calls Angelou's "most introspective" book,[2] are what dictates the book's form.
Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to all her books; she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth".[28] Her approach parallels the conventions of many African American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection.[29] Author Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African American autobiography, but insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.[30] In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discusses her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs.[31] When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she states, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about."[31] Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she has used these facts to make an impact with the reader. As Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work".[32] Hagen also states that Angelou "fictionalizes, to enhance interest".[32] Angelou's long-time editor, Robert Loomis, agrees, stating that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.
According to Lupton, The Heart of a Woman is similar to Angelou's previous volumes because it is narrated from the intimate point of view of a woman and a mother, but by this time, she has "accumulated a multilayered memory".[33] Angelou has become a serial autobiographer, something Lupton calls "a narrative structure unsurpassed in American autobiography",[2] thus enlarging the autobiography in both form and content. In this book, Angelou draws upon what she has written before, "unveiling the various layers hidden in earlier volumes",[33] as Lupton puts it, but without being repetitious. Lupton believes that Angelou is successful, citing the incident in this book when Angelou threatens the gang leader who has been threatening her son. The significance of this incident is more powerful when considered in light of Angelou's rape in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Lupton believes that Angelou's violent behavior is a "unconscious effort to rewrite her own history".[33]
According to Lupton, Angelou does not begin to create her own narrative until her fourth volume.[34] The Heart of a Woman depends less upon the strategies of fiction than in her previous books. For example, there is less dialogue and dramatic episodes to convey action or emotion.[3] Lupton believes that The Heart of a Woman is more uplifting than its predecessors, something she states is due to Angelou's resolution of her earlier conflict of becoming a successful performer and her duties as a single mother.[3]
Angelou perfects the use of the vignette in The Heart of a Woman, a literary technique she uses throughout her series. Vignettes are used throughout this book, to present both acquaintances and those she knows well. Two of her most developed vignettes in this book are of Billie Holiday and Malcolm X.[35] The vignettes of those she knew well, like Vusumki Make and her other relationships, also present her interactions and relationships. As Hagen states, although "frank talk seemed to be almost requisite for a commercially successful book" of the early 1980s,[36] Angelou values monogamy, fidelity, and commitment in her relationships.
For the first and only time in Angelou's series, she repeats the same episode in detail—her son's horrible accident—at the end of this book and the beginning of her next one, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. Critic Sondra O'Neale insists that this technique both centralizes each installment and connects each book in the series with each other; additionally, each volume "ends with abrupt suspense".[37] As Lupton states, it also creates a strong and emotional link between this book and Traveling Shoes unlike any other in Angelou's series.[38] Hagen adds that this technique repeats "Angelou's established pattern"[39] of ending each of her books on a positive note. In this book, Angelou ends with a hopeful look to the future as her son strikes out on his own and she looks forward to more independence. As Hagen states, "Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood."[40]
Race continues to be a theme in The Heart of a Woman, as it has been throughout Angelou's series of autobiographies up to this time. When the book opens, Angelou and Guy are living in an experimental commune with whites, in an attempt to participate in the new openness between Blacks and whites. She is not completely comfortable with the arrangement, however; as Lupton points out, Angelou never names her roommates, even though "naming" has been an important theme in her books thus far. For the most part, Angelou is able to "cheerfully coexist"[41] with whites, but she occasionally encounters prejudice similar to earlier episodes, like when she requires the assistance of white friends to rent a home in a segregated neighborhood in the opening of this book.[41] Lupton states that compared to her other books, Angelou "is a long way"[41] from her interactions with whites and people of other races. Hagen calls the descriptions of whites and the hopes for eventual equality in this book "optimistic".[42] Angelou continues, however, her indictment of white power structure and her protests against racial injustice that has been a theme throughout all her books. Instead of offering solutions, however, Hagen states that she simply reports, reacts, and dramatizes events.[43]
In this book, Angelou becomes more "politicized"[44] and develops a new sense of Black identity. As McPherson states, even Angelou's decision to leave show business is political.[45] McPherson also states that this book is "a social and cultural history of Black Americans"[46] during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Angelou sees herself as a "personal historian"[36] of both the Civil Rights movement and the Black literary movement of the time. She becomes more attracted to the causes of Black militants, both in the US and in Africa, to the point of entering into a relationship with a significant militant, and becomes more committed to activism. It is during this time when she becomes an active political protestor, but she does not think of herself in that way. Instead, the focus is on herself, and she uses the autobiographical form to demonstrate how the Civil Rights movement influenced one person involved in it. According to Hagen, her contributions to civil rights, as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".[47]
Travel is a common theme in American autobiography as a whole; as McPherson states, it is something of a national myth to Americans as a people.[48] This is also the case for African American autobiography, which has its roots in the slave narrative. Like those narratives that focus on the writers' search for freedom from bondage, modern African American autobiographers like Angelou seek to develop "an authentic self" and the freedom to find it in their community.[48] As McPherson states, "The journey to a distant goal, the return home, and the quest which involves the voyage out, achievement, and return are typical patterns in Black autobiography".[49] The Heart of a Woman has three primary settings—the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Egypt--and two secondary ones—London and Accra.[50]
Lupton states that like all of Angelou's books, the structure of The Heart of a Woman is based upon a journey. Angelou emphasizes the theme of movement by opening her book with a spiritual ("The ole ark's a moverin'") McPherson calls "the theme song of the United States in 1957".[44] This spiritual, which contains a reference to Noah's ark, presents Angelou as a type of Noah and demonstrates her spirituality. Angelou also mentions Alan Ginsberg and On the Road, the 1951 novel by Jack Kerouac, thus connecting her own journey and uncertainty about the future with the journeys of literary figures.[51] Even though the reason Angelou travels to Africa is an eventual failed relationship, she makes a connection with the continent, both in this book and in the one that follows it, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. As Lupton states, "Africa is the site of her growth".[52] Angelou's time in Africa makes her more aware of her African roots as she searches for her "ancestral past".[52] Lupton insists, however, that although Angelou journeys to many places in the book, the most important journey she describes is "a voyage into the self".[4]
Angelou's primary role in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas was stage performer, but in The Heart of a Woman, she changes from someone who uses others' method of expression—the songs and dances of the African, Caribbean, and African American oral tradition—to a writer. Lupton believes that Angelou makes this decision for political reasons, as she becomes more involved with the Civil Rights movement, but also so that she can care for her son.[34] Lupton also states that for the first time in Angelou's autobiographies, Angelou "begins her account of herself as a writer".[53] The Heart of a Woman marks the first time Angelou begins to identify with other Black women writers as well. As Lupton states, Angelou has been devoted to several writers since her childhood, but this is the first time she mentions female authors. Up to this point, her identification has been with male writers. Lupton believes Angelou's new affiliations with female writers is due to her emerging feminism.[16]
According to Als, Angelou's concept of herself as an artist changed after her encounter with Billie Holiday early in the book. Als believes that up to that point, Angelou's career was more about fame than about art. As Als puts it, "Developing her artistry was not the point".[7] Als also believes that the "blur of activity"[7] that made up her career, instead of revealing her ambition, reveals "a woman who is only moderately talented and perpetually unable to understand who she is".[7] Als explains this by stating that Angelou, in spite of the mistakes of her youth, needed the approval and acceptance of others, and observes that Holiday was able to perceive this. Holiday tells her, "You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing".[7]
Angelou has begun to write sketches, songs, and short stories, and shows her work to her friend John Killens, who sees her potential invites her to New York City to develop her writing skills. She joins the Harlem Writers Guild, and receives feedback from other talented and aspiring African American authors like Killens, Angelou's close friend Rosa Guy, and Caribbean writer Paule Marshall, who, like her, would eventually make significant contributions to African American literature. Angelou dedicates herself to improving her craft, forcing herself to understand the technical aspects of writing. As Lupton states, "Readers can actually envision in this volume the distinguished artist who becomes the Maya Angelou of the 1990s".[54]
According to Lupton, motherhood, a theme throughout all of Angelou's autobiographies, becomes more complex in The Heart of a Woman.[55] Even though Guy is going through the developmentally appropriate adolescent separation from his mother, which she struggles with, they remain close in this book.[56] As Lupton puts it, "long years of living and mothering"[38] and her success as a writer, actress, and activist, Angelou behaves more competently and with more maturity, both professionally and as a mother, and her self-assurance becomes a major part of her personality. Her past conflict between her professional and personal lives are resolved, she fulfills her promise made to Guy at the end of Singin' and Swingin' that they would never be separated again.[49][38] Lupton believes, however, that Angelou resolves this conflict by subordinating her needs to her child's, a resolution many mothers make.[3]
Lupton goes further by stating that not only is motherhood important in Angelou's books, so is "the motif of the responsible mother",[56] starting with Angelou's own mother in Caged Bird (with whom she has a significant encounter with in this book, before moving to New York) and coming to a resolution in her previous book, Singin' and Swingin'. Her commitment to care for her son is revealed in her confrontation with the street gang leader who has threatened Guy. As Lupton states, Angelou "becomes in this episode a representation of maternal power".[56] In this episode, which Lupton calls "the most dramatic episode of The Heart of a Woman",[57] Angelou no longer is the mother torn by self-doubt in Gather Together in My Name, but is now a powerful, strong, and aggressive Black mother. As Lupton states, she has become what scholar Joanne M. Braxton calls the "outraged mother",[53] which represents the Black mother's strength and dedication and is found throughout slave narratives.[56] Lupton also believes that Angelou has become a "reincarnation" of her grandmother, a central figure in Caged Bird.[53]
As Lupton puts it, by the end of The Heart of a Woman, Angelou "finds herself increasingly alone".[58] After Guy recuperates from a serious car accident, he leaves her to attend college. The final word in the book is the negative "myself", a word that Lupton insists signifies Angelou's new-found freedom and independence. Lupton states that Angelou is no longer defined as someone's wife or mother: "she is simply herself".[58] Tinnie calls this moment one of "illusive transcendence" and "a scene of hope and completion".[13] For the first time in many years, Angelou will be able to eat a chicken breast alone, something that is valued throughout her books, especially Caged Bird. This thought, which Lupton calls "perfectly formed",[59] echo both Gather Together and Singin' and Swingin', which ends in Angelou's "vows of innocence and commitment".[59] Tinnie states that The Heart of a Woman's "lonely aching"[13] hearkens back to the poem that inspires the book's title, and calls it "a scene of hope and completion".[13]
As with Angelou's previous books, The Heart of a Woman critics responded favorably to it, especially its professional qualities.[60] Angelou's first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is Angelou's most highly acclaimed autobiographies and her other volumes are regularly judged and compared to her first,[9] but her subsequent books, including The Heart of a Woman, has been generally well received by critics. The American Library Association's Choice Magazine agrees, stating that although Caged Bird was the best of Angelou's autobiographies, "every book since has been very much worth the reading and pondering".[61]
Critic Janet B. Blundell found The Heart of a Woman "lively, revealing, and worth the reading", but also found it "too chatty and anecdotal".[62] Hagen responded to this criticism by stating that all of Angelou's books consist of episodes connected by theme and character.[60] Sheree Crute, writing for Ms., seems to appreciate the episodic nature of Angelou's writing and praises her for her "wonderfully unaffected story telling skills".[63] Cudjoe calls The Heart of a Woman "the most political segment of Angelou's autobiographical statement".[64]
In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration; in the following week, sales of her works, including The Heart of a Woman, rose by 300–600 percent. Bantam Books reprinted 400,000 copies of her books to meet demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 1,200 percent increase.[65] In 1997, Angelou's friend Oprah Winfrey named The Heart of a Woman as a selection in her book club.[1]
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