Maya Angelou's Perceptions

In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Johnson continuously confuses the different aspects of love because of past experiences that have given her the wrong idea of what love actually is. The absence of the feeling of love in her life has led her to develop an understanding of love on her own from the things around her. The experience with Mr. Freeman has caused her to develop this perception of love at such a young age which continued on to misguide her through life.
Maya Johnson’s perception of love keeps changing as she encounters new things and people in her life. Maya hasn’t experienced the feeling of love very often due to her moving from place to place constantly. Because of her displacement, she hasn’t felt at home and surrounded by love before; therefore, she mistakes certain actions as love being expressed towards her. Or she mistakes the genuine love for her as someone who wants to abuse her. The occurrence that happened between Maya and Mr. Freeman is an example of how she misunderstood what was happening because he was using her for his own pleasure, but she described it as, “He held me so softly that I wished he
Maya was raised with little to no care for her and her family expressed almost no love in any way. Due to this ignorance of love in her family, Maya was forced to learn about love by herself. The occurrence with Mr. Freeman opened up to her what she thought love really was until he started to neglect her. She then realized that real love wasn’t someone who wanted to use her for their own pleasure. However, since she was so young when she first developed her understanding of love, that is what she grew up knowing to be true. Overall, Maya’s perception of love was influenced due the neglect in her life that caused her to figure out love on her