42 pages • 1 hour read
Maya AngelouLetter to My Daughter
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
What It Means to Be a Mother
Angelou dedicates Letter to the daughter she never had but whom she sees in every woman, regardless of their race, religion, or sexuality. A mother, Angelou implies, is not defined by biology alone. More important than blood relations is sharing one’s life with complete transparency—an idea Angelou establishes early in the work. Motherhood is therefore rooted in communication and storytelling, as is evidenced in the conversational nature of the work. This definition of motherhood contextualizes Letter, presenting the book as a collection of stories to be passed down through generations of women. As such, Angelou maps out her relations with different “mothers”—that is, influential women in her life. The two most prominent female figures are her grandmother, Annie Henderson, and her mother, Vivian Baxter. These women shaped Angelou’s morals and personal values, thereby shaping Angelou herself. Angelou purposefully establishes her grandmother and her mother as foils, diversifying and expanding the meaning of motherhood even further; though quite different in temperament and belief, both women were integral to Angelou’s development, and Angelou forged equally valuable maternal relationships with them.
Angelou’s grandmother raised her until she was 13 in Stamps, Arkansas. She describes her grandmother as follows: “My grandmother didn’t believe in hot curling women’s hair, so I had grown up with a braided natural. Grandmother turned the radio on to listen to the news, religious music, Gang Busters, and The Lone Ranger” (8). Natural and down-to-earth, Angelou’s grandmother instilled within her a respect for life’s simple pleasures. This respect would eventually evolve into Angelou’s definition of charity. Instead of proclaiming her love of humankind through participating in organizations and raising money, Angelou seeks to correct injustices as she encounters them, “for [she] learned that to be charitable with gestures and words can bring enormous joy and repair injured feelings” (8). Letter itself exemplifies this kind of charity, as Angelou’s intent in sharing her stories is to better the lives of others who need motherly guidance. Angelou’s grandmother also preached inclusivity as an integral part of politeness. Whenever Angelou strives to accept what she initially does not understand, she remembers “[her] grandmother and those four innocent raisins, which made [her] violently sick for one month” (23). Angelou’s determination to treat others as her equals, each with their own valuable wisdom, informs her desired audience for Letter and her expansive conception of motherhood.
Angelou’s biological mother also impacted her life enormously. More modern and progressive than Annie Henderson, Vivian forced her daughter to expand her boundaries. She exposed Angelou to a new way of life and showed her that, despite its differences from her grandmother’s lifestyle, it was not any less worthy. Angelou’s mother especially influenced her understanding of honesty, teaching Angelou that to be honest is to be liberated, as well as her excitement towards becoming a mother herself. Her mother also taught Angelou what it meant to be independent, fostering an environment that allowed Angelou to explore her own conceptions of self and freedom. Most importantly, Vivian’s unconditional love instilled within Angelou an unbreakable level of confidence and self-love; her mother routinely called her beautiful and wise. It was when Vivian referred to Angelou as her daughter that Angelou finally felt at home in San Francisco. This highlights the relationship between motherhood and another theme—that of home. Since Angelou’s defines home as something internal, it stands to reason that mothers, who play such a large role in shaping and supporting their children’s identities, would help establish this sense of groundedness.
Christianity as a Journey
Christianity proves integral to Angelou’s personal development. There are numerous times where she credits her survival or other life events to divine intervention—most notably, when her mother rescues her from Mark. Her mother breaks into Mark’s apartment in apparent response to Angelou’s prayers: “My life was saved. Was that event incident, coincident, accident, or answered prayer? I believe my prayers were answered” (16). However, she makes this comment in retrospect: The belief that her prayers had been answered was a lesson that Angelou did not recognize until she matured. This reflects Angelou’s contention that faith is a long journey with no foreseeable destination.
Nevertheless, Angelou argues that this journey is a source of joy, as the person making it continues to grow in their faith and knowledge of God’s love. The reader sees Angelou herself experience this journey in her wavering belief in God and eventual return to the faith. Angelou confesses that she did not always believe God heard her prayers. She writes, “It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God. It’s just that God didn’t seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented” (58).
Twice in the book, Angelou’s music teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, reminds her of God’s love and teaches her how to practice gratitude. Despite feeling forgotten and overlooked, she learned from Frederick that the accomplishment of simple acts and normal, everyday experiences were all blessings. Wilkerson later helped Angelou regain solid faith in God when he invited her to his book club. He had her repeat the phrase “God loves me” until Angelou began to cry. She writes:
That knowledge humbles me today, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in my gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation of full growth (58).
Here, Angelou not only realizes that God loves her and that this love enables her to overcome all obstacles, but she also feels a connection to the world and nature. Angelou sees potentiality for growth and love all around her. Expanding upon her grandmother’s famous words, Angelou “steps out on the word of God” whenever she must face challenges in her life. As such, she continues her journey in Christianity and grows in her faith every day. Letter becomes the record of Angelou’s continuous attempts at being Christian—one that might serve as an inspiration to those reading it.
Home Exists Within Oneself
Angelou discusses the idea of home throughout the work. She begins Letter by differentiating between simple facts and the factors that truly influence one’s identity. These factors come together to make the “real growing up world” that is rich with imagination and the only place where home really exists (2). Home, for Angelou, exists in one’s mind, which offers refuge from external reality. As such, only children fully inhabit home, since as we grow into adults, we attempt to negate our child-like nature. She writes, “We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do” (3). Home is always with us, providing safety in the face of fear and uncertainty.
The theme of home as an internal sense of belonging stayed with Angelou as she changed her external environments. As a child, she moved from Arkansas to San Francisco. As an adult, she spent time in New York and North Carolina. She also traveled to Paris and Morocco, among many other places. Her inner home traveled with her, but it also evolved as she aged. After having her son, he became integral to her sense of belonging and safety. She felt such a strong desire to be with him that she left her job working on the set of Porgy and Bess in Paris despite financial setbacks. With this anecdote, Angelou reiterates the link between home and motherhood that she explored in her discussions of Vivian and Annie Henderson, this time with Angelou in the role of mother. This implies that her readers, as her “daughters,” may be part of Angelou’s home as well.
Angelou expands upon her definition further to include lost loved ones, who are always with us, and God, who loves everyone unconditionally. While Angelou does not directly reference home in the sections dealing with the beloved and God, she does allude to a sense of belonging and safety. Home also becomes a place where frightening and confusing aspects of reality, such as death and the existence of God, are reconciled. By the end of the book, Angelou finds refuge in her ongoing journey through faith. The mind, family, the beloved, and Christianity all become places of hope, belonging, and safety for Angelou, and therefore places where she finds home.
The Regenerative Nature of Dialogue
Conversation consistently solves problems throughout Letter. Dialogue serves as a communal act of sharing—the kind of sharing Angelou associates with motherhood—in which differences are reconciled and obstacles are overcome. In fact, the first example of the regenerative nature of dialogue comes courtesy of Angelou’s own mother, when she confronted her about her new environment. After seeing her daughter smile, Vivian said, “That’s the first time I have seen you smile. It is a beautiful smile. Mother’s beautiful daughter can smile” (9). Angelou had never been “called beautiful and no one in [her] memory had ever called [her] daughter” (9). Angelou thus healed her previously estranged relationship with her mother through an affirmation of that relationship itself. Shortly after, Angelou has a child of her own, further underscoring conversation’s life-giving properties.
Angelou also investigates dialogue between races—for example, the way white and Black students at Wake Forest University used her as a bridge to communicate with one another. As the children asked her questions about race, she prompted them to acknowledge their fellow students. She writes, “The parents of those students had never had a language, which allowed them to speak to one another as equals, and now their children were creating a way which would allow them to have a dialogue” (39). Angelou would go on to practice this method with her fellow professors at Wake Forest University, asking them their thoughts on race relations in the US. Through this experience, she learned different perspectives on racism and shared her own opinions in return. In these two scenes, conversation is a way to learn about others and foster new relationships. It is therefore all the more significant that Angelou opens her work with the line, “Dear Daughter,” formatting the entire book as a conversation with another.
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