INNER TURMOIL IN ANITA DESAI’S CRY THE PEACOCK
INNER TURMOIL IN ANITA DESAI’S CRY THE PEACOCK
T.Vironika,
M.A (CA).,
Assistant
Professor of English
J.K.K
Nataraja College of Arts & Science
Komarapalayam
Anita Desai is widely praised as the finest of her
generation. She presents a new dimension to English fiction through the
exploration of troubled sensibility, a typical neo-Indian phenomenon. She is
considered to be one of the eminent Indo-Anglican novelists, prominent modern
writer, born in Mussori in 1937. Her works
reveas the exploration of the psychological state of her characters ,
because she had thought that inner life of a man or a woman decides his or her
character more than the external conditions of life. Desai has written
exclusively in English since she debuted in the mid-1960’s. Desai has been
identified with a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English, which is
stylistically different and less conservative than colonial Indian literature
and concerns such issues as hybridism, shifting Identity, and “imaginary
homelands,” a phrase coined by Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. She published
her first novel in 1963, Cry the Peacock.
Her most autobiographical work is set during her coming of age and also in
the same
neighborhood
in which she grew up. In 1984 she published In
Custody which was about an Urdu poet
in His declining day - which was short- listed for the Booker Prize. Her latest
novel published in 2004, the Uniqueness of Anita Desai’s is in giving voices to
the psychological, emotional as well as physical needs of women which are
hardly considered in an Indian society She portrays her characters as
individuals “facing single-handed, the ferocious assaults of existence.” (The
Times of India).As a result of disillusionment and a result of isolation from
this world there is a tendency towards revolt in female characters. The man
woman relationship is based on different types of social, personal and
emotional needs. „Marriage as Anita Desai shows is merely an adjustment rather
than an involvement. She projects on her experiences, her awareness of
man,society, human and moral dilemmas. The purpose of her novel is to study the
matrimonial crisis “The hazards and complexities of man-woman relationships,
the founding of individuality and the establishing of individualism of her
characters”. (Raji Narsimhan .23): in “Cry
the Peacock”. Marriage is a necessary bond in man’s life which has its
foundation in understanding between man and woman. As a novelist she does not
represent the futility of marriage but explores the psyche of the female
characters through marriage. She portrays the inherent disparity in male and
female characters. Females are emotional whereas men rational. Women have shown
to be emotionally as well culturally dependent on their mates; any loss in
relationship
becomes a total loss of self.
Anita Desai has mastered the technique of telling
the untold, mute, psychosomatic miseries of women particularly of married women
.Desai’s fictional world consist of the inner conflicts, visions of the characters,
particularly female characters. In her approach she is influenced by Emily
Bronte, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Japanese writer Kawa
Bata. Her novels present a ceaseless quest for a meaningful life by educated,
sensitive woman. In Desai’s novels the rejection in childhood or over-pampering
creates psychological blocks in the way of maturity and healthy interpersonal
relationship in adult life.
In the novel taken for study Maya marries because of her parents wishes and latter on judges
her husband according to her intellect and finding him unsuitable takes her own path (suicide) . The theme has
been as old as the novel itself and can be found in Richardson and Fielding,
D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway and Faulkner. Emphasizing the
importance of such relationship, D.H. Lawrence in Morality and the Novel points out, “The great relationship for humanity
will always be the relation between man and woman. The relation between man and
man, woman and woman, parent and child will always be subsidiary.”(l30)
Cry, The Peacock is her first novel. The very
beginning of the novel highlights the husband-wife alienation by unfolding the
relationship of Maya and Gautama. She has explored the theme of marital
relationships and dissonance in it. This novel shows the real cause of
disrupter in marriage of Maya and Gautama. The novel is about Maya’s cry for
love and relationship in her loveless wedding with Gautama. The peacock’s cry
is symbolic of Maya’s cry for love and understanding. The marital discord
results from the temperamental disparity between Gautama and Maya. Even Maya’s
childlessness exaggerate her agony of loneliness which she feels in spite of
being married .She becomes highly sensitive as a result of it. . Maya wants to
enjoy life to the utmost. She loves life in all its forms. She enjoys beautiful
sights and sounds. She is an epicurean to the core. In contrast, she is married
to Gautama, a friend of her father very senior to her age and a prosperous
middle aged lawyer. He is a kindly, cultured, rational, practical and busy man with
his own affair of business. He looks upon her love for good things as nothing
more than sentimentalism and once makes a disparaging remark about her that
she has a mind of third rate poetess.
Maya longs for companionship which to her despair she never finds in her
marriage .The novel echoes in the cry of Maya the desire of a married woman to
be loved with passion which few tend to get. “Because when you are away from
me, I want you. Because I insist on being with you and being allowed to touch
you and know you. You can’t bear it, can you? No, you are afraid, you might perish.”
(113)
The novel Cry, the Peacock demonstrates the
conflict between the self and society because the latter prizes formalism over
individualism. It evaluates the outcome of the female’s suppressed and
alienated role in the context of social, patriarchal and marital authority. The
protagonist Maya, points towards the illusory quality of all human
relationships, male and female. There is not only a rejection of the
traditional female role, but a deeply felt and suffered rebellion against the
entire system of social relationships. She is highly sensitive and keeps on
questioning the social and cultural conditions that generate neurotic trends in
her. She yearns to live and experience life but conforming to society’s norms
is a great hurdle, and contributes towards making her neurotic, insane,
alienated and mal-adjusted. The plot of the novel is woven of three broad
strands that cause Maya’s psychic turmoil- her obsession with death, her father
fixation and her incompatible relationship with her husband. From the opening
of the novel, she is shown obsessed by an inadvertent childhood prophecy of
disaster by an albino astrologer. According to the prediction, she or her
husband would die during the fourth year of their marriage. Her father
dismisses the prophecy as nonsense and orders that it should be forgotten.
Obeying her father’s wish Maya keeps the prophecy rigorously repressed in her unconscious
until her marriage with Gautama enters the fourth year.
On another occasion, in spite of her seductive postures,
Gautama remains rigid and cold; Maya herself describes her predicament in these
words: “I turned upon my side, close to him, conscious of the swell of my hip
that rose under the white sheet which fell in sculptured folds about my rounded
forms” (41-42). Thus she doesn’t remain emotionally but physically dissatisfied
too.
There is an identification of Maya with the Peacocks that
represent for her cries of love which simultaneously invite their death. Like
her, they are the creatures of exotic they will not rest till they have danced to their
death. For her, they represent the evolutionary instinct of struggle for
survival. She describes how they dance and the remarkable impact produced on
her mind: peacocks searching for mates, peacocks tearing themselves to bleeding
shreds in the act of love, peacocks screaming with – agony at the death of
love. The night sky turned to a flurry of peacocks tails, each star a staring
eye.”(52)
Maya’s preoccupation with death had been actually planted
long ago in her childhood by the albino astrologer’s prophecy foretelling of
the death of either of the couple after the marriage. She being intensely in love
with life turns hysteric over the creeping fear of death. “Am I gone insane.
Father, Brother, Husband. Who is my saviour? I am in need one. I am dying, God,
let me sleep, forget, rest. But no I’ll never sleep again. There is no
rest anymore. Only death and waiting.” (98)
Being motherless she becomes more sensitive and as a result
develops much attachment for her Pet Toto. Her husband hardly realizes the
emotional bond that existed in her heart for the pet. He is cold and too
practical to understand her grief. Instead, Gautama is concerned with a cup of
tea. He considers it replaceable just like
any other furniture item. Maya’s agony is quiet perceptible when she
“saw its eyes open and staring still ,screamed and rushed to the garden tap to
wash the vision from her eyes, continued to cry and ran defeated into the
house” ( 7).Dog’s death reminds her of her loneliness which had been suppressed
by her. “It was not pets death alone that I mourned today, but another sorrow,
unremembered perhaps, as yet not even experienced, and filled me with despair”(13).
She becomes more lonely after that and Gautama’s insensitivity is highlighted
when he calls her a chattering monkey when she tries to share her feelings
regarding her pet.
Gautama is detached,
philosophical, rational and inconsiderate .Whereas Maya is romantic which
further act as a dividing factor in their marriage. Gautama neither understands
her nor wishes her to enter her world. “On his part, understanding was scant,
love was meager” (89).Maya being childless longs for her husband’s
companionship. Gautama treats her like a child. Once when Gautama and she were
sojourning in a garden she talked of a flower and gave it to her by saying “Who
should deny you that?” He said. “this reminds of Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s
House” where Nora too is treated as a child.
Maya, a pampered child of Rai Sahib, is brought up in an
atmosphere of luxury. Her marriage with Gautama is based on a matter of
convenience. Gautama and Maya’s father were friends. They have similar way of thinking,
Gautama ever more used to come to Maya’s father. He used to come to her house
everyday and one day her father proposes that she should marry him .So we come
to know that their marriage is based on the friendship between her father and Gautama.
Even other marital relationship presented in this novel doesn’t represent
harmony. Maya is deeply scattered by the hypocrisy and disgust exposed through
other marriages around her. There is faint hint that her father’s marriage was
no good. She is not found anywhere discussing about her mother. Laila Maya’s
friend marries a tubercular man against her parents wishes .She doesn’t wear bangels
and if Maya is obsessed with Albino’s prediction Laila has accepted her fate as
she says “it was all written in my fate long ago”. Even Mrs and Mr Lall’s
marriage is no good. Mrs Lall calls her husband as opportunistic and quack.
Nile a divorcee declares: “After ten years with that rabbit I married, I have
learnt to do everything myself” (4). Mrs Sapru , who comes to Maya’s father as
is to possess riches, comforts, poses, dollies, loyal retainers-all the
luxuries of the fairy tales to you still”(98).Another factor that influences
her marriage is the prophecy that constantly rings in her ears and is haunted
by a “black and evil shadow of her fate and the time has come. “And four years
it was now to be either Gautama or I” (32).This long forgotten prophecy act as
precipitating factor like in Macbeth the prophecy of three witches act as precipitating
factor in his doom.
The dance of the peacock has an intense personal
significance for Maya as the peacock destroys each other though they are madly
in love. Her longing for love forces her to kill her husband first and then
herself. Maya’s other causes of suffering are her marriage to Gautama, a man of
her father’s age who is detached and reserved even to an extent of not
fulfilling her physical and emotional needs. Also the indifferent behavior of
the members of her husband’s family, the solitude and silence of the house after
her marriage and the death of her pet dog accentuate her sense of loneliness
which gradually develops into an actual sense of alienation. The void between
her father’s love and her husband’s love make her conscious of the isolation
that she lives in .She tries to gain respite from her loneliness by continually
thinking about her childhood memories with her father. In her own eyes she is
as one doomed already and throughout her life there hovers an uncanny
oppressive sense of fatality. This leads to a state of neurosis which makes her
kill her husband by pushing him from roof. Unaware of everything, Gautama
accompanies Maya on the roof of the house at her request. The pale moon rises
and Maya is fascinated and bewitched by it. Both of them are at the low parapet’s
edge and he casually moves towards her and hides the moon from her view.
Maya waxes into a sudden frenzy and pushes him over the
parapet to “pass through an immensity of air, down to the very bottom” (208)
.Three days later Gautama’s mother and sister
take Maya to her father’s house at Lucknow in order to put her in an asylum.
But in the middle of the night, they hear a cry of horror and they rush
upstairs and one could watch the other elderly “the heavy white figure goes
towards the bright, frantic one on the balcony, screaming.”(218)
In the end Maya is not saved from
becoming insane, a fate far worse than the one thrust on Gautama. Having tried,
in vain, to transfix all that she experienced, she becomes once again, a part
of a fairy tale, a toy princess in a toy world. Anita Desai is more
specifically concerned with the fate of less loved mind of the Indian
house-wife, Maya. Maya’s distraught mind, her mental agony, her fear of fate
and her eventual fall into the labyrinth of insanity form the core of the novel,
Cry, The Peacock and her actions are
read by others in the light of traditional beliefs and customs. In his book, Indian Writing in English, K.R.
Srinivasa Iyengar aptly states: “Maya is at once the centre and the
circumference of this world. Her sanity – whether she is sane, hysterical or
insane fills the whole book and gives it form, as well as life.” (468)
Thus this novel explores that the
marital relationship leads one towards insanity if they are not satisfying and
the temperamental disparity among couples further adds to despair among the couple
involved in the relationship .Without respect and understanding marital
relationship are not mere than a lip service.
To conclude, Anita Desai presents to
reader her opinion about complexity of human relationships as a big
contemporary problem and human condition. So, she analyses this problem due to the
changing human relationships in her novels. Desai deals with complexity of
human relationships as one of her major theme, which is a universal issue, as
it attracts worldwide readers to her novels. She strives to show this problem
without any interferes. In other hand, she allows to her readers who have their
judgment about her novel characters and action. The novel Cry, the Peacock describes the reasons and consequences of
alienation in the relationship between Gautama and Maya. Maya’s moods,
obsessions, dilemma and abnormality are conveyed very effectively. It brings a
disastrous end of their life.
References
1.
Desai, Anita. Cry,ThePeacock. Delhi:
Orient Paperbacks, 1980. Print.
2.
Iyengar. Srinivasa K.R. Indian Writing in
English. New Delhi: Sterling, 1964. Print.
3.
Jain, Jasbir. Anita Desai Indian English Novelists, ed.
Madhusudhanan Prasad. New
Delhi: Sterling, 1982. Print
4.
Lawrence D.H. Morality and the Novel,
in David Lodge, CenturyLiteratureCriticism.
London: Longman, 1972. Print.
5.
Rao B, Ramachandra. The Novels of Anita
Desai. New Delhi: Kalyani, 1977. Print.
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