A Manifesto of Female Predicament, Psychological Fiction and Matrimonial Crisis in Anita Desai’s Cry The Peacock

Abstract

Anita Desai is one of the most vigorous contemporary and abundant Anglo-Indian writers. Anita Desai’s first novel ‘Cry the Peacock’ was published in 1963 is the conqueror of the coveted Sahitya Academy Award. It is the anecdote of the psychic turmoil of a young girl, Maya, obsessed by a childhood prophecy of disaster to befall her or her husband during their fourth year of marriage. She essentially depicts the plight of a fashionable woman in the existing man dominated society where she endeavors to voice herself. In Cry the Peacock, her protagonist Maya is incapable to lead a peaceful marital life with her husband Gautama, as she is obsessed with the image of her father. This literary fiction explores the existence of the protagonist ‘Maya’ through the light of Sigmund Freud’s Electra complex. The inner turmoil and the convolutions of her ever-fluctuating psyche are portrayed through the course of her story. Anita Desai brilliantly sketches the character of Maya bringing in the psychological realms of a “father fixation” through in this novel. Her portrayal of a man-woman relationship is influenced and conditioned by the complex social milieu.

Introduction

Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock (1963) portrays the psychic tumult of a young and sensitive married girl Maya who is possessed by a childhood prognostication of a lethal catastrophe. This novel is a unique, idiosyncratic and hallucination of the feminist point of view. It is a kind of tale that is extremely emotional, tender and innovatory about a woman told by a woman novelist. Maya is manifest as a fast disintegrating woman under the pressures of marital strife. In this literary text Cry, the Peacock is the devoted elucidation of the psychosomatic growth of a female character, which cannot cope up with the practical world of the husband and feels woebegone. A woman cannot come out of these customary jobs because of the orthodox outlook of the male-dominated society. She is imprisoned in the four walls of the house where there is no one else to share her agony and grief. Anita Desai’s Cry, the Peacock studies such predicaments which lead the woman to astray. The novel Cry, The Peacock by Anita Desai divulge delusions of the female protagonist who attempts to decry her loneliness through her make-believe shifts and finally when she understands the truth of living, she understands that emotions that rooted in faith and love count for more than memory to live in reality. This paper focus at scrutinizes the character portrayal of Maya, the protagonist of Anita Desai’s novel Cry, The Peacock to locate the causes and consequences of Maya’s neurosis and how her antagonistic marital alliance aggravates it and leads to an advanced mental ailment. This paper also examines the use of bird imagery in the representation of Maya’s neurotic behavior that eventually creates a complete disjuncture between her private and public egocentrism. Anita Desai’s use of several Indian words serves to add color to the context.

Psychoanalysis and Marital Chaoses

The psychoanalytic theory gained momentum during the late 20th century with the formulations of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung Published in 1963, Cry, the peacock is the trendsetter in the field of psychological fiction in Indian writing in English. This novel is reflecting on to be the trendsetter in feminist writing. Desai sketch Maya as hypersensitive and discriminated. Maya's claustrophobia, loneliness, alienation, isolation, and frustration are effectively brought out by the Desai. Maya is a hypersensitive young woman 'pursued and haunted by the idea of early death prophesied by an albino astrologer and her ineffectual lonely struggle against fate, that drives her to homicide, insanity and finally to suicide'. Desai tries to explicate in detail about Maya’s trapped feminine psyche right from her childhood to her terminal demise as early life. She drops a victim to social and psychological predicaments. The social estimation affects her psyche to such an expanse she becomes a victim of many accustomed and unaccustomed traumas. The present paper destines for the complication faced by the woman in Indian society which, unequivocally, is marching ahead at the path of evolution but still assigns conventional roles to the woman.

At the beginning of the novel, it has been admitted by Maya that she is sexually not gratified. It can be felt by the following lines:

“Telling me to go to sleep while he worked at his papers, he did not give another thought to me, to either the soft, willing body or the lonely, wanting mind that waited near his bed. ”

Even if she is provided with the material comforts, she tries hard to let others listen to her agony which goes unheard in most of the cases. Human Identity is usually connected to and defined by societal and cultural norms. When it comes to women, she is defined only concerning a man as she is deprived of an identity of her own. It’s easy to liberate woman in an antediluvian social composition even if she is not well educated but it’s very hard to think of her freedom in a society which is moving ahead at the path of progress and civilization. She is concerned with the inner world of her characters. She tries to look for the deep desires, emotions and feelings felt by her characters and show them as the influencing factor behind their action. She portrays the disparity in temperament as affecting the man-woman relationship. Generally, women are culturally as well as emotionally depending on a man and any disruption in a relationship proves to be a forfeiture of identity. Emphasizing the significance of such a relationship, D. H. Lawerence 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. ”

According to Freud, “experience shows…that woman, who, as being the actual vehicles of sexual interests of mankind, are not only endowed in a small measure, with the gift of sublimating their instincts, and who…when they are subjected to the disillusionments of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives. ” In this novel Cry, The Peacock the name of the central character is Maya. Desai’s literary work furnishes the anecdote of a young sensitive girl obsessed with a childhood prediction of a mishap, whose severe susceptibility is rendered in terms of inestimable loneliness and isolation. Alienation, isolation, and loneliness are some of the crucial hassle confronting the post-modern man. R. S. Sharma contemplates it “the first step in the direction of psychological fiction in English”. This modern era can be rightly called “the era of alienation”. In the present era, the collision of alienation is due to many commodities as the generation gap, loss of identity and credibility, isolation and so on.

Maya is poetic, instinctive, and Gautama, detached and philosophical. The enormous progress of science and technology, the expeditious growth of industrialization, urbanization and the changing value systems in society are the main causes of the loneliness of man. Cry, the Peacock unfastens with the portrait of husband-wife separation and dissension on by exposing the relationship between the eminent characters Maya and Gautama. The female protagonist Maya is obsessed with the dismay of death as a ramification of an astrological prediction that one of the spouses will die in the fourth year of their marriage life. She cannot inaugurate efficacious interaction with her husband, Gautama, who is detached, rational and twice of her age. Her husband’s indifference to her agonized predicament and her childless life heightens her sense of isolation and consequently, she kills him in a fit of insane fury. Desai presents the silence, solitude, melancholy and dark world of shadows in Maya’s life. The marriage of Maya and Gautama is more or less a marriage of convenience as we can say the marriage of conservative bonds. Maya’s marriage with Gautama has been settled through her father’s friendship with him. But Maya is not conscious of the unpleasant realities of life. Anita Desai is especially eminent for the astute depiction of the inner life of the female characters in her writings.

The novel portrays the inner emotional world of Maya who is the victim of city life. She feels estranged from her husband’s world and feels rejected and utterly lonely in the house. Thinking of her unhappy marriage, Maya reflects with deep concern: “It was discouraging to reflect on how much in our marriage was based upon nobility forced upon us from outside, and therefore neither true nor lasting. It was broken repeatedly, and repeatedly the pieces were picked up and put together again, as of a sacred icon with which, out of the pettiest superstition, we could not bear to part. ”

The anecdote of Maya’s life seems to be one of a three-fold pattern of circumstances that can be summed up as deprivation, alienation, and elimination respectively. In the first site, Maya has been deprived of the love of a mother, brother, and later her father. Secondly, she is alienated from her husband and in the termination, she brings about his elimination from life and her own self from her family and society. Maya is an instinctive woman of passions and emotions. Cry the Peacock explores the life of Maya through the light of Sigmund Freud‟s Electra complex. Desai’s this one novel is the most notorious and it presents the dilemma of Maya in the male-oriented society and her destruction at the altar of marriage. The objective of Desai’s 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”.

Feminine Delicacy

Anita Desai’s Cry, The Peacock is an idiosyncratic example of a hallucination or illusion of the feminist point of view. She elucidates the uniqueness of feminine sensibility through the reactions, rejoinder and responses of the female protagonist Maya to the occurrence and circumstances in Cry, The Peacock. A highly emotional, sensitive and sensuous woman, Maya has an obsessive love for life, she is a perfectly normal and healthy woman. Her only transgression is that she is fervent, sensitive, inventive, vehement and sensuous and thus represents the disturbed psyche of the modern Indian women. She tries to strike balance between institutional needs and intellectual aspirations and is deeply mystify when the existential absurdity of life is brought before her.

The cries of peacocks in this text represent the female protagonist's Maya cries of love, which simultaneously invite their death. Like her, they are creatures of exotic wild and will not rest till they have danced the dance of death. She describes how they danced and produced a remarkable impact on her mind: In the shadows I saw peacocks dancing, a thousand eyes upon their shimmering feathers gazing steadfastly, unwinkingly upon the final truth – Death. I heard their thirst and they gazed at the rain clouds, their passion as they hunted for their mates. With them, I trembled and panted and paced the burning rocks. Agony, agony, the moral agony of their cry lover and for death. ” When she experiences isolation, loneliness and a lack of transmission, she feels herself in a mental catastrophe. Thus she wrote, “… my childhood was one in which much was excluded, which grew steadily more-restricted, unnatural even, in which I lived as a toy princess in a toy world. But it was a pretty one. The presumption she had at the marriage of her husband, who is much older than her are not fulfilled. As an upshot, she becomes stultifying.

Maya finds her husband Gautama, as a man in whom understanding was scant, love was meager. But as one reads through the novel, one finds that her husband loves and cherishes her, but does not take her solemnly. He identifies her with “Maya”, which repels her and to which she objects. As time passes, she becomes more and more restless, starts brooding over the feeling of emptiness in her heart. Maya is thus an extremely sensitive character, a portrayal of a woman who has failed to come to terms with Hegemony and patriarchal order. Though she lives in the male world surrounded by male dominance, she refuses to identify with it and revolts against it in her own way. As the story unfolds, she seeks her mother in the natural landscapes and gardens, gets solace in it, but her inner feelings and deepest desires would not be rejected. Though Maya is an affluent housewife with all the necessities of a comfortable city life fulfilled, yet she is neither happy nor satisfied nor is she the ideal, content housewife who compromises with her circumstances and thus suppressing her self-identity and feminine desire in her heart till she dies. K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar aptly states: “Maya is at once the center 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. ”

She is a rebel woman who fails to identify herself with her husband Gautam’s world and finds herself alienated from the affection she got from her father and besides her total economic dependence on her husband makes her feel rather insecure and inadequate. There are other traits in Maya’s character which transcend the idea of Feminity. She is in search of a new vista for a woman’s world, a space in which she is on par with man. The dance of the peacock’s who destroy each other in spite of being madly in love. Maya thinks of her married life with Gautama as a deadly struggle in which one is destined to kill the other. Rebuffed by her husband, Maya is torn between her solitary life and her dismay of death.

Maya’s Terminal Catastrophe

Does Maya kill herself or does the female protagonist go to the asylum as planned? This literary text has been adored throughout the segment of society. It is Desai's significant achievement in the realm of Indo-Anglian fiction. Meena Bellipa considers it, “a remarkable attempt considers it to fuse fantasy with perpetual experience”. This novel is one of the most poetic Indian novels in English. This novel presents an impression of the marital incoherence and encountered conjugal life. Cry, the Peacock exposes an impression of marital incongruity and unhappy nuptial or matrimonial life. No other writer is so much concerned with the life of young men and women in Indian cities as Anita Desai. K. K. Sharma rightly remarks that the novel “highlights the problems of unequal marriage”.

Being intensely in love with life, she turns hysteric over the creeping fear of death:

“Am I going insane? Father; Brother; Husband. Who is my savior? I am in need of one. I am dying. God, let I sleep, forget, rest. But no, I’ll never sleep again. There is no rest anymore – only death and waiting. ”

Conclusion

The novelist has accentuated the female quandary in miscellaneous aspects. Desai is elaborating on the despondent condition of highly sensitive and emotional women tortured by negligence, isolation, and loneliness. The ending of the novel is usually equivocal leaving doubt about the character’s final destiny. We can say that Cry, The Peacock exposes unhappy conjugal life due to the problem of alienation and dilemma. Desai’s fictional world consists of the inner conflicts and visions of the characters, specifically 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 an educated, sensitive woman and spurn in childhood or over-pampering creates psychological blocks in the way of maturity and healthy interpersonal relationships in adult life. Desai’s protagonists feature the innermost complexities of a human mind. The dance of a peacock bears a sinister semblance to the course of the story.

References

1. Lawrence, D. H. “Morality and the Novel,” in David Lodge, ed. 20th CenturyLiteratureCriticism, London: Longman, 1972 pp130.
2. Sigmund, Freud. Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness, tr. James Strachey. Penguin, 1985, p. 47.
3. Narsimhan, Raji. Sensibility Under Stress, New Delhi: Prakashan,1976.
4. Iyengar, Srinivasa. K. R. Indian Writing in English. NewDelhi: Sterling, 1964.
5. Desai, Anita. Cry, The Peacock Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2000 (8th Printing), 1963 p. 53.