Identity Crisis of Women in Where Shall We Go This Summer

Abstract

The present study deals with Identity crisis of women in where shall we go this summer? by Anita Desai. Her works significantly highlight the complexities of human relationships especially in women and also exhibit different facets of feminine psyche. It also presents a variety of characters facing identity crisis in different situations and attempts to realize the difference between illusion and reality. The study focuses primarily on the emotional exploration of the inner mind of Indian women and the mystic tensions of women seeking their identity in male dominated society. It also gives a biographical sketch of the eminent Indian writer Anita Desai. The novel is about time as a liquidator, as a preserver and about what the slavery of time does of people. It describes Nanda Kaul’s motherly feelings of humiliation and desolation due to life time of alienation. the novel Where Shall We Go This Summer? It describes the tension between a sensitive wife Sita and the rational Raman. The protagonist is a nervous, sensitive, middle-aged woman who finds herself alienated. Her sense of alienation is because of her own emotional imbalance.

Introduction

Anita Mazumdar Desai was born on June 24, 1937 in Mussorie, a hill station north of Delhi, as the daughter of a D.N. Mazumdar, a Bengali businessman, and her mother Toni Nine, of German origin. She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English at school and in the city streets. She has said that she grew up surrounded by western literature and music, not realizing until she was older that this was an anomaly to her world where she also learned the Eastern culture and customs. She once wrote: ‘I see India through my mother’s eyes, as an outsider, but my feelings for India are my father’s of someone born there’.

She had a composite mind inheriting a multi-religious, multi-lingual and multi-cultural tradition, enjoying familiarity with Christian, Muslim and Hindu cultures and German, Bengali, and English language. Desai prefers to concentrate more on the character or scene rather than going round about it. So, she prefers the private world of character rather than the public.

Desai like many of her European counterparts (Woolf, Cloude Simon, Michael, Buttor, and Alain Robbie Grilled) is much concerned in elaborating a new commanding posture for the author. Desai do not consider truthful in a ‘preconceived plot’. This is because, she thinks, plot is just an idea occupying one’s subconscious mind. She prefers the pattern and rhythm to a plot and her characters are the ‘embodiment of unexplained mystery’. Desai’s novels deal mostly with women characters and based on the problem of the position of women in their family. Women in Desai’s works are confined within the cyclic parameters of home-womb tomb.

In her fourth novel, Where shall We Go this Summer? Anita Desai presents an intense identity crisis of the central character Sita, a sensitive woman in her early forties. She is represented by her childhood on Manori Island twenty years ago. The past becomes a psychic residue in her ‘personal unconsciousness’, the backdrop of her life, and her obsessive preoccupation which gives her the strength to leave her home, husband, two children and the urbanized life of Bombay for Manori island, where she thinks she would be able to live under a magic spell:

She saw that island illusion as a refuge, a protection. It would hold her baby safely unborn, by magic. Then there would be the sea- it would wash the frenzy out of her, drown it. Perhaps the tides would lull the children, too, into smoother, softer beings. The grove of trees would shade them and protect them. (WSWGTS 91)

This vision is the motivating force that urges Sita’s leaving her home, much to the dismay of her husband Raman, who sees the absurdity of the plan- a pregnant woman leaving for an unreal place as if she were bewitched:

She had escaped from duties and responsibilities, from order and routine, from life and the city, to the unlivable island. She had refused to give birth to a child in a world not fit to receive the child. She had the imagination to offer it an alternative - a life unlived, a life bewitched. (WSWGTS 128)

Sita is a rebellious, non-conformist woman, disgusted by and trying to liberate herself from the patriarchal norms. As a new woman she too is seething in discontentment with her being enclosed within the ‘four walls’ of her house with the expected behavior of an ideal ‘mother’ and ‘wife’. In protest she curves a niche of her own, escapes to her desired island of ‘Manori’ in search of an ‘independent female’ status separated from the ‘male’ liberated from patriarchal bondage, wanting to be a woman as an independent existential being. She is an adaptive in the house of her husband but that is not to say that she is financially challenged of mal treated. But the feminist woman in her makes her dismissive of her status. When she was heavily pregnant with her fifth child, she was unhappy, apprehensive at the thought of losing its innocence in this world where nothing except ‘food, sex and money matters’.

Sita’s problem seems to be due to the mal-adjustment with her husband; the home life and the surrounding atmosphere nauseating her. She is fed up with her husband, a businessman, whose complete lack of feeling brings her to the verge of insanity. A deep change takes place in Sita, a proud mother of four children:

Four children with pride, with pleasure- sensual, emotional, Freudian, every kind of pleasure- with all the placid serenity that supposedly goes with pregnancy and parturition. Her husband was puzzled, therefore, when the fifth time she told him she was pregnant, she did so with a quite paranoiac show of rage, fear, and revolt. He started at her with a distaste that told her it did not become her- a woman now in her forties, greying, aging, to behave with such a total lack of control. Control was an accomplishment that had slipped out of her hold. (WSWGTS 29)

Tragically, her dream of getting love and affection from her husband ends in a nightmare. The point at issue is that her husband ignores her instincts. She likes him to treat her in a gentle and tender way which he cannot do. As a result, in the long run the husband-wife relationship is dragged into difficulties that come out in the form of identity crisis, for both Raman and Sita stand for binary oppositions. Raman is a creature of society, more accommodative, apathetic whereas Sita is hyper-sensitive, an introverted personality and a pessimist. She not only hates Raman for his lack of feeling but also derides the ‘subhuman placidity, calmness and sluggishness’ and the routine manner of her husband’s family. As a reaction against these, she speaks with rage and anguish and with ‘sudden rushes of emotion’.

In order to seek a means of escape, she takes to smoking, abuses her children for trifles, and flies into a rage when the servants talk in the kitchen because she thinks they are quarrelling. Finally, she like Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chooses three things- exile, silence and cunning. All this is the ultimate rejection of the values that her husband represents. She has resolved to go to Manori Island as a kind of self-exile in her search for identity. In silence and in her revival of the past, she is away from home, and civilization, thus reminding one of Billy Biswas in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. She has her vision to fulfill on the island as one sees it in the early part of the novel:

She had come here in order not to give birth. An explanation she had repeated to herself and her husband so often that, instead of acquiring lucidity-‘Ah! Oh, now I understand!’-it seemed steadily more strange, mistaken. Yet she had arrived, she was on the island, in order to achieve the miracle of not giving birth. Wasn’t this Manori, the island of miracles? Her father had made it an island of magic once, worked miracles of a kind. His legend was still here in this house-in the green tinge of the night shadows, the sudden slam of a wooden shutter, the crepitation of rain on the roof-and he might work another miracle, posthumously. She had come on a pilgrimage, to beg for the miracle of keeping her baby unborn. (WSWGTS 28)

Sita’s journey to the island is a quest for integration of the self. Actually, the island is a heaven to Sita, one which wonderfully holds the master key to her final liberation from the existential anxiety, hopelessness and suffering. She believes that her problems will be magically solved by the island, she will be relieve from her mental anxiety and will be calm and comfortable in the island. The psychological cosmos of Sita’s life mingles with her father’s fantasy. Before her marriage, she led a glorious life style in an island. She remains lovely company of her sister Rekha, Jeeven and her mystic father who had always been surrounded by his disciples. Sita comes to the island with foolish hopes. She already has four children. At the age of forty, she conceives the fifth one. But, she would not like to deliver her child in the destructive land. So, she comes to Manori in order to not give birth to the fifth one.

Her escaping to ‘Manori’ is identical to Maya’s garden. Maya’s hankering for her father’s garden. Sita’s returns to the island are important significant gestures, not hysteric reactions of mad women but attempts to let out their pent up frustration, to restore their selves. With this fear firmly seated in her mind, she turns towards discovering an escape route in the island, to confer in her a kind of solace.

The clash of identities between Sita and Raman takes an unhappy dimension. It has other interesting points of focus. At the root of the husband- wife conflict, there is the theme of tradition versus modernism. By temperament and upbringing, Sita’s root is in tradition represented by her father and Manori island. Her sudden encounter with Bombay follows with a hasty marriage to Raman. It threatens her very root of existence for Raman and Bombay stands for modernism. Where Shall We Go This Summer? is a faithful record of the post-war state of reality, characterized by a sense of muddle, confusion, meaninglessness, pervasive horror and fear. The only thing that represents tradition is Sita’s memory of the past; and her conviction that the past still continues to exist in its full form is countered by the debris of the past itself. The present, however, is not religious enough to retain the glory of the past, with her husband and others in the family.