CHAPTER III Theame of Indenlity I cry the peacoct anita desais novels show a womens quest of identity lecause

e of her alienation, aloofness, loneliness identical crisis of herpersonality anita desais purpose as a writer is to see her women characters as human with their own compulsions her novles have been examined as the maniferto of female preclicament and creative release of the feminine sensibility . Her feminism is not anti male and her women need mans loving company and aspire for the bliss and thrill of life which are ever denied to them. She sets herself to voice the voiceless miseries and helplessness of millions of married women, tormented by exislentialist problems and predicaments. She focuses on how her heroines, in the contemporary urban milieu are bravely struggling against or helplessly submitting to the relentless forces of absurd life. Desai has natural preference for writing about women characters. The most recurrent themes in all her novels are the hazards and complexities of man women relationship, the founding and nurturing of individuality and the establishing individualism of her characters. Although she is preoccupied with the theme of inconapatible marital couple yet we come across different kinds of colomen characters in her novels. Her herioines are not mere goddesses or robots but they are individuals. She has presented bath the extremes. If at one extreme there are sensitive women characters, on the other, we also find thick skinned women with blunt sensibility. Desais first four novels are a study of womens depression resulting from their identity in her very first novel cry the peacock we find examples of two extremes. Maya, the heroine is a neurotic young woman whose sanity is first disintegrating childhood memories maya, a spoiled and pampered daughter of a wealthy Brahman is married to Gautama, a rather in sensitive advocate who fails to understand her sensitive nature. She suffers from father obsession and looks for the typical father image in her husband. Here desai has dealt with a sterile woman, highly sensitive and emotional lady, maya. Though Gautama loves her in his own way yet, maya is never satisfied and happy. She feels that Gautma never cares for her and does not have any feeling for her voices in the city articulated monisha,s plight and psychic life and intimately shows the woman as female birds in the cages. She loves to see herself as an unfettered individual and not to become at any stage a complacent tame wife who adjusts her self to a glided cage. In the patriarchal society, women have not been seen as the equal partners. They have been treated as the second read members in the family and the society. Simone de Beauvair,s observation is very illuminating and cited in feminism: Theory Anita Desais two novels cry. The peacock and voices in city depict the inner climate, the climate of sensibility that rumbles like thunder and suddenly blazes forth like lighting.

Since her preoccupation is with inner world of sensibility rather than the outer world of action, she has tried to forge the style, supple and suggestive enough to convey the fever and fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal characters. Maya is a motherless child but her father showers all his love an her. She has been brought up as a princes, As a child, I enjoyed. The glories and bravado of Indian mythology, long and astounding tales of the princes and regal queans. The princess of the toy is married to an imaginatively starved emotionally barren and coal headed, middle age man, Gautama. Gautama, a brilliant ambiltious and serious minded lawyer, leaves maya emotionally and spiritually starved and insecired. Perhaps their great difference in age worked as a big gap in their lives. Her problems are not physical but psychical. They originate and exist because of the incompalibility of temperaments. Maya is romantic and hungry for love whereas Gautama is realistic and cold. Instead of comforting her in her grief over the death of a pet dong. Toto as maya is childless woman. She loves Toto more than people in general love their pets. 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. The death of her pet dog reminds her of loneliness. The pets death shatters maya beyond measure. She is left alone in the world of frustration and disappointment. Toto was in significant for Gautama whereas it was everything for maya with which she shared her pains and pleasures and removed her loneliness. This reminds us of mulk Raj Anands story The parrot in the cage where the parrot is the fate of his mistress, Rukmaniai and the suffering humanity his cries for liberalion lead to an aggravation of suffering. In the case of maya, in cry, the peacock, this sensuous awareness of the external world becomes a neurotic interoversion. Her inner landscape is visited by a premonition of disaster that has its origins in her repressed childhood memory of the death of a pet dog and an astrological prediction that her marriage would end in its fourth year, with the death of either the husband or the wife. The lack of companionship between maya and her husband Gautama intensifies her state of mind. This is evident when, for example, during a walk, they talk desultoruly, not really listening to each other, being intent on our own paths which , however ran parallel. And though maya startles with the embrace of recognition to the poignant fragrance of flowers that matched her mood to perfection Gautama remains impervious to any such moment of Intimacy. Indeed, on one in his family spoke of love except interms of political scandal and intellectual dissent ( ) or ever spoke to her except when it had to do with bablles, meals, shopping, marriages.

Mayas inleriorizing of the external is intense but partial, retricted as it is to natural phenomena. Living within her inner reality, she fails to establish any channel of communication with the outer, human world. So mayas longing for the dance of the peacocks remains only a symbolic desire for the liberating monsoon, her murder of Gautama being a consequence of her introverted recoil from the summer without and the oppressive summer of childhood memory within. The novel captures the compulsive intensity of a sleep walkers state of mind through the imagery of suffocation and isolation ironically, this is also its main weakness as a narrative, because the novelist seems to let maya take almost complete control of its direction. If the subject of all my books has been what Ortega Y Gasset called the terrors of facing, single handed, the ferocious assaults of existence, cry, the peacock is the earliest treatment, though flowed, of this theme. Maya is outside of the mainstream even though her treatment, if not conventional, is orthodox. Desai has remarked that she does not fed compelled to write about the mainstream and that she feels drawn only to those who go against the current, even though they suffer, or are helpless in the face of fate or life. Gautama is detached philosophical, rational and inconsiderate. His constant harping on detachment as preached in the Bhagrad Gita and his discouraging response to her requests and suggestions including the desire to go to the hill station and see kathakali dances points to an attitudinal and temperamental difference between the two. There is no place for maya in the world of Gautama. He neither understands her nor wishes her to enter his world. Thus his world is totally strange to maya on his part understanding was scant, love was mearge (89) maya, a Childers women and having no vocation to pursue, finds herself in utter suffocating loneliness. She always long to be with her husband. Gautama treats maya as child and she resents it . Once both of them were walking together and maya talked of the flower, Gautam plucked it and gave it to maya saying, who should deny you that? He said and smiled at me as to a winsome child. (102) Then in the debate, maya said, And you will think me a tiresome child for it, for showing what you once called my third rate poetesss mind (96) maya realizes that she is not as helpless and dependent as a child. She is as much because she wants to liberate herself from the ages of old guardin child chain.

Anita Desai has an insight into human psyche. Maya has father fixation and cannot relate with her husband on equal basis. Having lived a carefree life under the indulgent attentions of her loving father may desires to have a similar attention from her husband. When Gautama a busy, prosperous lawyer too much engrossed in his vocational affairs, fails to meet her demands, she feels neglected and miserable. Mayas dissatisfaction with marriage makes her depressive when Gautama sees her morbidity increasing he warns her against turning neurotic and blames her father for spoiling her. Her is the one responsible for this - for making you believe that all that is important in the world is possess, possess riches, comforts, posies, dollies, loyal, retainers all the luxuries of the fairytales, you were brought up on. Life is a fairy tale to you still. (98) later, finding her situalion unetural, he attributes it or her father fixation. If you knew your freud it would all be very straight forward, and then appear as merely inevilable taking your childhood and upringing into consideration you have a very obvious father obsession which is also the reason why you married me a man so much older than yourself. It is a complex that unless you mature will not be able to deal with rapidly, you to distary. (122) The reason for mayas obsession is, however, not only the father fixation factor though it inlensifies her tragedy. Four of marriage without children or vocation is the other factor which leads maya to her insanity. The death of her pet dog aggrawates her mental condition. It makes her increasingly conscious of the mysterious coorking of destiny Gautamas rational mind initially fails to suspect it when he realize it, it is too late to mend. He is totally indeifferent and insensitive to natural beauty smells colours, and sounds in the way of characteristic of Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse. Maya realize It is not that Gautama and maya have never tried to understand each other, they are prevented by a nameless barrier. The terrifying words unnatural death four years