Desai's Women and Their Portrayal in Patriarchal Society

Batool Fatima Khaleel

Assistant Professor,

Bharat Institute of Engineering and Technology

Ibrahimpatnam, RR Dist.

Telangana

ABSTRACT:

For centuries, women communities in the traditional social order and

system have always been considered obsequious to men. Her detestation against

the patriarchy, her boredom is only camouflaged to conceal her foible strength

from the world. This paper present a critical analysis on the feminist way of

portraying women in Anita Desai’s three most popular and widely acknowledged

psychological novels - Cry, the Peacock (1963), Voices in the City (1965) and

Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975). Anita Desai focuses on the minute and

sagacious images of an agonized, fretted and trodden feminism preoccupied with

her morose depression, alienation, and loneliness in a patriarchal society. Desai

highlighted the lives of Indian women with their innate issues and tried her best to
ameliorate their lot through her writings. She has given a voice to the new Indian

women.

INTRODUCTION:

The word ‘Feminism’ seems to refer to a fervent awareness of women’s

identity and interest in feminine problems. Feminism that came into existence

after the 1960s aims at understanding social practices, male domination, and

emancipation of women from patriarchal oppression. Feminism is an ideology

against women being oppressed and exploited in a patriarchal system. Indian

feminist explores the feminine subjectivity and applies the theme that ranges from

childhood to womanhood. Feminist have put forth through their novels what

actually the feminism is. For thousands of years women have been oppressed by

all societies. The Indian women suffer, mostly because of the husband's

infidelity, childlessness or a tyrannical behavior of mother-in-law. The change in

women’s perspective is portrayed with greater awareness by an eminent feminist,

Anita Desai, in her novels Cry, the Peacock (1963), Voices in the City (1965) and

Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975). She broods over the fate of the modern

woman in the male-chauvinistic society.

Female characters are given utmost importance in almost all her novels

like Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Bye

Bye Blackbird and Fire on the Mountain. In all these novels, women are
characterized as the protagonist who suffers either from a father, husband,

brother or a lover in this men dominated world. Desai delve into their problems,

either it is a sister, daughter, wife, mother or grandmother. She gives more

importance to thought, emotion and sensation than to action, experience and

achievement as seen in the novels of other novelists. She maintains her

individuality in her writings. She discovers and underlines the true significance of

the lives of people by getting deeper into the unknown mysteries of the mind of

her protagonists. Her novels, Cry, the Peacock (1963), Voices in the Cry (1965)

and Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975) expresses mental trauma and agony

experienced by ‘Maya’, ‘Sita’ and ‘Monisha. These novels of Anita Desai are

examples of feminist manifesto in which she has not only portrayed women of

different ages but also of different types and characters. Maya is married,

hypersensitive and neurotic. Monisha, in Voice in the City, is also sensitive,

intellectual neurotic type like Maya in Cry, the Peacock. In Where Shall We Go

This Summer, Sita, a sensitive, emotional, middle-aged woman blessed with four

children becomes more or less a victim of the situation. Desai, as a writer, excels

not only in portraying female characters but also makes a psychological study to

elicit the innermost feelings of these women. Mr. Ramesh K. Srivastava points

out his views on Desai's art and he says:

“Being a sensitive woman novelist and gifted with good observation,

sensitive, a penetrating analysis and a skill to paint with words, Anita

dominated by the latter.(1994:XXVIII)”

Desai’s women characters undergo psychological trauma in a male dominated

society. Her women characters elucidate a new prospective with their distinctive

sufferings. She tries to extrapolate the torment and predicament of women in a

patriarchal, conservative and restricted conventional society. In Cry, the Peacock,

Maya hardly adjusts with her family, her husband, Gautama, misogynistic lawyer

who is much older to her and never probes into the mind of Maya. She desires to

be loved and cared for her husband. She says “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”(Cry the Peacock 113).

Monisha, in her spiritual and mental distress, fights a relentless battle for her self-

identity in Voices in the City. She is oppressed by her in-laws. She feels desperate

and isolated from her husband, in-laws and the outside world. She says:

“I long to thrust my head out of the window and cannot, the bars are closely shut.”

(VITC 250)

Monisha undergoes mental and spiritual agony because of her husband’s

indifferent, insensitive and impassive attitude. She finds herself entrapped in a

restrictions and duties. According to her

“Life follows a subdued pattern of monotonous activity without acquiring any

meaning” (Voices in the city, 252)

In reference to Desai's Where Shall We Go This Summer, Sita's distress is the

attitude of her husband, Raman, who runs a business and doesn't find time to

spend with his wife and ignores her desires. Sita being stubborn, childishly sulky

women, living in her own world of fantasy, feels alienated, denies to adjust

herself in a typical joint family system of India. She hates to follow the daily

chores of life at the in-laws house. She undergoes trauma due to her

hypersensitive nature and her insensitive husband. She starts smoking to harm the

foetus she is carrying.

Desai emphasizes on the feminine tragedy arising out of the marital conflict. The

conjugal relation between wife and husband is based on different aspects of

social, personal and emotional needs. Marriage is merely a social construct, legal

agreement than an involvement. There is no congruous relationship between

Maya and her husband, Gautama. Maya suffers a lot due to the indifferences of

her husband and is unable to lead a normal life with him. Maya feels that she is

being unattended and neglected by her husband. She shares an intense soft-

centered, soft-hearted relationship with her father. She is pampered and given
utmost attention by her father and she tries to search the same image of her father

in her husband. Gautama, who is insensitive, rational, realistic, busy in his

professional life, doesn’t pay any attention to the desires of his young wife and

hence she feels lonely, isolated, neglected, frustrated, alienated and is unable to

lead a normal life with her husband. Extremely frustrated, she looks back to the

days of her childhood spent with her father and thus she says:

( “…………my childhood was one in which much was excluded,

which grew steadily more restricted, unnatural even,

and in which I lived as a toy princess in a toy world.

But it was pretty one”. (CTP 78))

Her mental anguish, grief, upbringing caused by her mother’s death are neglected

and makes her isolated from the outer world. She behaves abnormally in her later

life due to excessive care and concern of her father towards her.The ambitions and

expectations of Maya towards marital life are not fulfilled. Resultantly she

becomes shattered, fuzzy and enervated. She found her husband Gautama as a

man without love and understanding who she believes has “an unawareness, a

half deadness to living world!” She becomes more and more restless. She fails to

bring her senses to rest even after murdering her husband. Desai represents a

frenzied and psychoneurotic woman who fails to face and deal with the
patriarchal social system where she rebel silently and helplessly like an inferior

being. It seems that Maya fails to accept the natural truth and realistic issues in the

cocoon. She escapes from reality and retreats into fantasy. Maya never supports

the idealistic sense of an ideal wife in a middle-class family of Gautama. She feels

insecure, powerless and helpless being dependent economically on her husband

and considers herself as the ruled to the panoptic gaze. Her wanting to have a

purified world where she gets all rights without having any discrimination on

gender is suppressed.

Monisha, like Maya, is a victim of the situation. She gets married to a middle

class, phlegmatic husband and feels difficult to adjust herself in that environment.

She impassively denies her self-identity and realizes that

“Life is reduced to cooking and washing which hurts her pride. To sort the husk

from the rice, to wash and iron and to talk and sleep when this is not what one

believes in.” (VITC 240)

‘Where Shall We Go This Summer’, is another novel of Desai, where she depicts

the fruitless marital relationship of wife and husband due to various factors like

lack of communication, time apart, large family circle, expectation of spouse from

each other etc. Sita feels alienated as her husband and children are unable to

understand her emotions. She is tired of discharging duties and obligations

towards her husband and children. Sita’s husband, Raman is practical, rational
and passive, and ignores his wife desires due to his busy schedule. She is vexed

with her husband, his business, surroundings and even his friends. She feels even

frustrated with the attitude of her children towards her. Resultantly, she is not

interested in having another torturous childbirth who may also consider her as an

insane mother like her other children. She wants to go to her father's island

Manori in search of peace and solitude. Her disturb state of mind is due to her

maladjustment with husband, her in-laws and the society. Differences in age,

maturity, Indian philosophy of segregations, and mental relationship between wife

and husband seemed to be responsible for marital disharmony. Indian women

have a belief that they are weak, submissive and subservient which makes them

insane. After going to Manari, she learns about the unimaginative and realistic

nature of life, embraces reality, compromise with her destiny and prepares to

deliver her fifth child. The poem by D H Lawrence teaches her that life must be

lived with its duties and responsibilities. The women characters of Desai

sometimes react violently and sometimes silently.

Desai delve into the problems raised due to loneliness, frustration, anger and

alienation in her novels. Cry, the Peacock (1963),Voices in the City (1965), and

Where shall we go this Summer? (1975) focus the predicament of women isolated

either from their family, parents, partners, society or themselves. Desai’s women

are not misandrist but they are aspirants of love, care, attention, respect and
recognition from husband, in-laws and society. They suffer mostly because of the

husband's infidelity, childlessness or a harsh mother-in-law. She begins a new era

of psychological novels with a new dimension to the world of novel writing in

English. She unfurls a new panorama of unique sufferings of her women

characters. She tries to protrude the torment and plight of women in a patriarchal,

conservative and conventional society.

To conclude, one can say that Anita Desai has been fully successful in raising

woman’s voice through her woman characters. She takes her readers on a journey

into the mind of her characters that are sensitive, speculative and complex. She

has an innate ability to peep into the inner recesses of the psyche of her

characters. Desai focuses on marital discord as a serious concern in her work and

tries to unfurl a new panorama of unique sufferings of her women characters. She

tries to protrude the torment and plight of women in a patriarchal, conservative

and conventional society. She, through her novels, focuses on how unusual

attitudes, uncertainties, individual complexities, paradoxes creates an emotional

and physical gap between wife and husband and spoils their relation. In all these

novels we come across traumatic taxing experiences of marital lives. She

visualizes on different aspects of the problem leading to marital disharmony.

Desai didn't leave any stone unturned in portraying the issues of women in a male

dominated society.
References

1. Desai Anita, Cry the Peacock, 1963; rpt New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 2008.

Print

2. Desai Anita, Voices in the City, 1965; rpt New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks,

2008. Print

3. Desai Where Shall We Go This Summer? 1975; rpt New Delhi: Orient

Paperbacks, 1982 Print

4. Srivastava Ramesh K : 1994, “Perspective on Anita Desai,” Ghaziabad :

Vimal Prakashan, Introduction XXXVIII