Topic > A manifesto of female difficulties, psychological fiction and marital crisis in Anita Desai's Cry of the Peacock

IndexAbstractIntroductionPsychoanalysis and marital chaosFemale delicacyMaya's terminal catastropheConclusionReferencesAbstractAnita Desai is one of the most vigorous and abundant contemporary Anglo-Indian writers. Anita Desai's first novel 'Cry the Peacock' was published in 1963 and won the coveted Sahitya Academy Award. It is an anecdote of the psychic turmoil of a young girl, Maya, haunted by a childhood prophecy of a disaster that would befall her or her husband during the fourth year of their marriage. It essentially depicts the plight of a fashionable woman in the existing male-dominated society where she tries to give a voice to herself. In Cry the Peacock, its protagonist Maya is unable to lead a peaceful married 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 convolutions of his ever-fluctuating psyche are portrayed throughout his story. Anita Desai brilliantly delineates the character of Maya by introducing the psychological realms of a 'father fixation' in this novel. His representation of the man-woman relationship is influenced and conditioned by the complex social context. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Introduction Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock (1963) portrays the psychic turmoil of a sensitive young married girl Maya, possessed by a childhood prediction of a lethal catastrophe. This novel is a unique, peculiar and feminist point of view hallucination. It's an extremely emotional, tender and innovative kind of story about a woman told by a writer. Maya manifests as a woman who rapidly disintegrates under the pressures of marital conflict. In this literary text The Cry of the Peacock is the devoted elucidation of the psychosomatic growth of a female character, who is unable to cope with her husband's practical world and feels pained. A woman cannot abandon these habitual jobs due to the orthodox view of the male-dominated society. She is imprisoned within the four walls of her home where there is no one else to share her agony and pain. The Cry of the Peacock by Anita Desai studies such difficult situations that lead women astray. The novel Cry, The Peacock by Anita Desai divulges the disappointments of the female protagonist who tries to denounce her loneliness through her turns of fantasy and in the end, when she understands the truth of life, she understands that emotions rooted in faith and love they matter more. that memory to live in reality. This article carefully examines the character portrait of Maya, the protagonist of Anita Desai's novel The Cry, the Peacock, to identify the causes and consequences of Maya's neurosis and the way in which her antagonistic marital alliance aggravates it and leads to an advanced mental disorder. This article also examines the use of bird imagery in the depiction of Maya's neurotic behavior which ultimately creates a complete disjunction between her private and public egocentrism. Anita Desai's use of several Indian words serves to add color to the context. Psychoanalysis and Marital Chaos Psychoanalytic theory gained momentum during the late 20th century with the formulations of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Published in 1963, Cries, the Peacock is the trendsetter in the field of psychological fiction in Indian writing in English. This novel aims to become a trendsetter in thefeminist writing. Desai describes Maya as oversensitive and discriminated against. Maya's claustrophobia, loneliness, alienation, isolation and frustration are effectively highlighted by Desai. Maya is a hypersensitive young woman haunted and haunted by the idea of ​​an untimely death prophesied by him, an albino astrologer and her ineffectual solitary struggle against fate, which drives her to murder, madness and finally suicide.' Desai seeks to explain in detail Maya's trapped female psyche, from her childhood until her terminal death in early life. He is a victim of social and psychological difficulties. Social esteem affects his psyche to such an extent that he becomes a victim of many habitual and unusual traumas. The present article is intended for the complication faced by women in Indian society which is unequivocally moving forward on the path of evolution but still assigns conventional roles to women. At the beginning of the novel, Maya admitted she is not sexually gratified. This can be understood from the following lines: “Telling me to go to sleep while he worked on his papers, he thought no more of me, nor of the soft and willing body, nor of the lonely and longing mind that waited by his bed.” Also if she is provided with material comforts, she strives to let others hear her agony which in most cases remains unheard. Human identity is usually connected and defined by social and cultural norms it is defined only in relation to man as it is deprived of its own identity. It is easy to liberate the woman in an antediluvian social composition, even if she is not well educated, but it is very difficult to think about her freedom in a society that advances on the path of progress and civilization. He is concerned with the inner world of his characters. He tries to look for the desires, emotions and deep feelings felt by his characters and to show them as the factor that influences their actions. He describes the disparity in temperament as having an effect on the male-female relationship. In general, women are culturally and emotionally dependent on a man and any break in a relationship proves to be a loss of identity. Highlighting the significance of this relationship, DH Lawerence in “Morality and the Novel” emphasizes: “The great relationship for humanity will always be the relationship between man and woman. The relationship between man and man, woman and woman, parent and child will always be subsidiary. "According to Freud, "experience shows... that women, who, as the effective vehicles of the sexual interests of humanity, are endowed not only in a small measure with the gift of sublimating their instincts, and that... when they are subjected to the disappointments of marriage, they become ill with serious neuroses that permanently darken their lives. ” In this novel Cry, The Peacock the name of the central character is Maya. Desai's literary work provides the anecdote of a sensitive young girl haunted by a childhood prediction of an accident, whose severe susceptibility is rendered in terms of inestimable loneliness and isolation. Alienation, isolation and loneliness are some of the crucial problems that postmodern man must face. RS Sharma considers it “the first step in the direction of psychological fiction in English”. This modern era can rightly be called “the age of alienation”. In the current era, the collision of alienation is due to many conveniences such as 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, rapid growth of industrialization, urbanization and changing value systems in society are the main causes of human loneliness. Cry, the Peacock yesdissolves with the portrait of separation and dissension between husband and wife 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 according to which one of the spouses will die in the fourth year of married life. She cannot usher in an effective interaction with her husband, Gautama, who is aloof, rational and twice her age. Her husband's indifference to her agonizing situation and childless life increases her sense of isolation and she consequently kills him in a fit of mad fury. Desai presents silence, loneliness, melancholy and the dark world of shadows in Maya's life. The marriage of Maya and Gautama is more or less a marriage of convenience, we can say the marriage of conservative ties. Maya's marriage with Gautama was fixed due to her father's friendship with him. But Maya is unaware of the unpleasant realities of life. Anita Desai is particularly eminent for her astute portrayal of the inner lives of female characters in her writings. The novel portrays the inner emotional world of Maya, a victim of city life. She feels alienated from her husband's world and feels rejected and completely alone at home. Thinking about her unhappy marriage, Maya reflects with deep concern: “It was disheartening to reflect on how much our marriage was based on a nobility imposed on us from outside, and therefore neither true nor lasting. It was repeatedly broken, and repeatedly the pieces were picked up and put back together, as of a sacred icon from which, through the meanest superstition, we could not bear to part. ” Maya's life anecdote appears to be one of three patterns of circumstances that can be summarized as deprivation, alienation and elimination respectively. In the first site, Maya was deprived of the love of a mother, a brother, and later her father. Secondly, she is alienated from her husband and in the conclusion brings about the elimination of him from life and herself from family and society. Maya is an instinctive woman of passions and emotions. Cry the Peacock explores Maya's life through the light of Sigmund Freud's Electra complex. This novel by Desai is the best known and features Maya's dilemma in the male-oriented society and her destruction on the altar of marriage. The objective of Desai's novel is to study the marriage crisis "The risks and complexities of man-woman relationships, the foundation of individuality and the establishment of individualism of his characters". Feminine delicacyAnita Desai's cry, the peacock is a peculiar example of hallucination or illusion of the feminist point of view. It clarifies the uniqueness of female sensibility through the reactions, retorts and responses of the female protagonist Maya to the event and circumstances of Cry, The Peacock. A highly emotional, sensitive and sensual 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 sensual and therefore represents the disturbed psyche of modern Indian women. She tries to find a balance between institutional needs and intellectual aspirations and is deeply disconcerted when the existential absurdity of life is presented to her. The cries of the peacocks in this text represent the female protagonist's Mayan cries of love, simultaneously inviting their death. Like her, they are exotic and wild creatures and will not stop until they have danced the dance of death. He describes how they danced and made a remarkable impact on his mind: In the shadows I saw the peacocks dancing, a thousand eyes on their glittering plumes staring steadily, unblinking, at the final truth:Death. I felt their thirst and they looked at the rain clouds, their passion as they searched for their mates. With them I trembled, panted, and paced back and forth on the burning rocks. Agony, agony, moral agony of their lover's cry and for death. "When he experiences isolation, loneliness and lack of transmission, he feels in a mental catastrophe. Thus he writes: “... my childhood was a childhood in which much was excluded, which became more and more restricted, even unnatural, in which I lived like a toy princess in a toy world. But she was acute. The presumptions she had at the marriage of her husband, much older than her, did not come true husband Gautama, a man in whom understanding was scarce and love scarce. But as one reads the novel, one finds that her husband loves her and cares for her, but does not solemnly identify her with "Maya". which repels her and which she opposes. As time goes by she becomes more and more restless, she begins to ruminate on the feeling of emptiness in her heart. Maya is therefore an extremely sensitive character, the portrait of a woman who has not managed to do anything deal with hegemony and the patriarchal order. Although she lives in the male world surrounded by male dominance, she refuses to identify with it and rebels in her own way. As the story unfolds, he searches for his mother in natural landscapes and gardens, finds comfort in them, but his inner feelings and deepest desires are not rejected. Although Maya is a well-to-do housewife with all the needs of a comfortable city life met, yet she is neither happy nor fulfilled nor is she the ideal contented housewife who compromises with her circumstances, thus suppressing her identity and feminine desire in the his heart. until he dies. KR Srinivasa Iyengar rightly states: “Maya is both the center and the circumference of this world. His sanity, whether sane, hysterical, or mad, fills the entire book and gives it shape, as well as life. ”She is a rebellious woman who cannot identify with her husband Gautam's world and finds herself alienated from the affection received from her father and furthermore her total economic dependence on her husband makes her feel rather insecure and inadequate. There are other traits in Maya's character that transcend the idea of ​​Femininity. She is looking for a new perspective on the world of women, a space where she is on an equal footing with men. The dance of peacocks who destroy each other despite being madly in love. Maya views her married life with Gautama as a life-and-death struggle in which one is destined to kill the other. Rejected by her husband, Maya is torn between her solitary life and the dismay of death. Maya's Terminal Catastrophe Does Maya kill herself or does the female protagonist go to an asylum as expected? This literary text has been adored across the entire segment of the society. It is Desai's significant achievement in the realm of Indo-Anglic fiction. Meena Bellipa considers it “a remarkable attempt to merge fantasy with perpetual experience”. This novel is one of the most poetic Indian novels in English. This novel presents an impression of the marital inconsistency and married life encountered. By crying, the Peacock exposes an impression of marital incongruity and unhappy marital or marital life. No other writer is as interested in the lives of young men and women in Indian cities as Anita Desai. KK Sharma rightly points out that the novel “highlights the problems of unequal marriage”. Being intensely in love with life, she becomes hysterical with the creeping fear of death: “Am I going crazy? Father; Brother; Husband. Who is my savior? I need it. I am dying. God, let me sleep, forget, rest. Hand,. 53.