Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies

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Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies ISSN: 2321-8819 (Online) 2348-7186 (Print) Impact Factor: 0.92 Volume 3, Issue 11, Nov.

1 Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies ISSN: (Online) (Print) Impact Factor: 0.92 Volume 3, Issue 11, Nov Theme of Alienation and feminine Psyche in the Novels of Anita Desai Gazala Ansari Research Scholar, P.N.G.PG.College Ramnagar Kumaun University Nainital, Uttarakhand Abstract: This research paper focuses on the theme of Alienation and feminine psyche in the novels of Anita Desai. Female protagonist of her novels feels alienated, isolated, separated and detached in this modern world. These are the basic traits of existentialist behaviors, because existentialism is the basic roots of alienation. The entire female protagonist remains in their own world, live in imagination and hearted by male practices or by the hand of society. They cannot adjust with this world; they think that this world is full of cruelty, because it never gives the importance to the individual feelings and desires. Most of the novels of Anita Desai revolved round the theme of feminine- their problem, feelings, imagination, fantasies, enchantment, resentment, excitement and their Alienation. Fuller remarks- man suffers not only from war, persecution, famine and ruin, but also from inner problems a conviction of isolation, randomness, meaninglessness in his way of existence. This remarks of fuller best suited the condition of the protagonists in Desai s novels. Key Words: Alienation, detachment, feminine psyche, Insular, persecution, Isolation Introduction- The 20 th century, especially the post war period, has witnessed of great spiritual stress and stains. Therefore it has been rightly regarded as the age of alienation. In this age, man is brought face to face with confusion, frustration, disintegration, and disillusion and meaningless in life.through made its first appearance in the classical sociological work of the 19 th century and early 20 th century. Alienation is a main theme of all the major novels of Anita Desai. All the protagonist of her novels suffers from the alienation, isolation, loneliness, persecution, detachment, and rootlessness. Alienation is a result of loss of identity. Another theme of Anita Desai is feminine psyche which constitutes a major part of Anita Desai s fictional material. Women writers of all ages have a natural preference for writing about women characters. Anita Desai is no exception in so far as she has written, by and large, about women characters; and no wonder, most of her novels move around women characters. All the protagonists of these novels- Cry the Peacock (1963), voice in the city, (1965) where shall we go this summer? (1975) Fire on the Mountain, (1977) Fasting Feasting (1999) belong to a category which may be classified as Alienated. The protagonists of these novels have been bestowed with characteristics that may be referred to as Insular. Insular or insularity may be defined as that quality or state of being narrow-minded or circumscribed by outlook, mentality and character. Maya, Monisha-Amla, Sita, Nanda Kaul, Bimla(Bim), Uma all the female protagonist suffered in this modern world, because they all are self alienated. Society play an important role to make them alienated and selfcentered. About the Author: Anita Desai is one of the world famous and of India s best modern novelists in English. She is an Indian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and story writer. She is a writer who has influenced generations of writers. She has enriched Indian fictional world with her significant literary outputs. Anita Desai, originally an Indian citizen, migrated to America. She has been living in America. She can be considered to be an expatriate writer of the Indian origin. Anita Desai was born on 24th, June, 1937, in Mussoorie, a hill station situated in the foothills of the Himalayan ranges, near Dehradun, in the North Indian State of Uttaranchal, India. It is conveniently connected by road to Delhi and major cities. It is called Gateway to Yammunotri and Gangotri, Shrines of Northern India. She was formerly known as Anita Mazumdar, a daughter of Dhiren N. Mazumdar, a Bengali business executive, and the former Toni Nime, a German expatriate, a teacher, while an engineering student in pre-war Berlin, of German origin she grew up during World War II and could see the anxiety her German mother was experiencing about the traumatic situation in Germany. After the war she found her known Germany devastated. Her mother never returned there. Anita herself did not visit until she was an adult. She has taught at Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges and is a member of the Advisory Board for English in New Delhi. She is married and has four children. She is known as a novelist, short story writer and also children author Presently she is working as a Fellow of the Royal Available online at 151

2 Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Girton College, Cambridge and Clare Hall, Cambridge. The author has won the Winifred Holt by Memorial Prize for her novel Fire on the Mountain. Alienation Define: Alienation is basically an existential issue that affects the life of each human being at one stage or another. Alienation is rooted in fears and anxieties of life and death. Existentialists believe that there are three levels of alienation. The first is social alienation when a person is estranged from his society and family; he becomes lonely in a crowd, unable to communicate emotionally or relate to anyone else. The second level is alienation from God. This is the state when one loses faith in any divine intervention in human life. This is called despair in theological terms. The last and most serious stage is self alienation, where one becomes schizophrenic, unable to stabilize one s identity in a given milieu. Self-alienation may lead to horrible acts like murder or suicide. Sidney Finkelstein defines the term alienation as a psychological phenomenon, an internal conflict, a hostility felt toward something seemingly outside oneself which is linked to oneself, a barrier erected which is actually no defense but an impoverishment of oneself. Feminine psyche Define: The word 'Feminine', as used in this paper, is not meant to denote "an essence of femaleness" but rather a mode of characterizing females in fiction. The novels of Anita Desai revolve around the women protagonists, who mirror the persisting grip of the culturally imposed 'Feminine', upon their female conscious and unconscious. Thus, it is implied that the author's understanding of what constitutes 'Femininity' in behavior and thought, is intermingled with the creation of female characters who define themselves according to the socially prescribed norms for a woman. It is also informed by a feminist s awareness about the kind of limitations inevitably faced by the 'feminine' self that is at the centre of their novels and is explored through the female protagonists. Manifestation of Female Predicaments and Existential elements: (Cry the Peacock) Maya, the young heroine of cry the peacock (1963), is a vivacious, but hypersensitive, pampered, and love-lorn girl. The problem she faces is how to adjust with life, which she finds in hospitable and inscrutable. Actually Maya is romantic related with ideal, Egotistical and self indulgent, pursuing fancies and fanciful feeling.a toy princess living in a world of elusive happiness 4 Gautama, her husband, is a practical man of the world. He does not relish Maya s eccentricity and indulgence, as such he chides her Life is a fairy tales to you still. What have you learnt of the realities? The realities of common human existence, no love and romance, but living and dying and working, all that constitutes life for the ordinary man. You won t find it in your picture books and that was all you were ever shown- picture books. Actually Maya has been a father s pet since childhood when she grow up, she develop a dream like quality in her nature, unable and unwilling to face the harsh reality of life marriage and Gautama. But soon everything changed in her life. Incident occurred one after another. The death of Toto also starts a chain reaction within Maya and her fears lying in the unconscious come to the force. Something shadowy comes to her vision. She feels she was grieving, besides her Toto s death, Another sorrow, unremembered, perhaps as yet not even experienced (P.8) which could be the predicted death of one of them. The incompatible temperaments of Maya and Gautama cause lack of communication between the two which in turn makes her feel alienated. In Maya s case it is, what Sidney Finkelstein defines, a psychological phenomenon, an internal conflict, a hostility felt towards something seemingly outside oneself which is linked to oneself, a barrier erected which is actually no defense but an impoverishment of oneself. Maya s alienation refers to her estrangement from her family, her society and even her own self. For her alienation from husband, mainly Maya is responsible, but to a certain extent Gautama also has a share. Her loneliness becomes more poignant after the death of Toto-a child substitute-who in her opinion deserved a splendid ceremony but which Gautama had derisively termed the frills and flaps of pions frivolity. Even prior to Gautama s murder, Maya obsessed with the idea of death and doom, gradually loses her grip over sanity. Her thoughts, words and actions become incoherent. She becomes aware of the impending insanity: Yes I am going insane. I am moving further and further from all wisdom, all claim, and I shall soon be mad, if I am not that already (Voice in the City) In The voice in the city (1965), three major character, namely Nirode, Monisha and Amla, become cynical, freakish and desperate because they feel abandoned and ignored in life. All of them are highly educated, intellectually gifted and ambitious individual, yet the problem with them is that they have an over-exacerbated sensibility. The Roy progeny love life excessively, but are inapt at distinguishing the actual from the illusory. Their creative energies do not converge on a common point of integration so that they all remain fragmented and unfulfilled. Each one of them has a strong desire to open the channels of effective communication with other, but is unable Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 3(11) November,

3 to do so because there pervades an atmosphere of emotional and spiritual stagnation 19 around them. None of the trio is able to acquire an attitudinal objectivity and matter-of-factness since they are sentimental temperamentally, and have nihilistic as well as predatory proclivities. Jit, one of Amla friends, is intrigued and disgusted to observe it and says: I don t understand it this terrible destructiveness in all of you. You seem to worship it. Nothing will persuade you to forego it. You destroy you destroy yourself, and you destroy that part of other that gets so fatally involved in you.20 The primary cause of this fatal destructiveness happens to be the absence of positive faith or a sense of permanent commitment, also in Monisha and not only in Nirode, but Amla. The result is that they are utter failures in life. ( Where shall we go this summer?) In this novel, again, the theme of alienation and lack of communication in married life is discussed and re-assessed by the writer. Sita finds herself alienated from her husband and children. She remains an ignored personality since childhood. She is the product of a broken family. She yearns to have the attention and love of others, but her father remains busy with his chelas and patients. Even after marriage, she remains lonely. Her husband also is busy. He fails to address her expectations. As a result, there is marital discord, a widening gulf and increasing tension between husband and wife. This novel is a triumph of atmosphere both insular and climatic with sea, wind and air in constant motion - a kind of spiritual turbulence and isolation in some ways strikingly reminiscent of Virginia Wolf, in particular, of To The Light House. Sita s with - to withhold that birth by magic - is an outcome of a sick mind. Because of her abnormal reactions, the readers may get confused whether she is a schizophrenic or a paranoid. A Schizophrenic is a split personality, whose mental functioning borders on insanity. But a paranoid would suppress all evidence to the contrary and highlights petty things in support of her feelings, reasons or estimating personalities of other characters as in her favors or against. Sita in this state of tantalizing potential faces life with nothing but uncertainty. She insists on fleeing from the main land to the island of her childhood to restore the magic, which can change her dreary mechanical life. But she can do anything because no one has time for her so she cannot comprehend her boredom, her frustration with her existence: she herself looking on it saw it stretched out so vast, so flat, so deep, that in fright scrambled about it, searching for a few of these moments that proclaimed her still alive, not quite drowned and dead (Where Shall We Go This Summer: 33-34). (Fire on the Mountain) The novel, Fire on the Mountain (1977) on a plain scale, may be considered the story of the agonized cries of Nanda Kaul, an old woman who has had too much of the world with her and so longs for a quiet, retired life. Novel show a woman s inherent desire to know herself in terms of not only her relationship with her family, but also in terms of her individual identity and its relationship with the world at large. Fantasy plays a major role in the life of the protagonist, Nanda Kaul. It is a novel about the loneliness of this old woman and the way fantasy becomes her life. The conflict arises when fantasy overtakes reality to such an extent that ultimately reality has to assert its position and Nanda Kaul is made to acknowledge reality. In this novel, fantasy is a means to escape loneliness. Nanda Kaul lives a lonely life in the mountain retreat, Caregnano. Her retreat to the mountain is by no means withdrawal but is a 'forced' seclusion. She has been 'reduced' to live for the rest of her life alone in Kasauli. She had a very busy past life, full of responsibilities. Being the wife of a Vice-Chancellor, she had to fulfil various social duties as well as domestic duties; with a house full of children.. But in spite of all this, we find Nanda lonely within herself. She could not get mentally involved with all these activities but merely did them as part of her routine. Her relationship with her husband was nothing beyond the duties and obligations they had for each other. Her husband's affair with another woman is a scar on her heart which she is trying to forget with her withdrawal into the world of fantasy. Nanda is face to face with reality that her friend Ila Das has been raped and killed because she protests to child marriage. She has to admit all the falsities to herself. But she is not able to bear it and dies. Jasbir Jain sums up the entire philosophy of the novel as, "withdrawal, which does not come naturally to her, takes her nowhere and involvement is equally meaningless. Death is the ultimate reality of life whereas life is a painful process. (Fasting Feasting) Fasting Feasting is a novel of an innocent girl Uma, who is hearted by the society. This novel shows the realities of society. Uma is made to appear a victim of her circumstances, a victim of her fate and as such she accepts her destiny quietly, ungrudgingly and tries to live like the dumb driven cattle. But that does not mean that she is completely insensible an unthinkable. On the contrary, Uma is full of tender feelings; she has her wishes and desires, imagination and expectation, which she is unable to express. There is a sense of agony, a sense of irreparable loss and permanent shock in her which Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 3(11) November,

4 she deliberately hides in order to remain true to her nature. It is significant to note that Uma has been delineated in altogether a different way from all the other heroines of Desai. She is neither a psychic case nor a violent rebellion in the society; neither assertive nor demanding and yet she is a thinking, feeling human being. Unlike her sister, Aruna, she cannot express nor can she register her thoughts and yet she appears to suffer under the circumstances against which she can make no resistance. Here she becomes the traditional archetypal woman who is born to live and suffer. In Fasting, Feasting, it may be observed that, unlike her other novels, Anita Desai has made an attempt to present Uma as a girl who has to live in the society accepting all the humiliations, injustices, sufferings and miseries without raising any voice or making resistance. Like the traditional Indian woman, Uma suffers quietly only to prove her great sense of endurance and stoic acceptance. After her tragic withdrawal from her husband Harish, Aruna, the younger sister, whispers to her in the dark and silences, Uma, Uma Didi - did he touch you? Uma burries her head in her pillow and howls - No, No. (Fasting, Feasting: 171) There could not be a more tragic situation than the one that Uma faces! Who could explain the cause or the justification of such a situation? Psycho- Analysis of the Novels: Psychoanalysis, as inaugurated by Sigmund Freud, an analysis the psyche, which according to the theory, is a site of irrational and unconscious conflict between primal desires and traumatic realities. Anita Desai is a novelist of psychological learning. Her major pre occupation in her novels: cry, the peacock, voice in the city, where shall we go this summer? Fire on the Mountain, Fasting Feasting are to delve deep into the inner recesses of the psyche of the fictional persona, and most of who are fragile introvert hypersensitive egocentric, fanciful, impressionistic, isolated and freakish. Mrs. Desai herself admits that she is interested in characters who..have retreated or been driven into some extremity of despair and so turned against, the general current. unusually high susceptibility, extra refined sensibility, proclivity towards romantic-idealism and acute right conciousness render these characters malcontented and misfit in the modern malignant world. These people expected too much from life, fail in expectations and are disappointed bitterly. Their Dejection result in their emotional and mental suffering. Most of them are young, inexperienced, dreamy emotionally raw and psychologically unsteady. Conclusion: In all her novels Anita Desai presents to readers her opinion about the complexity of human relationships as a big contemporary issue and human condition. So, she analyses this problem by projecting and expressing changing human relationships in her novels. She is a contemporary writer because she considers new themes like alienation and detachment and knows how to tackle them in brilliant manner. Anita Desai takes up outstanding contemporary issues as the subject matter for her fiction while remaining rooted in the tradition at the same time. She explores the anguish of individuals living in modern society. She deals with the complexity of human relationships as one of her major themes, which is a universal issue, as it attracts worldwide readers to her novels. She strives to show this problem without any interference. On the other hand, she allows to her readers to pass judgment over her characters and their actions in an objective and impartial way. Anita Desai unravels the tortuous involutions of sensibility with subtlety and finesse and her ability to evoke the changing aspects of Nature matched with human moods are another of her assets. Thus it may be concluded that in her different novels Anita Desai has portrayed different facets of human feminine psyche. Her range is quite wide. Her characters cover women of almost all age groups. In Fire on The Mountain, in Raka we have a child going to girlhood; in Cry, The Peacock, Maya a married woman Nanda Kaul, and Ila Das old women. In voice of the city tormented life of Monisha and Amla. In Fasting Feasting Uma who always obey of her parents. References Anita Desai, Indian Writer. 28 Feb June ANITA Desai in her interview with yashodhra Dalmia, The Times of India, (Sunday bulletin ) aprill 29,1979, as quoted by S. P. swain in his article, the Alienated self of Maya : A study of ANITA DESAI S Cry the peacock JIWE, ed. G.s. Balarama Gupta, vol. 20, nos.1-2 Jan.- July Alienation. Britannica Perspectives. Vol. 2. London: William Benton, Print. Alienation. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vol. 1. London: Print. Bhatnagar, M.K., 2008, the Novels of Anita Desai: A Critical Study, p. 110New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers. Desai, Anita Desai, Cry, the Peacock, Delhi: Orient Paperback, 1980.p, 105. Desai, Anita, Fasting, Feasting, London: Chatto & Windus, Desai, Anita, Fire on the Mountain, New Delhi: Allied Publishers, p 145. Desai Anita. Voice In The City, New Delhi: Orient Paperback(1965) 1982,175(All subsequent references are from the same edition) Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 3(11) November,

5 Desai, Anita, Where Shall We Go This Summer? Delhi Paperbacks, Desai, Anita, Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Delhi Paperbacks, Desai, Anita. The Book I Enjoyed Writing Most, Contemporary Indian Lit, XIII, 1973 Iyenger, K.R.Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling Publisher (1962), 1990,469. Sharma, R.S Anita Desai New Delhi: Arnold-Heinnemann, 1981, 51. Sidney, Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York International Publishers, p Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 3(11) November,

FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE NOVELS OF ANITA DESAI: A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY

FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE NOVELS OF ANITA DESAI: A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY ABSTRACT SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Supervised By: Dr. Gunjan Sushil Department of English University of Allahabad.