Male Characteristics in Anita Desai’s Novels

 Abstact-

Anita Desai is an existential writer who is pre-occupied with internal conflicts and agonies of her sensitive characters in an insensitive world. The most common themes in her novels are human relationship, particularly the man-woman relationship. In Jane Austen's novels, husband-hunting fills an important place in the action. In Mrs. Jhabvala's novels there is much stress on wife-hunting as on husband-hunting."1 But in the novels of Anita Desai the intricacies of relationship gains an enunciation. Her forte is the exploration of sensibility rather than the outer world of action. She has tried to forge a style supple and suggestive enough to convey the fever and fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal characters. The theme of man-woman relationship in Anita Desai's novels reveals her consummate craftsmanship. Nowadays this theme has become more important due to rapid industrialization, growing awareness among women of their rights and individualism and the westernization of attitudes and lives of the people. Twentieth century novelists treat this subject in a different manner from that of earlier novelists. They portray the relationship between man and woman as it is, whereas earlier novelists concentrated on as it should be. Indo-English writer is concerned with the problem of interaction between man and woman, between the individuals and the social world. Therefore, the most recurrent themes in her novels are "The hazards and complexities of man-woman relationships, the founding of individuality and the establishing of individualism of her characters."

 

Keywords- Man-woman Relationship, English learning styles, Novels of Anita Desai, Male Characteristics

 

I.        INTRODUCTION

Literary manifestations of the specialization process create a different linguistic experience and environment for male and female experience. Especially, in the novels, we can move much closer to the female experience. Novels, therefore, are seen as structured and extended statements about reality. A closer study of Anita Desai's works reveals her struggle for female autonomy, played out against the backdrop of the patriarchal cultural pattern. At the outset, it seems that she is asking a new and different question. Her writing can be viewed as a self-conscious reaction to overwhelming masculinity of privileged dominant gender. We can identify in her characters a defiant tone of voice in asserting the personal and the subjective. Her emphasis is psychological rather than sociological. Her profound intellectual maturity provides a frame work based on gender (female) as the ideological scheme for the analysis of society in general.

Anita Desai is concentrated in terrifying isolation, finding it hard to reconcile with the world around "self". Her protagonists, therefore, are Shukla: 54 constantly confronted with the stupendous task of defining their relation to themselves and to their immediate human context. Acceptable behavioural pattern is alien to them. The root is not far to find. Her central characters, by and large, have strange childhood from which they develop a negative selfimage and aversion. The immediate result is - their fragmented psyche to view moving but their movement is always on the periphery. If they are placed within the female space, they are shown as threatening presence. Thus, the principal male characters in her works play negative roles in their relations with the females.

 

II.                ANITA DESAI ADDED NEW DIMENSION TO THE CONTEMPORARY INDIAN ENGLISH FICTION

 

                                      She has secured a unique position due to her innovative thematic concern and deals in her novels with feminine sensibility. Desai sincerely broods over the fate of modern woman more particularly in the male dominated society and her annihilation at the altar of marriage. In Desai's novels most marriages are proved to be unions of incompatibility. Her fiction is relevant to all times because she writes about the predicament of modern man. She digs into the inner psyche and goes beyond the skin and flesh. Literature for her is not a means of escaping reality but an exploration and an inquiry. Desai writes mostly about the miserable plight of woman suffering under their insensitive and inconsiderable fathers and brothers. So man-woman relationship brings characters into alienation, withdrawal, loneliness, isolation and lack of communication. Most of her protagonists are alienated from the world, from societies, from families, from parents and even from their own selves because of their individuality. When these characters have to face alienation, they become rebels. There is a series of 16 questions that are related to the three main learning styles. Read the question and select the answer that closest fits your answer. Don't think about the questions too much. Go with your first choice. After you answer each of these questions, just click on the submit button at the bottom of the page. If you are connected to the internet, the computer will evaluate the results and display how many of each answer you selected.

 

Tension, worries, depression, disappointment, anxiety and fear become the lot of Desai's protagonists and they lose their sense of sanity and mental poise. Anita Desai talks of women who question the age-old traditions and want to seek individual growth. They try to reassess the known in a new context and find a meaning in life. Desai suggests that a balance between the conventional, pre-set role of women and the contemporary issues has to be struck. Her female protagonists try to discover and rediscover meaningfulness in life through the known, the established. These characters are not normal but different from others. They do not find a proper channel of communication and thus become alienated and start brooding about their lives. All their wanderings and reflections finally bring them into new vistas of understanding, which they had formerly ignored and rejected.

 

Anita Desai is an original talent and has the courage to go her own way. She explored different aspects of feminine psyche which also includes man-woman relationships. Her two novels—Cry, the Peacock and Voices in the City carry a burden of rich promise as well as the mark of present achievement. "Through these two novels Anita Desai was considered to have added a new dimension to the achievement of Indian women writers in India."3

 

Desai depicts the inner weather of mind and expresses most poetically the tension of man-woman relationship in a fast changing urban milieu. As Edmund Fuller puts it, "In our age, man suffers not only from war, a conviction of isolation, randomness, (and) meaninglessness in his way of existence."4 The pervasive sense of alienation has corroded human life from various quarters. Consequently, he suffers from an acute sense of rootlessness, which may manifest itself as "the alienation from oneself, from one's fellowmen and from nature, the awareness that life runs out of one’s hand like sand."5

 

The novel Cry, the Peacock is mainly concerned with the theme of disharmony between husband and wife relationship. The play is about Maya's Cry for love and relationship in her loveless wedding with Gautama. The peacock's cry is an implication of Maya's anguish cry for love and life of involvement. The novel shows her despair, anxiety, dread, anguish and her choice in the given situation, which ultimately leads her to insanity. The novel begins with the death of her pet-dog Toto which throws her into a frenzy of grief. Maya is much attached to the dog because of her childlessness and it appears that the dog becomes a child substitute. She wants to provide a decent burial to the dog but the gardener fails to do so. Later on, when her husband Gautama comes, he takes it casually and makes arrangement for its burial. This shocks and hurts Maya. Gautama consoles her that he would bring another dog for her.

 

The second part of the novel is Maya's long narration of her inner life. Maya is a prisoner of the past, lives almost perpetually in the shadows of world of memories which engulf her; Gautama lives in the present and accepts reality and facts. Maya keeps on remembering her childhood days or the treatment of her father meted out to her. She feels that no one else loves her as her father did. She seeks other father in her husband who is much elder to Maya and is a friend of her father. Gautama keeps on criticizing Maya's father as he knows that Maya suffers from father-fixation. He says to Maya:

 

"If you knew your Freud it would all be very straight forward, and then appear as merely inevitable to you-taking your childhood and upbringing 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 complex that, unless you mature rapidly, you will not be able to deal with, to destroy..."

 

Like his mother and his sister, Nila, Gautama is man of the world. He runs after fact and reason and has nothing to do with the world of feelings and emotions which forms the core of Maya's existence. Gautama's myopic intelligence fails to establish communion with the emotional self of Maya, his wife. Maya suffers in her loneliness and tries to gratify her emotional starvation with her nostalgic reveries of childhood days. She was brought up tenderly as 'a toy princes in a toy world'. No wonder that Maya's childhood world of fantasies and adult world of realities clash producing more imbalance in life. Inner demands and outer realities also create a conflicting situation. Maya wants to escape from realities whereas Gautama desires to live in it.

 

III.             ANITA DESAI HIGHLIGHTS

 

Anita Desai highlights Maya's sexual demands with the help of two powerful symbols—The peacock's voluptuous dance and the mating calls of the pigeons. Maya compares herself with the peacock who mate only after fighting. The cries of the peacock, 'Pia, Pia, Mio, Mio'—assimilate in Maya's mind with her own anguish. Like the peacocks she loves intensely and her love is unreciprocated. Like Maya, peacocks are creatures of excess world and will not rest till they had danced the dance of death.

 

For Maya, Gautama was only a 'figure of granite' for 'there were countless nights when I had been tortured by a humiliating sense of neglect, of loneliness, of desperation." In a fit of frenzy one evening she pushed down Gautama to death and later commits suicide by jumping out of the balcony carrying her mother-in-law along with her. Desai writes :

 

"The old lady was up on her feet... They met for an instance, there was silence, and then both disappeared into the dark quiet. All around the dark was quite then."

 

IV.             ANITA DESAI'S SECOND NOVEL VOICES

Anita Desai's second novel Voices in the City offers the picture of another Maya named Monisha. Desai's concern in this novel is primarily with human relationship and how in the absence of meaningful relationships the individuals suffer. She probes the psychic compulsion that may affect an individual in forging long term and significant relationships and how an individual is affected if he is unable to forge such relationships.

 

Like Maya, Monisha also suffers emptiness. But unlike Maya, Monisha has stilled her emotions and has trained them to submit. Maya pushes Gautama off the roof so as to protect her world of sensuous abundance but Monisha sets herself afire to reach the case of intense feelings.

 

The novel deals with the incompatible marriage of Monisha and Jiban. The theme of alienation is treated in terms of mother-children relationship which itself is a consequence of dissonance in husband-wife relationship. Monisha's relationship with her husband is characterized only by 'loneliness and lack of communication.' She is also childless like Maya. She understands that her husband Jiban is unable to understand and fulfill her emotional needs and begins to grow world-weary. She is alienated from her mother as well as her husband. Her husband reckons her as worthless. Monisha's ill-matched marriage, her loneliness, sterility and stress of living in a joint family with an insensitive husband push her to breaking point. The element of love is missing in her life and finally she commits suicide.

 

Monisha's brother, Nirode, is the chief protagonist of the novel. If Maya's tragedy emanated from her obsession with a father figure, Nirode's tragedy lies in his love-hate relationship with his mother. He used to despise his father and worship his mother. But after the death of his father he always pities him and hates his mother because she has been unfaithful to his father by having intimate relation with Major Chadha who lives next door to their house at Kalimpong which itself is a consequence of dissonance in husband-wife relationship. Nirode considers his mother as she-cannibal. His broken faith in the idol of his mother prevents him from trusting other people and from being in their contact. He discovers a new sense of meaning in Monisha's suicide.

 

In Bye-Bye Blackbird, Anita Desai presents Sarah as a woman and reveals her dilemma and split personality which are the result of her marriage with Adit. Sarah married Adit in the hope of filling the hollowness of her life with the exotic but romantic world of her husband. But, she is deceived in her hopes as Adit stays in England living the unreal life of an immigrant. The theme of conjugal disharmony between husband and wife, which Desai projects in Cry, the Peacock and Voices in the City finds a faint subdued expression in this novel. The cause of disharmony between Sarah and Adit is not to be found in the difference of their culture; it emanates from their different temperaments rooted in the individualities. Adit's indifference towards Sarah's emotional sufferings is reflected in his half-hearted attempt to know the cause of her anguish. Towards the end of the novel Anita Desai shows that Adit does not care to know Sarah's feelings when he decides to return to India and settle there. Sarah is pregnant and has concern for her unborn baby. She comes out of her anguish when Adit asks her to accompany him to India.

 

In Where Shall We go This Summer ?, Desai takes up the theme of marital discord as the subject matter of this novel. The major protagonist of the novel Sita, is a middle aged woman who finds herself alienated from her husband and children because of her emotional reactions to many things that happen to her. Sita is introverted and subjective as Maya. If Maya's father is over protective, Sita's father neglects her completely. Sita is badly disturbed by the violence around her. She was a sensitive woman who hankered for love and affection in life. She expected close communion with her husband Raman. The behaviour of ladies in her husband's house made her utterly helpless, disparate and disappointed in life. She always wants to escape reality. On the contrary, Raman represents the sanity, rationality, and an acceptance of the norms and values of society. Sita is the product of a broken family. Even after marriage, she remains lonely. Her husband is also busy. As a result, there is marital discord.

 

Sita had four children. When pregnant for the fifth time, she foolishly decides not to give birth to the child in a world of violence and hatred. When Raman asked her where shall we go this summer? She at once replied 'To Manori'—a pilgrimage, a place of wonder and miracles. She reaches the island accompanied by her two children Karan and Maneka. But she feels betrayed when she learns that Raman has come to Manori not to see her but to fetch Maneka. In order to bridge the gap Raman speaks to her in a calm tone and informs her that he is prepared to do some farming here. To Sita, suddenly Raman has become the nicest man in the world. The sudden harmony between the couple seems unnatural and unconvincing. D.S. Maini observes:

 

"But such a weak epiphany does not connect. Nor are we prepared for the sudden flow and the decision to return to Bombay and to sanity. Her final view which seems to uphold the exciting and teasing ambiguity of life again is not well-earned."

 

In Fire on the Mountain, Anita Desai probes the feminine sensibility and 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. Fire on the Mountain creates the problems of man-woman relationship as a basic component part of uninteresting family life. Like Sita, Nanda Kaul lives alone in her villa. She is a vice-chancellor's wife. Having been rejected and discarded all her life by her husband and children, Nanda Kaul decides to live alone in Simla hills at Carignano. Her husband is responsible for this. Outwardly the Kauls are an ideal couple for university community but from inside their relationship is all-barren.

 

V.                CONCLUSION

                                To conclude, Anita Desai presents to reader her opinion about complexity of human relationships as a big contemporary problem and human condition. At the level of inner consciousness words are not mere meanings recorded in a dictionary but are symbolic which trigger feelings and meanings that an individual draws out of one’s subconscious storehouse. Her women characters make a reader look at them with awe with their relationship to their surroundings, their society, their men, their children, their families, their psychological make-ups and themselves. Though not admittedly a feminist, Anita Desai is well aware of the predicament of the Indian women and their relationship with men. Running inward her fiction grapples with the intangible realities of life. Man-woman relationship in the urban society is her concern and in novel after novel she delves deeper and deeper in this dilemma. D.H. Lawrence rightly points out that "The great relationship for humanity will always be the relation between man and woman. The relation between man and man, woman and woman, parent and child, will always be subsidiary."

                                                

REFERENCE

1.       Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi, 1983, p. 453

2.       Raji, Narsimhan, Sensibility Under Stress, New Delhi Prakashan, 1976, p. 23.

3.       Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi, 1983, p. 464

4.       Quoted in Indian Women Novelists, Vol. II, ed. R.K. Dhawan, Prestige Books, New Delhi, 1991, p. 22.

5.       Erich, Fromm, et al., Zen Buddhism and Psychologists, New York, 1970, p. 86

6.       Desai, Anita, Cry, the Peacock, p. 146, Ibid., p. 201, Ibid., p. 218

7.       Maini, D.S., The Achievements of Anita Desai, Indo-English Literature, ed. K.K. Sharma, Ghaziabad, Vimal Prakashan, 1977, p.229

8.       Desai, Anita, in an interview with Alma Ravi, World Literature Written in English, Vol. XVI, No. 1, April 1977, pp. 97-98

9.       Desai, Anita, Clear Light of the Day, p. 95

10.    Lawrence, D.H., Morality and the Novel in David Lodge ed. 20th Century Literature Criticism, (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1972), p. 130.