1. Desai's Womenand Their Portrayalin PatriarchalSociety
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

2. 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

3. 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

4. Desai creates a rich gallery of characters, both male and female though
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

5. repressive joint family household of Jiban. She struggles to free herself from
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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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