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 244715
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 20th 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 20th 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 self-centered.

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 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 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 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
1. Anita Desai, Indian Writer. 28 Feb. 2012. 21 June 2012.
2. 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 1992.
3. Alienation.” Britannica Perspectives. Vol. 2. London: William Benton, 1968. Print.
“Alienation.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vol. 1. London: Print.
4. Bhatnagar, M.K., 2008, the Novels of Anita Desai: A Critical Study, p. 110New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers.
5. Desai, Anita Desai, Cry, the Peacock, Delhi: Orient Paperback, 1980.p, 105.
6. Desai, Anita, Fasting, Feasting, London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.
7. Desai, Anita, Fire on the Mountain, New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1977- p 145.
8. Desai Anita. ‘Voice In The City’, New Delhi: Orient Paperback(1965) 1982,175(All
subsequent references are from the same edition)
9. Desai, Anita, Where Shall We Go This Summer? Delhi Paperbacks, 1982.
10. Desai, Anita, Where Shall We Go This Summer?, Delhi Paperbacks, 1982.2 Desai, Anita.
The Book I Enjoyed Writing Most, Contemporary Indian Lit, XIII, 1973
11. Iyenger, K.R.Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling Publisher (1962),
1990,469.
12. Sharma, R.S Anita Desai New Delhi: Arnold-Heinnemann, 1981, 51.
13. Sidney, Finkelstein, Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York
International Publishers, 1965. p. 137.