Cry the Peacock as an insight into feminine sensibility

           Introduction

Anita Desai is a prominent modern writers in Indian writing in English and considered to be one of the eminent Indo Anglian Novelists . A study of her works will reveal that she tries to explore the psychological state of a characters, because she thinks that inner life of a man or woman besides his or her character more than the external conditions of life. She brought in fame with the publication of our first novel 'Cry the Peacock' and 'Voices in the City'. Anita Desai's notion of modern ideal building of the society free from male domination. Desai represents the theme of consciousness and sensibility of women as compounded with the men and how they suffer on the basis of emotional as well as physical repression and become the victim of male dominated social and cultural order.

         What is Feminism? 

The term 'feminism' has its origin from the Latin word 'femina' meaning 'woman' and thereby refers to the advocacy of women rights, status and power with men on the grounds of equality of sexes. In other words, it relates to the belief that women should have the same social, economical and political rights as that of men. Anita Desai seems to be aware of relationship between feminism as a political movement, literary and theoretical commitment to the struggle against patriarchy and sexism and not only gender study in literature. In fact, the feminist critical perspective and theory became pertinent to the study and analysis of the social, institutional and personal power relations between the sexes. The rendering of feminine sensibility and the dilemmas of women oppressed by male dominated social order and recurring themes in her fictional work.

Feminine Sensibility in Cry the Peacock

Anita Desai's 'Cry the Peacock' is a unique example for an illusion of the feminist point of you. She defines the uniqueness of feminine sensibility through the reactions and responses of the heroine to the events and situations in the novel. A highly emotional, sensitive and sensuous woman, Maya has obsessive love for life, she is perfectly normal and healthy woman. Her only sin is that she is sensitive, imaginative, passionate and sensuous and thus represents the disturbed psych of modern Indian woman. She tries to strike a balance between institutional needs and intellectual aspirations and is deeply bewildered when the existential absurdity of life life is brought before her. When she experiences loneliness and lack of communication, she feels herself in mental crisis. She is seen to share a very affectionate relationship with her father and is at pain to leave her home at marriage. Her problem upbringing caused by her mother's death makes her detached from the world outside. Thus she wrote "... my childhood was one in which much was excluded, which grew steadily more restricted, unnatural even, in which I lived as a toy princes in a toy world. But it was pretty one." The expectations she had at marriage of her husband, who is much older than her are not fulfilled. As a result, she becomes stultifying. She finds her husband Gautama, as a man in whom understanding was scant, love was meagre. But as one reads through the novel, one finds that her husband loves and cherishes her, but does not take her seriously and that too because she is a woman. He identifies her with "Maya", which repulses her and to which she objects. As time passes, she becomes more and more restless, starts brooding over the feeling of emptiness in her heart. Maya's loneliness and isolation, her aching heart and gradual deterioration of psych make her an emotionally disturbed character taking her to a world of feminine sensibility. Even though the problem in Cry the Peacock is complicated by the emotional instability of the heroine Maya, there are "moments of lucidity followed by the murderous clarity of an insane woman with a frightening logic of her own." She feels that she should never sleep in peace. Therefore, she turns hysteric over the creeping fear of death. She has no rest any more - only death and waiting.
Maya's attitude to nature and physical world also shows her obsessive love of life. She gives highly sensuous account of the world of nature of flower and fruits, forms and colours. She has the deep sensitivity, quite deeply inclined by the sights and sounds, forms and colours of the natural world. She is infuriated when she finds that her husband fails to notice the dust storm. Gautama for her is representative of male centred materialistic civilization and culture. The act of murder is revolt against callous materialistic social order. Maya believes that she is not fit to live in this world based on male centred wisdom, reason and order. She wants to be free from the chains of slavery based on customs and established norms of the society. There is other trait of Maya's character which transcends the idea of feminism. She is in search of new vista for a woman's space in which she is at par with man. The dance of peacock's who destroy each other in spite of being madly in love. Maya thinks of her married life with Gautama as a deadly struggle in which one is distained to kill the other. Rebuffed by her husband, Maya is torn between her love of life and her fear of death.
The gloomy state of affairs is unacceptable to Maya. Hence she eases her tension psychologically by thinking how peacock stamps its beak against rock, and how it seizes the snakes to breaks its body to relieve its own pain ety of past and present dilemmas. This affects her consciousness badly and she craves for an urgent outlet of her emotions. Thus under the spell of d delusion, she kills Gautama and commits suicide. Her unconscious desire to kill her husband is a revenge reaction arising out of her own basic frustrations - unhappy married life, unfulfilled longings and a reaction against her husband's cold  unresponsiveness. Through this murder  and suicide, she experiences fulfillment and is relieved from the anxiety of past and present dilemmas.
Women in Desai, tend  to make constant comparisons between their father's houses. In their search of fulfillment, women continue to rely on the house. When it becomes clear to that the house cannot feel their emotional spritual vacuum, they choose to withdrawal becomes a symptom of Maya. To study the predicament of Maya, it is important to see her life has structured between her father's house and her husband's both locations act as a reflection of her attractive figure-nurtured by the values of her class, she also becomes a threat to that very system.

          Conclusion

What sounds notable is that Maya's feminist consciousness protests against society which devalues women and forces her to realize that her socialization was not typical. Maya is a heroine from the feminist perspective. She defines her signifying self as separate and distinctive. She struggles to maintain that identity even though at odds with the society around her and she finds validation in her own voice. Maya's feminism is her struggle for personal fulfillment in countering the female stereotype of her friends and the expectations and criticisms of her husband. As a heroine with feminine sensibility, Maya dares to maintain her "aesthetically and morally coherent unique" individualism despite lack of support from friends, family or religion. In short, in Cry the Peacock, Anita Desai is found prenting Maya as  dissenting female fighting against three traditional forces in her life; male authority expressed by her husband; her female friends playing stereotypical submissive - wife roles; and her religion's beliefs in karma and detachment.