Cry the Peacock as a psychological novel

          Introduction

Desai spotlights an extremely complex nature of life. The real life has an infinite variety; it may take as many forms as there are individuals. Her notion of reality of life seems to have been greatly influenced by Virginia Woolf who says that "Life is not a series of big lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelopes surrounding us from beginning of consciousness to the end."

A Psychological conflict in Cry the Peacock

• Desai's heroines represent not ordinary, mainstream women but are mostly from effluent families and do not have to worry about daily subsistence. They are more concerned with their needs. 
• The journey from selfhood to freedom is an important contribution made by Anita Desai. The motif of self exploration was new, especially for the women of the sixties.
• As Anita Desai's main emphasis is on the inner world rather than on the outer world, she uses the technique of stream of consciousness to explain the problems of the characters. Their emotional world is reflected in syntax and imagery.
• The image of a new emergent woman, who is intelligent, rebellious, in search of fulfillment is shown in her novels. Each novel by Mrs. Desai is a marvel at technical skills.

Desai prefers the inner reality to be outer, insight to sight. In her first novel, 'Cry the Peacock', Anita Desai portrays the psychic tumult of a young and sensitive married girl Maya who is haunted by the prophecy of a fatal disaster.

Maya is the daughter of a rich advocate in Lucknow. Being alone in the family, her mother being dead and brother having gone to America to carve his own independent destiny, she gets the most of her father's affection and attention and in her moments of affliction exclaims to herself: "No one, no one else, loves me as my father does." The excessive love Maya gets from her father makes her have a lop- sided view of life. She feels the world to be a toy made especially for her, painted in her favourite colours and set moving according to her tunes.

When she gets married, she desires the same love and attention from husband Gautama, a father surrogate. She dreams of human love and her dreams link her conscious and unconscious levels of her mind. Her dreams fill her mind with imagination, fantasy and nostalgia. Maya wants her fulfillment as a woman and as a wife. Maya always hope for fulfillment and when she fails to have it, she feels loneliness, isolation and desertion. She tries to fulfill her incomplete desire through her husband but Gautama fails to satisfy her. He fails to distinguish between the fact and fancy. Therefore, a trauma visits Maya's unconscious mind, leading to an obsession in her psych.

Another important psychological effect upon her is the prophecy of an astrologer about her future which was made in her childhood. The prophecy is that one of the husband and wife would die after four years of their marriage. The prophecy becomes troublesome the unconscious mind. We can say that Maya's unconscious mind never reconciled with her conscious mind. Her conscious level of mind signifies the associative approach to human behaviour whereas her unconscious mind forces to realize her identity as a women and as a wife. When her husband was unable to soothe her burning heart, at the point, anxiety enters her mind. In psychological findings, if the level of anxiety enters the unconscious level of human psyche, it makes a person to keep  apart what actually belongs to him together. Thus, this constant anxiety in Maya makes her to develop a separation of idea and emotion. She develops a negative approach towards life and finds its entire essence as useless and meaningless. Therefore Maya says:
" All order is gone out of my life, all formality. There is no plan, no peace, nothing to keep me within the pattern of familiar. Thoughts come, incident occur, then they are scattered and disappear. Past, Present, Future, Truth and Untruth and I am tired of it. My body can no longer wear it my mind has already given way. See I am grown thin, worn. "
This loneliness makes her a psychosis patient. The disenchantment goes so deep in her unconscious that she loses the equilibrium of her mind. She dreams and her dreams become suggestive to her fear psychosis and a simple dream becomes a nightmare for her. She makes an unconscious journey through her dreams to an unknown world. In psychology, human mind when faced with the worries and the anexities of life traces for its existence certain unseen and unfelt objects from the deeper recess of pre-conscious level of human psyche.
The sexual obsessions of Maya have been symbolised through animal's world. Maya marries a father like man who is without sentiments and emotions. He fails to come to the level of Maya's sensitive nature. Gautama understands deeply the causes of Maya's obsessive nature. At this stage, Id meets the Ego level in Maya's mind. Freudian concept of sexual obsession is analyzed when Gautama points out the father fixation in Maya's mind:
"If you know your freut 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 a complex that you matured rapidly; you will not be able to deal with, to destroy."
The sense of father obsession and the distinction in their respective sensitiveness make their nervous system tense. Maya's hypersensitivity becomes an important cause in her failure to realize her identity as a wife. The sexual repression makes her nervous system  breakdown. When she fails to realize herself, she yields to her past memories for relieving her tense mind. Maya desires to materialize the vision of the flesh and tries to recreate her own world but Gautama fails to fulfill the dream of her existence in the society. Thus, the concept of existentialism is related by Anita Desai while describe about the psychology of her character. Maya is afraid of being lost in the society and her fear shows a fantasy that breeds in the lust for life. On the other hand, if Gautama observes father obsession in Maya, she too realizes the unsentimental behaviour of Gautama and lack of manliness in him. The father fixation, unfulfilled womanhood, weak husband and death phobia make her neurotic. The novelist uses different images like the window and mirror again and again to show the inner psychic turmoil of Maya's mind. Anita Desais' 'Cry the Peacock' is a great effort towards dealing the psychological problems of an alienated self. Maya's mood, obsessions, dilemmas and abnormality is conveyed effectively through the understanding of Maya's psychology.

         Conclusion

Anita Desai, as a novelist, has least concern for revealing the social and economic problems in her novels. She has devoted creative energy completely to the psychological states of human mind. She finds her way to the inner most region of human psych and explains about that region from where the original ideas of human mind come into operation. Anita Desai works on revealing the different mental states and human psyche of the various characters.