cry the peock

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Vol.-I N umber 2 u W interu July-December 2009

Journal of Lit erature, Cultu re and Media St udies


The Feminine Anguish in

Cry, The Peacock

MEENAKSHI ANAND*

UMESH PRASAD**

In the patriarchal society, women have not been seen as the equal

partners. They have been treated as the second-rate members in the

family and the society. Simon e de Beauvoirs observation is very

illuminating and cited in Feminism; Theory. Criticism, Analysis : The

situation of woman is that shea free and autonomous being like allcreaturesnevertheless finds herself living in a world where men

compel her to assum e the status of the other. (33) She has been

given away to a new master in a new h ouse where she is not allowed

to show her preferences. Her new master handles her in the way

he likes. It does not occur to him that she is a living being and as

such she has her own desires, aspirations and dreams. Her cries go

unheard and her pain goes unfelt. But enough is enough. Time

comes when her anguish becomes too pronounced to submit to

repr ession. It man ifests itself in trau ma, suicide and death. This

symptom generally remains unnoticed by male writers, but female

writers x-ray the genuine feminine anguish. It is an integral part of

their lives. Anita Desais two novels Cry, The Peacock an d Voices in

the City depict the inner climate, the climate of sensibility that rumbles

like thund er and sud denly blazes forth like lightning. It is more

compelling than the outer weather, the physical geography or the

visible action. Since her preoccupation is with the inner world of

sensibility rather than the outer world of action, she has tried to forgethe style, supple and suggestive enough to convey the fever and

fretfulness of the stream of consciousness of her principal characters.

Maya is a motherless child but her father showers all his love

on her. She has been brought up as a princess : As a child, I enjoyed,

princesslike, a sumptuous fare of the fantasies of theArabian N ights,

the glories and bravado of Indian mythology, long and astounding

tales of the princes and regal queens .... (41)

* P.G. Dept. of English Naland a College, Biharshari N alanda (Bihar)

** Head , Dept of English, SPM College, Uda ntp rui, Biharshar if (Bihar)

The princess of the toy is married to an imaginatively starved,

emotionally barren and cool headed, middle aged man, Gautama.

Gautama, a brilliant ambitious and serious-minded lawyer, leaves

Maya emotionally and spiritually starved and insecured. Perhaps

their great difference in age worked as a big gap in their lives. Her

problems are not physical but psychical. They originate and exist

because of the incompatibility of temp eramen ts. Maya is roma ntic

and hu ngry for love wh ereas Gautama is realistic and cold. Sensitive

as the legendary pumpkin wine, she is threatened to dry up at the

mere show of a finger and is unable to differentiate between the

desirable and the plausible. Instead of comforting her in her grief

over the death of a pet dog, Toto, Gautama is concerned with a cup

of tea. He considers the pet dog insignificant and rep laceable. He

is unable to comprehen d the value of emotional attachment. As Maya

is a childless woman, she loves Toto more than people in general

love their pets. She saw its eyes open and staring still, screamed

and rushed to the garden tap to wash the vision from her eyes,

continued to cry and ran defeated, into the house. (7). She wants

Toto to be buried in a befitting manner. The death of her pet dog

remind s her of loneliness. She had to bear in the early parts of her

life : It was not my pets death alone that I mourned today, but

another sorrow, unremembered, perhaps, as yet not even experienced,

and filled me with this despair. (13) The pets death sh atters Maya

beyond measure. She is left alone in the world of frustration and

disappointment. No one w ill come to console her. Everyone has his

or her ow n fad. So she tells Gautama, Oh, Gautam a, pets might not

mean anything to you, and yet they mean th e world to me. (19) This

irks him and he says, You go chattering like a monkey and I am

annoyed that I have been interrupted in my thinking. (20)

Toto was insignificant for Gautama whereas it was everything

for Maya with which she shared her pains and pleasures andremov ed her loneliness. This reminds us of Mulk Raj Anan ds story

The Parrot in the Cage where the parrot is the fate of his mistress,

Rukma niai, and the suffering huma nity. His cries for liberation lead

to an aggravation of suffering.

Gautama i s de tached , ph i losophica l , ra t iona l and

inconsiderate. His constant harping on detachment as preached in

The Bhagvad Gita and his discouraging response to her requests and

suggestions including the desire to go to the hill station and see

Kathakali dances points to an attitudinal and temperamental difference

between the two :

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If only we could go away for the summer, I sighed,

lethargically, breaking my promise never to say such things

to Gautama who had never been able to go away for the

summer till he married me, and then refused to do so ...

I cried, tearfully, and rose from my pillows to hold and draw

him into my own orbit of thought and feeling, yet not daring

to make the bold, physical move. You dont imagine I would

go without you? Leaving you behind in the heat? ... Dont

speak like what, in Gods name? (38-39)

There is no place for Maya in the world of Gautama. He neither

und erstands her nor wishes her to enter his world. Thus his world

is totally strange to Maya : On his part, understanding was scant,

love was meagre (89.) Maya, a childless woman and having novocation to pursue, finds herself in utter suffocating loneliness. She

always longs to be with her husband.

Gautama treats Maya as a child and she resents it. Once

both of them were walking together and Maya talked of the flower,

Gautam plucked it and gave it to Maya saying, Who should deny

you that? he said, and smiled at me as to a winsome child. (102)

Then in the debate, Maya said, And you will think me a tiresome

child for it, for showing what you once called my third-rate poetesss

mind... (96)Maya realizes that she is not as h elpless and depend ent

as a child. She is as much competent as man. Gautamas treatment

of Maya as a child pains her much because she wants to liberate

herself from the ages of old guard ian-child chain. This remind s us

of the agony and rage of Indu in Roots and Shadows where Indu

expresses her resentment at Narens declaration about his going :

Going? Why did I feel at once like a deserted abandoned

child? Why did it always have to be some one else for me?I felt foolishly ridiculously angry, like a pampered child

suddenly left on its own, finding out that grown ups have

other and more engrossing interests after all. (161)

Anita Desai has an insight into human psyche. Maya has

father-fixation and cannot relate with her husband on equal basis.

Having lived a carefree life under the indulgent attentions of her

loving father, Maya desires to have a similar attention from her

husband. When Gautama, a busy, prosperous lawyer, too much

engrossed in his vocational affairs, fails to meet her demands, she

feels neglected and miserable. Mayas dissatisfaction with marriage

makes her d epressive. When Gautam a sees her morbidity increasing,

he warns her against turning neurotic and blames her father for

spoiling her : He is the one responsible for thisfor making you

believe that all that is important in the world is to possess, possess

riches, comforts, posies, dollies, loyal retainersall the luxuries of the

fairy tales, you were brought up on. Life is a fairy tale to you still.

(98) Later, finding her situation unnatural, he attributes it to her

father fixation :

If you knew your Freud i t would a l l be very

straightforward, and then appear as merely inevitable to you

taking your childhood an d u pbringing into consideration. You

have a very obvious fatherobsessionwhich is also the

reason why you married me, a man so much older than

yourself. It is a complex that, unless you mature rapidly, you

will not be able to deal with, to distroy. (122)

The reason for Mayas obsession is, however, not only the

father-fixation factor though it intensifies her traged y. Four years of

marriage without children or vocation is the other factor which leads

Maya to her insanity. The death of her pet dog aggravates her mental

condition. It makes her increasingly conscious of the mysterious

workin g of destiny. Gautam as rational mind initially fails to suspect

it. When he realizes it, it is too late to mend . He is totally indifferent

and insensitive to natural beauty, smells, colours, and sounds in the

way so characteristic of Mr Ramsay in To The Lighthouse. Maya

realizes : Already w e belonged to separated w orlds, and his seemed

the earth th at I loved so, scented with Jasmine, coloured with liquor,

resounding with poetry and warmed by amiability. It was mine that

was hell. Torture, guilt, dread, imprisonmentthese were the fourwalls of my private hell, one that no one could survive in long. Death

was certain. (88) It is not that Gautama and Maya have never tried

to understand each other, they are prevented by a nameless barrier.

The terrifying wordsunnatural death four years after her marriage

to either husband or wifeprophesied by the astrologer ring in her

ear and unnerve her like the drumbeats of the mad demon of

Kathakali ballets. She knows that she is haunted by a black and

evil shadow of her fate, and the time has come And four years

it was now, we had been married four years ... I knew the time had

come. It was now to be either Gautama or I. (32) This long-

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forgotten, but now newly remembered, prophecy acts upon Maya

with the same force of inevitability as the prophecy of the witches

acts upon Macbeth. Gautama dismisses the possibility of stars

influencing human lives but the terror persists deep in Mayas

consciousness and paralyzes more and more the normal motions

of her mind and heart. Her mother is dead , her brother, Arjuna,

is in New York, and she herself has fled down the corridor of years

(82) from the embrace of protection in her dear fathers house in

Lucknow to the embrace of Gautamas love. But her fate has been

pursuing her all the time, and the final, the decisive year has her

in its grip. Neither Gautam as nor her own family can help her

now. Perhaps Gautama can rescue her from it in time but he is a

prisoner in his own shell. In her own eyes, she is as one doomedalready.

The loving attention of her father makes Maya oblivious of

the deadly shadow, but as her husband Gautama knew nothing that

concerned her. (9) She is left to the solitude and silence of the house

which prey upon her. Temperamentally, there is no compatibility

between Maya and Gautama. Maya has a romantic love for the

beautiful, the colourful and the sensuous. Gautama is no romantic

(26) and has no use for flowers (24). Maya is a creature of instinct

(16), a wayward and high-strung child (48). As symbolised by her

name she stands for nothing but an illusion. (172), a wayward and

child (53). Gautamas name, on the other hand, symbolises

asceticism, detachment from life. He is realistic and practical. He has

philosophical detachment towards life as preached in the Bhagwad

Gita. (120) Such irreconcibably different temperam ents are bou nd to

have marital disharmony.

Mayas predicament is to come to terms with the astrologers

prediction and to enjoy the moments of life on earth with her practical

minded h usband. But she, as a creature of song, dance and flowers

meets with the situation which is beyond her control, and consequently

goes mad. Therefore, R.S. Sharm a has rightly pointed ou t that most

of her problems as a fiction writer begin with her insistence on too much

style on too small a canvas. (167)

Mayas feelings about Gautama are revealed through her

words. To her, his hand appears as cool and dry as the bark of

an old shad y tree. (22) Maya reveals her neu rotic mind through the

appropr iate use of words, Wild horse, white horse, galloping up

paths of tone, flying away into the distance, the wild hills. The

heights, the dizzying heights of my mountains, towering tapering

edged with cliff-edges, founded on rock... Danger ! (150)

The vocabulary is more violent, diseased and evil. The sentence

structure is more abrupt and broken. There are many exclamatory and

interrogatory phrases. The ph ilosophic generalization merges with a

personal anguish as in the case of Gautama.

The novelist depicts the cry of an agonised woman feeling

lonely and u nwanted . Maya suffers acutely. She clings more and

more to him, intrigued by his arrogance. She mu st keep herself intact

despite the ever-widening inner division. She can achieve this. She

emerges herself with him. Unconsciously, she surrend ers to him. Thewisdom to surrender to a stronger personality is inherent in a

morbidly dependent character. Maya is helpless, suffering, humble,

loving and h ence lovable. Her expansive traits remain sup pressed in

her unconsciousness, because she does not want to master her life.

Before marr iage father was there on w hom she externalised, and felt

strong in his strength; now there is Gautama. For Maya, both father

and husband are magic helpers to protect her from a feeling of

inadequacy.

As a morbidly dependent person, Maya cannot express her

rage openly. That would not be commensurate with her self-image

of a loving and selfless individual. So she hides her aggressive traits

behind her self-effacing and self-minimising process. She projects

herself as a helpless, suffering martyr, a childless woman, gripped

by the misfortune of her pets death. Her act of pillow-beating and

crying piteously is what Horney terms the shrinking process

wherein she sees herself as a helpless child. These initial expressions

lead to self-pity. Psychomatic systems like splitting head aches andfever, followed delirium, occur Maya becomes vindictive when

finally the self alienates itself from the real centre, and self-hate

takes hold.

Self-hate is the logical outcome of a conflict between

Mayas pride system and her real self. It is a war between th e healthy

and neurotic forces, i.e. between constru ctive and d estructive elements.

Karen Horney calls the central inner conflicts.(56)

Anita Desai presents Mayas conflict using mirror imagery.

As she grazes in the mirror, she sees her own body detached itself

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Vol.-I Number 2 u W interu July-December 2009

from her soul and float away, to rest upon the dim mirror where I gaze

upon it from a cool distance. (90) This detached body is glorified itself

and the thing it is served from is the actual self. Maya studies her

reflection in the mirror.

In sum, the key to understanding Mayas character lies in

comp rehend ing her divided self. There is no attempt on her part

at self-analysis to comprehend her demands. The fast withering self

and the receding contact with the outer world, leave the core of her

integrity impaired. Her failure to find life and more of it, becomes

an ap pallying crime. She cond emns Gau tama to death for it and then,

burdened with guilt, and haunted by self-contempt, self-accusation

and self-hate, she drags herself into the complete darkness of the

world of the insane.The dance of the peacock has an intense personal significance

for Maya as the peacocks destroy each other though madly in love.

Maya thinks of her married life with Gautama as a deadly struggle

in which one is destined to kill the other. Rebuffed by her husband,

Maya is turn between her love of life and her fear of death. The

gradual disintegration of her personality is very powerfully dramatised.

She is deeply stricken with the sense of loneliness and insecurity :

God, now I was caught in the net of the inescapable, and

where lay the possibility of mercy, of release? This net was

no hallucination, no .... Am I gone insane? Father! Husband!

Who is my saviour? I am in need of one. I am dying, and

I am in love with living. I am in love, and I am dying. God,

let me sleep, forget , rest. But, no, Ill never sleep again . There

is no rest any moreonly death and waiting. (84)

References

Bande, Usha, 1988. The Novels of Anita Desai. New Delhi : Prestige Books.

Desai, Anita, 2006. Cry, the Peacock. Delhi : Orient Paperbacks.

Deshpande, Shashi. 1983, Roots and Shadows. Hydrabad : Orient Paperbacks.

Sharma, R.S., 1981. Anita Desai. ArnoldHeinemann, New Delhi.

Singh, Sushila, 1970. Recent Trends in Feminist Thought : A Tour de

Horizon Feminism : Theory, Criticism, Delhi : Analysis.

Pencraft International.

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