Desai’s Cry the Peacock- A journey to the voiced world

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue V, May 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186

Desai’s Cry the Peacock- A journey to the voiced world

Mrs Jaya Jaiswal¹, Prof (Dr) Anita Kumari²,
¹Research Scholar, Department of English, RKDF University, Ranchi, Jharkhand
²Assistant Professor, Department of English, RKDF University, Ranchi, Jharkhand

Abstract: Women are the marginalised section of the society. But they cannot remain voiceless for long, they have to speak and find an outlet for their tears and fears, anguish and anger, thus register their existence. The voices resisting exploitation are fully aware of their own strength and dignity. The age-old existence of oppression, despair and suffering is common in the lives of marginalized classes across countries and continents. It’s an archaic system that has produced the men who run the country negotiate domestic and foreign policy and penned sexiest laws that made it easier for women to slide through the cracks. Woman is marginalised defined only by her difference from male norms and values in every country and culture. Anita Desai, one of the Indian novelists focussed on women’s situation in Indian society, whose leading voices has given the inner description of women’s inner world, her sensibility, her sulking frustration and the storm raging inside her mind. Her Cry The Peacock, presents the story of a young sensitive girl obsessed by a childhood prophecy of disaster. The novel points the role and contribution of patriarchy and patriarchal values towards misery, suffering, loneliness and unhappiness of women. Desai’s heroine in the novel chooses to remonstrate and fight against the general accepted norms and currents. The thoughts of the women protagonists in the novel are sure to crop up in her struggle to live their desired life. The main focus of the paper is to discuss a journey of a woman who confronts the gender-oriented tradition in search of her true self.

Keywords: Sexual Commodification, Marginalisation, Suffering, Feminine sensibility, Tradition, Limits, Womanhood.

I. INTRODUCTION

Anita Desai’s novel CRY THE PEACOCK is a winner of the Sahitya Academy Award, which was published in 1963. It is a psychological novel, which explores the sensibility and inner working of the heroine Maya married to Gautama, a lawyer who is twice her age, living under a morbid fear of death. Desai focuses on the detached relationship between Maya and Gautama. She has described the failure of marriage between Maya and Gautama. It portrays Maya, a most sensitive woman suffering from neurotic fears and marital disharmony. Maya is a rebel woman who fails to identify herself wither husband Gautama’s world and finds herself alienated from the affection she got from her father and besides her total economic dependence on her husband makes her feel rather insecure and powerless. She is in search of new vista for a woman’s world, a space in which she is at par with man. The whole tragedy of pathos of the pampered rich woman is described in this novel in order to show how bright but brittle foundation of upbringing in such a pampering aristocratic atmosphere crumble at the first

Read More