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The IUP Journal of English Studies :
Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock: A Psychoanalytical Study
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Anita Desai is one of the most powerful and distinguished Indian English novelists. She has an extraordinary sharpness and penetration of vision. Her writings have drawn world-wide critical attention. Anita Desai has added a new dimension to the Indian English fiction: the exploration of human psyche. She is endowed with searching psychological insight and often peeps into the inner recesses of the psyche, rather than merely presenting the outer spectacle of the world; the creative field of imagination is her unfailing reserve. Cry, the Peacock, Anita Desai's first novel, has been described as a trendsetter in the field of psychoanalytical realism. It explores the inner world of the main protagonist, Maya, and demonstrates her fear, insecurity and strange behavior. Through her, she depicts a world of alienation, loneliness and suffering. Maya is described as a hysterical character whose impending tragedy is suggestively foreshadowed, time and again. This paper is an effort to portray the psyche of a woman on the verge of insanity and the factors responsible for that.

 
 
 

Anita Desai is a pioneer in writing psychological novels. She explores the psychic depth of her characters and analyses in detail their motives. Her characters are distinguished by the qualities of introspection, introversion and a refusal to surrender their individual selves. I am interested in characters who are not average but have retreated or have been driven into despair and so turned against or made to stand against the general current. It is easy to flow with the current, it makes no demands, and it costs no efforts. But those who cannot follow it, whose hearts cry the `great no', who fight the current and struggle against it; they know what demands are and what it costs to meet them (Atma Ram, 1983, pp. 21-23).

Cry, the Peacock, the first novel of Anita Desai, is a powerful psychological analysis of Maya, the main protagonist of the story. She is seen as a neurotic, introvert and love-famished character, a victim of the inadequacy of human relationships. Maya's claustrophobia, loneliness and frustration are effectively brought out by the writer. Maya is a hypersensitive young woman "pursued and haunted by the idea of early death prophesied by an albino astrologer and her ineffectual lonely struggle against fate, that drives her to homicide, insanity and finally to suicide" (Meera Bai, 1991, p. 172).

Maya, an introvert and a pampered daughter of a wealthy aristocratic father, is given in marriage to Gautama, a man much older than herself. The novel opens with the death of Maya's pet dog, Toto. In her state of agony and depression, she is reminded of the albino astrologer's prediction that in the fourth year of her marriage, there will be a death, either hers or her husband's. To make herself free from the burden, Maya recedes to her past and fantasizes her childhood days. Fantasy becomes a part of the total structure of the novel and it is constantly projected along with and in contrast to the world of reality. Maya always clings to fantasy, as she is unable to relate herself to reality. Her relationship to reality passes through three different stages—her childhood, marital life and the final stage when she totally surrenders herself to the world of insanity.

 
 
 

Psychoanalytical Study, Indian English fiction, Psychoanalytical realism, Introspection, Introversion, Psychological novels, Child Development, Women Novelists, Psychological research, Anita Desai, Psychological analysis of Maya.