Symbolism In Anita Desai's Cry, The Peacock

Abstract: Anita Desai’s first novel Cry, The Peacock was published in 1963 and it can be considered a trend –settler. Anita Desai was born in Mussorie on 24th June, 1937. She had Bengali father and German mother. She has lived in metropolitan cities-Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Poona and Chandigarh. She describes these cities in her novels. In the novel cry, the peacock, deals with the psychical rather than with physical aspects of its characters. The chief protagonist Maya is a spoiled and coddled daughter of a wealthy Brahmin. She is married to Gautam, a rather in sensitive, pragmatic and rational advocate. Gautam fails to understand her sensitive nature. She suffers from father obsession. In her childhood, an albino astrologer had foretold

Sometimes she completes and Sometimes she does not completes whatever she perceives. But she knows to select from the vast amount of material and presents it with the help of flash back technique and interior monologues capturing the inner qualities of life. Being a woman novelist she sides more intensely with the heroines of her novels, yet very honestly she presents her heroes too. She does not associate with any feminist movement as she makes it clear that she is concerned with only individual’s men and women. She is only interested in exploration of psychic depths of her characters. In contrast to other novelists of Indian English Fiction such as Raja Rao, M.R.Anand, R.K.Narayan, and Desai use a different set of language to depict the inner crisis and tensions in the lives of her characters. All of her characters are existential, non-political or social. She presents each of them as an unsolved mystery. By using first person narration she allows them to tell his or her tale, but nowhere the reader feels that Anita Desai choses the method of narrating the story to meet the challenging possibilities. A trivial situation or an unimportant incident in her novels evokes subjective and neurotic