In Pursuit of Self: A Feminist Reading of Anita Desai’s Cry the Peacock And Voices In The City

Abstract

Anita Desai”s novels convey a sense of universal feminist consciousness. She presents a critical understanding of the communal, cultural and gendered hindrances that her women characters had to go through in their pursuit of self. Alongside subjugation Anita Desai thoughtfully represents the determined quest of the woman characters to fashion a worthwhile reality for themselves. In the light of these arguments the present paper is an attempt to examine and probe the way Desai’s women characters challenge the stereotypical roles and identity imposed on them by the patriarchal social order as they attempt to reconstruct a liberated self- identity for them. For this purpose her two novels Cry the Peacock and Voices in the City are thoroughly studied in this paper.