ST.
XAVIER’S COLLEGE, RANCHI
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (ELL)
SEMESTER V
DISCIPLINE- SPECIFIC ELECTIVE (DSE)- I
CRY, THE PEACOCK
(PDF no. 4- Study material prepared by Prof. Udita Mitra)
Analysis of Cry, the Peacock
Anita Desai’s novel Cry, the Peacock (1963) is a psychological novel that explores
the psychological reality of upper- middle class individuals in contemporary urban India. It
examines human relationships in terms of loneliness (alienation/ isolation), frustration,
disillusionment, and lack of compatibility. It analyses how such complexities can lead to
anxiety, paranoia, neurosis (illogical or excessive fear or anxiety), and, in extreme cases,
psychosis or madness or acute mental breakdown. It pays special attention to sensitive and
intelligent women who struggle for individuality as well as emotional fulfilment in a male-
dominated society. Desai is regarded as the pioneer of the use of psychology in Indian
English fiction. In the words of K.R.S. Iyengar, Desai focuses on the “inner world of
sensibility.” Desai's novels are comparable to Virginia Woolf's novels; like Woolf, Desai
also focuses on exploring the women’s sensibility, and both Desai and Woolf often use the
stream- of- consciousness technique and the interior monologue. Desai follows the maze of
Maya’s observations, feelings, anxieties, memories, dreams, and delirium as Maya descends
into madness by the end of the narrative.
Cry, the Peacock centres around Maya. P.P. Mehta describes Maya as “one of the
finest portrayals of a struggle between sanity and madness.” Maya is a young, married,
childless woman. Maya is intelligent, introvert and hypersensitive. She wants to enjoy every
little thing she can see, hear, smell, touch, and feel. Also, her sensitive nature makes her
vulnerable to anxiety. Maya grew up as an overprotected child with her father. In trying to
protect her, her overprotective father made her childhood “restricted” and “unnatural” and
treated Maya as “a toy princess in a toy world.” Maya could never learn to handle difficult
emotions on her own. She remained psychologically fragile.
Maya’s husband, Gautama, is a middle-aged lawyer. He gives importance only to
ideas and logic. He does not care for the little things in life. He does not try to understand
Maya. He counts her, like many other women, as a “light- headed,” “overbearing,” and
“childish” woman. When alone, he calls her “neurotic” and a “spoilt baby” obsessed with her
father. They are incompatible with each other. K.R.S Iyengar explains it clearly;
What is real to her is shadowing to him, what are facts and hard realities to him have no
interest for her. It is the inner spiritual contact that fails to click.
Marital discord leads to a feeling of utter loneliness and alienation for Maya. She feels
disillusioned with Gautama. Yet, she remains desperate for his companionship. She has no
deep friendships. Her only companion is her pet dog Toto.
Being lonely and hypersensitive, Maya finds it difficult to handle Toto’s death. This
death provokes a “strange unease” in her. This anxiety stems from a childhood experience.
An albino astrologer had predicted that in the fourth year of her marriage, either Maya or her
husband would die a violent death. The lonely Maya becomes obsessed with her anxiety and
fear of death. There is a sense of urgency as she is desperate to escape the possibility of
death. She is full of “a longing, a dread, a search for solution, a despair....” She remembers
the albino astrologer had spoken of peacocks. These birds have intense and rough physical
intimacy. They know that they may die soon after making love, yet, they love passionately.
Their “dance of joy is the dance of death,” just like lord Shiva’s taandav nritya. Shiva’s
taandav is beautiful even though it is the signal of destruction. Maya, too, wants to cry out
like the peacocks. P.P. Mehta writes;
The symbolism of the eerie cry of the peacock deepens the inner turbulence of Maya.
Maya wants to live but she knows that she would possibly die soon. She feels
helpless and looks for a saviour;
“Am I gone insane? Father! Brother! Husband! Who is my saviour? I am in need of one. I
am dying, and I am in love with living… There is no rest any more- only death and waiting.”
Maya seeks escape, sometimes in vivid childhood memories and sometimes in her interior
monologues, dreams, and hallucinations. Her mental turmoil comes out in form of fever,
nightmares, delirium, and “fierce headaches” pounding her mind like drums. As the sense of
taking urgent action overpowers her troubled mind, she now thinks that Gautama should die
as he does not care for the beauty of little moments (not even Toto). He is “a body without a
heart, a heart without a body.” Maya has always felt emotionally neglected with him. He has
given Maya a failed marriage full of “deep, twilit, hopeless regret.”
The storm gives Maya “release from bondage, release from fate, from death and
dreariness and unwanted dreams. Release and liberty.” The storm represents the final
point for Maya’s mental breakdown. In madness, the mind does not care for fear or sin or
morality; the mad mind is free from all concerns. The moment, when she turns fully mad,
has come as she truly decides to murder Gautama. Earlier the moon had represented her fear
of death. Now the moon represents her final will to live by killing Gautama. The moon looks
like a beautiful white rose, full of “purity… chastity… a vast, tender mother love.” Maya
feels one with the pure joy of living. She pushes Gautama off the terrace. He falls and dies.
Maya has gone fully mad.
Cry, the Peacock recreates the sensitive individual’s unending search for
companionship and satisfaction in life. Jasbir Jain comments;
The world of Anita Desai’s novels is an ambivalent one; it is a world where the
central harmony is aspired to but not arrived at, and the desire to love and live clashes- at
times violently with the desire to withdraw and achieve harmony.
This novel explores the psychological struggles brought by the modern social life. It
shows how parenthood, marriage, family, and friendship can fail to acknowledge an
individual’s psychological and emotional needs. One’s loneliness, anxiety and mental agony
can go unnoticed by the near and dear ones. Women, in particular, often become trapped
in unhappy relationships (like marriage) as men often lack compassion, respect, and
understanding towards women. Desai brings these concerns alive with poetic grace, vivid
images, and layered metaphors. Meenakshi Mukherjee praises Desai’s style for its “sensuous
richness, a high strung sensitiveness, and a love for the sounds of the words.”
**********************************************************************
Additional Quotes
Eric Fromm- “To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as
physical starvation leads to death.”
Madhusudan Prasad- Cry, the Peacock “explores the turbulent emotional world of the
neurotic protagonist Maya who smarts under an acute alienation stemming from marital
discord and verges on a curious insanity.”
P.P. Mehta- “Anita Desai seems to excel in drawing tightly strung supersensitive women
whose dissatisfaction with their surroundings leads to tragedy.”
