Exploring the Female Psyche in the novels of Anita Desai

Abstract

Anita Desai, an Indian English novelist and short story writer, happens to be a leading
voice in Indian English literature. She is occasionally referred to as an ‘explorer’ of inner life of
her female characters. She is always very conscious about unraveling the inner turmoil and tension
of her female characters. She becomes therefore a recorder of the dilemma faced by an individual
in the Indian urban set up. She gets interested in analysis and portrayal of human relationship. The
novel is essentially a vehicle for delineating human relationships mostly baffling in nature in the
sense that man’s actions and volitions often take to uncertain ways under different situations. Thus
Desai always adopts novel as a vehicle for exploring the inner psyche of the female characters.
There are traces of ‘existentialism’ theories in her novels as her work gives emphasis on the
alienation of man from an ‘absurd’ world, his consequent estrangement from the ‘normal’ society
and his recognition of the world as negative and meaningless–presents the sensitive individual,
fragmented and spiritually destroyed by the particular social conditions of life, a life complex
enough to make him obsessed. All the characters in her novels like Maya, Nirode, Amla, Monisha,
Sita, Sarah, Uma–suffer from a sense of isolation that is not merely physical but also psychic