IDENTITY AND FEMININITY IN ANITA DESAI'S FICTION

Author(s): Renu Juneja

Source: Journal of South Asian Literature , Summer, Fall 1987, Vol. 22, No. 2, ESSAYS
ON INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH (Summer, Fall 1987), pp. 77-86
Published by: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University

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Renu Juneja

IDENTITY AND FEMININITY IN ANITA DESAI'S FICTION

Feminine personae in two works

Anita Desai's fiction seeks to unravel the complex responses of middle-

class women to their domestic world, a world of web-like associations with
parents, husband, siblings, and children. Such a task involves confronting
feminine stereotypes of Indian culture. How Desai handles these stereotypes
becomes an index of her intentions, and, I would argue, even a measure of her
success. A self-conscious writer who is aware of her difference as a female
novelist, Desai pursues several strategies, often within the same novel. She
represents some women as molded by cultural norms, passively suffering the
limitations such norms impose. With other women, Desai so renders their inner
lives that cultural formulations about gender seem to have little bearing on
their subjective reality. Their problems, we are to assume, have a human
dimension beyond the bounds of gender. So determined is Desai to represent
the issues confronted by these women as androgynous that she also offers men
with similar responses and following a similar course of action. She also
depicts women who consciously rebel against and reject socially sanctioned
codes of feminine behavior. Finally, in a significant departure with Clear
Light of Day, Desai offers women who, in searching for autonomy, achieve inde-
pendence through affirmation of some stereotypical ly feminine aspect of per-
sonality. In so doing, Desai frees herself from those recurrent explorations
of extremes of feminine sensibility which had become her dominant mode in ear-
lier fiction.

Until Clear Light of Day , the women dominating Desai's fiction are vari-
ations of a recognizable type. They are sensitive, sometimes intensely emo-
tional, always misfits within their world, and struggling to preserve their
integrity in face of the demands made on them. Trapped in a repressive cul-
ture or an insular family, these women attempt to retain autonomy through two
typical responses: they withdraw into a subjective world, often acting in ways
society must deem neurotic or even mad; or they cultivate a coldness and
detachment, refusing, for self-preservation, to give of themselves. With
Clear Light of Day, a strong, individualized female protagonist achieves tran-
scendence over inner division and social restrictions through celebration of
her nurturing feminine self, through acceptance and accommodation rather than
withdrawal and rejection. To establish the uniqueness of this achievement in
Clear Light of Day, I begin with Voices in the City as my basis for compari-
sons. This second novel shares with others a sensitive, introverted woman as
one of its central characters. But it also offers a wider range of women and
attitudes, and it alone explores in depth the psyche of a young man, thus
allowing us to isolate what Desai regards as quintessential^ feminine.

All three protagonists of Voices in the C¿t¿/--Monisha, Amia, and Nirode--

struggle for autonomy and individuation, and while their quest is similar and
they are bonded by blood, for each the struggle is intensely lonely and very
private. Such isolation, even when surrounded by family and friends, is typi-
cal in Desai. Also typically, development and freedom are seldom thwarted by
economic constraints. Distinctive of this novel, however, is Desai's attempt
to suggest that the problems confronted by the characters are not gender-
specific. I say "attempt" because the issue is a confusing one. On the one
hand, the circumstances that trap Monisha clearly derive from roles assigned
to women in a traditional Indian household; her inherent passivity, as well,
seems a stereotypical ly feminine trait. On the other hand, Monisha's

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hypersensitivity and her refusal to share her self with others, born out of
her fear of violation of that inner self, also characterize her brother,
Nirode. The novel ends with Nirode asserting the identity of his struggle
with Monisha's and finding in her death an inspiring resolution to his own
dilemmas. Desai is obviously striving to universalize the predicament of the
sensitive feminine temperament into a kind of existential anxiety. But in so
doing, she negates the yery difference of feminine perspective and psychology
which has been the source of her artistic strength.

Monisha's predicament is a familiar one in Desai 's fiction, shared in

some measure by Maya in Cry, the Peacock, Sita in Where Shall We Go This Sum-
mer? and Nanda in Fire on the Mountain. These women find themselves trapped
in marriages where they are temperamentally incompatible with husbands and in-
laws. They have refined, inward-looking, nervous sensibilities, while the men
are invariably insular, complacent, or even vulgar. Indian society may regard
marriage as a rite confirming secure identity on the woman, but for these
women it only offers annihilation of their truest self.

Monisha has been married into a family and to a man that her aunt, a go-
between, had reported to the parents as "completely unsuitable to Monisha's
tastes and inclinations." The aunt hints that the parents, although aware of
the incompatibility, deliberately marry Monisha to Jiban in order to curb what
they regarded as her "morbid inclinations" (199). Like Amia, we must view the
situation as "criminally unfair" (199). Monisha cannot learn to resign her-
self to this marriage or learn to love the boring nonentity who is her hus-
band. "There is no love in my relationship with Jiban," Monisha muses, "which
is filled only by loneliness and a desperate urge to succeed" (135).

There is even a greater incompatibility with other women of the joint

household with whom Monisha is forced to share her life. Occupied in domestic
work that she regards as meaningless drudgery- -cutting vegetables, serving
food- -Moni sha must listen to her mother-in-law recount the "remarkably many
ways of cooking fish, of being Jiban's wife" (111-12). Her wardrobe is full
of books, a freakish oddity to her sisters-in-law, who lie on her bed chatter-
ing about the number of saris that hang in theirs. She imagines, rightly,
that they perceive her as a dangerous infidel "who ought never to have been
allowed into this stronghold of practicality and chatter. I am too silent for
them, I know: they all distrust silence" (119).

Denied the privacy she craves, Monisha finds herself totally alienated
from those around her: "I am alone here" (136). Her choices for escape are
limited. She cannot return to her mother about whom her feelings are ambiva-
lent: "My relationship with mother ... is filled with an inbred and invalid
sense of duty, of honour, of concern. Besides, she is too whole and complete
in herself to need our little offerings" (135-36). Apprehension about social
consequences fuels these doubts: "Her [mother's] disapproval I could adapt my
self to, but it is her disgrace in which I will not involve myself" (139).
Nor does she have the option to sublimate her dissatisfaction through absorp-
tion with children. Monisha is barren. Unable to achieve autonomy, Monisha
retreats to morbid introversion. The Bhagvad Gita' % message of detachment is
interpreted by her as a denial of all connection. So she records in her
diary: "Tracei ess, meaningless, uni nvol ved- -does this not amount to non-
existence" (140). Having confronted her non-existence, her inner numbness
when she fails to respond to the powerful music of the street singer, Monisha
commits suicide.

While Monisha is passive, hers is not the subjugated consciousness of the

typical, traditional Bengali woman. Monisha may share their existence but she
does not share their attitudes; in fact, she views them with detached irony
mingled with compassion: "I see many women . . . who follow five paces behind

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their men. They wear saris of the dullest colours ... like the female birds
in the cages, and there is something infinitely gentle, infinitely patient
about their long eyes" (120). Being so aware, possessing so powerful a stub-
bornness, why cannot Monisha rebel? This is a question Amia too asks within
the novel. Desai seems to suggest that Monisha's response is rooted in a par-
ticular kind of feminine temperament. While introversion leading to disinte-
gration of personality is not in itself gender-related, it is, nevertheless, a
likely consequence of feminine vulnerability.

Of course, not all women are equally vulnerable, and in Amia, the inde-
pendent younger sister, Desai offers the rebel who consciously opposes the
confinement of traditional female roles. Amia arrives in Calcutta relishing
the idea of pursuing a career as a commercial artist, even though she is aware
that her job will not involve her deepest self. She is unconventional enough
to fall in love with a married artist, and in her ability to reach out and
connect with other people she is very different from her emotionally stunted
sister and brother. Calcutta may infect her with a desire for secrecy, but
she is naturally expansive and communicative, quick and unstinting in her con-
cern and compassion. Amia needs friends, needs reciprocation. "I never could
avoid them [friends],11 she tells Monisha (196).

Her relationship with Dharma is a curious one, and, as is typical in

Desai, unfulfilling. For one, it is denuded of sexual ity--another norm in
Desai 's fiction, where the experience of the outer world, and not relation-
ships, is resonant with sensuality. Sexual passion, when it appears, is asso-
ciated with the vulgar and the decadent, like Jit's wife, Sarla--"a voluptuous
porpoise of ebony flesh" (34). Then, too, we sense that Dharma is using her
vitality and her love to feed his development as an artist. Whatever the
appeal of the mysterious, meditative Dharma as a human being in relationship
with others, he is oddly self -centered and inadequate. He has cast out his
fifteen-year-old daughter for making an alliance he dislikes. He perceives
nothing shameful in having imposed his decision on his wife, Gita Devi, when
this nearly destroys her sanity and empties her life of all joy. His self-
righteous declarations that he has never regretted moving away from Calcutta
for his wife's sake and that he will continue to protect her from associations
she finds painful are crass enough to jolt even the lovesick Amia to the
reality of the situation. She leaves feeling "emptied out, frangible and
exhausted" (231).

Gita Devi represents what Amia or Monisha can never be: the traditional
wife. Constantly sublimating her unhappiness through prayer, Gita Devi is the
long-suffering wife that Indian tradition venerates. She cannot share her
husband's intellectual life, but she is self-denying enough to leave him
undisturbed to pursue his art and his friendships. And though she has been
rendered childless by her husband's willful act, her motherhood is still the
most passionate fact of her existence: "Nothing ever distracted her attention
from our daughter, and it still does not" (229).

The novel offers not a single fulfilling male-female relationship.

Desai, of course, does not intend her work to be a polemic against men,
because she suggests that men, too, can be diminshed by marriage. Within t
novel, Nirode's violent rejection of marriage as destructive is related to his
attempt to keep his spirit inviolate. Yet in so broadening and neutering the
issue of marriage, Desai creates a problem for her readers. It is easy enough
to see how the sensitive of either sex may fear the demands, the proprietori-
ness, and the obligations that often accompany marriage and threaten attempts
by either partner to secure an autonomous self. The confusion arises because
there is no equival ance in the causes which motivate this fear in men and
women. Desai firmly grounds women's difficulties either in responses associ-
ated with feminine sensibility or in social conditions perpetuated by a

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patriarchal culture. Hence there is fair amount of correspondence in the
experience of her exceptional women. However, with a man like Nirode this
rejection of marriage is a highly individual matter, a quirk of personality
shaped by a peculiar case history, rather than a universal human, response.

Nirode's quest for detachment and emancipation causes him to withdraw

from all relationships. But his distrust of love is also rooted in his
Oedipal feelings for his mother. It is difficult to sort out these motiva-
tions, specially because we are asked to acknowledge a metaphysical dimension
to Nirode's quest. That is why the novel's conclusion is so puzzling.
Despite the superficial similarity, Monisha and Nirode are widely separated in
the causes of the disintegration. Are we called upon to be ironic over
Nirode's rapture at Monisha's suicide as an emblem of "the vigilance of heart
and conscience," a "celebration of the death of a saint" (248-49)? The tone
of these passages does not augur such irony. Yet Monisha dies screaming
"No! No!" as if, at the moment of her death she has recognized her suicide as
a failure. And what must we make of Ami a7 s response? Amia, the only person
capable of freely caring for others learns caution from Monisha's death, and
resolves to avoid "what lay on the other side of this stark, uncompromising
margin" (248). Not she, but Nirode, the emotional recluse, suddenly finds
himself liberated into caring and touching. These enigmatic transformations
overburden the novel with a meaning that Desai's gender-specific analysis of
Monisha's condition cannot sustain.

Nirode's final vision of his mother as Goddess Kali, now also identified
with the city of Calcutta, provides an equally unsatisfactory resolution. We
sense that the mother is unconventional and strong; despite her absorption in
children, she has succeeded in keeping her inner self inviolate. Amia jokes
about how she has made a fetish out of motherhood (141). Yet to Monisha, and
more so to Nirode, her dedication to motherhood is a kind of devouring. So
Nirode seeks independence from what he regards as the "warm, enveloping suc-
cubus" of mother love (37). He will not respond to her letters nor accept any
financial help from her. Underlying this resentment of the children is the
recognition that their mother exists in herself and by herself beyond their
lives. "She is too whole and complete," as Monisha muses, to need her
children.

Ami a' s disclosures to Dharma about her parents indicate that the coldness
of the mother may well have been an adaptive strategy to an incompatible mar-
riage. A high-caste Bengali family has arranged an out-of -caste marriage for
financial reasons. Amia remembers her mother crying, as well as the "terrible
contempt and resentment in her eyesyn when she looked at her husband (207).
She remembers her mother cooking marvellous dishes which her father rejected
or the musical soirees the artistic mother arranged during which the father
drank himself to sleep. An indolent, uncouth man, "My father always got on
her nerves by simply never doing anything" (206). Apparently, the mother res-
ponded by withdrawing and forgetting him; she "deliberately shut her mind to
him by concentrating it on flowers and music and fine food, things he shunned"
(208). Such experiences have shaped the mother into an ambiguous person-
warm-hearted, impulsive, instinctive but also self-absorbed and with a "cold,
frosty love of power" (209).

Nirode's sex-nausea, his grotesque imaginings of his mother's involvement

with her neighbor, Major Chadha, can thus be seen as the male child's response
to this essential self -containment of his mother. Such a reading is confirmed
by the mother's guilt and recognition that her strategy to survive intact in
spirit may have been practiced at the expense of the children. In a letter,
she regrets having retreated to Kalimpong, her "lifelong ivory tower." She
recognizes that her "secluded paradise . . . seems to have no channel of com-
munication to your very real and rough lives in the city" (201-202). Also, we

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are never sure of the truth of Nirode's accusations because Amia challenges
his vision of the mother's relationship with Major Chadha. We can speculate
how a sensitive boy, so "devoted to [his] mother" during childhood (191), is
now driven to assert his independence by rejecting that relationship. We can
recognize the inner logic which now makes him imagine that love as emasculat-
ing both for himself and his father: "the love that made her swallow father
whole, like a cobra swallows a fat, petrified rat, then spews him out in one
flabby yellow mess" (190). Nevertheless, as Amia confirms for us, there is
something morbid and insane in Nirode's rantings. The problem arises when
Desai endorses Nirode's vision of the mother as Goddess Kali as the final one
in the novel .

The mother as Xali is both generative and destructive, "the goddess and
the demon are one" (255). "Isn't it perfect and inevitable," says Nirode to
Amia, "that she should pour blood into our veins when we are born, and drain
it from us when we die?" (256). Ami a' s repeated insistence that she is moth-
er, "that is all," Desai projects as a weak, defensive manoeuver. Throughout
the novel, Amia has seen the mother as an individual shaped by particulars of
her existence. At the novel's end she tries to assert the normality of her
relationship with her mother by going to the mother's room in search of mut
comfort at Monisha's death, hoping that the mother will be willing "to gather
Amia to her breast" (255). Instead she is coldly rejected. Nirode's vision
of the mother as some kind of abstract, primeval force is affirmed.

It is impossible to see the relevance of this archetype to a portrait

hitherto rendered with fine psychological and social particularity. Nor does
Desai seem cognizant of the inherent patriarchal bias of this myth of the
devouring mother born out of male fears of the woman's sexual rapacity. Desai
has merely avoided, not resolved, the problem of representing her very valid
insight that, contrary to cultural expectations, motherhood is not a simple,
fulfilling experience for the woman. She takes up the issue again in two suc-
ceeding novels. Sita, in Where Shall We Go This Summer? and Nanda, in Fire on
the Mountain, offer searing and complex denials of obligations of mother-
hood. Clear Light of Day continues these familiar preoccupations but also
offers some new responses. And given the seeming impossibility, in Desai 's
fictional world, for women to reconcile their feminine capacity to nurture
with their desire for autonomy, Bim's and Tara's relatively well -integrated
personalities in clear Light of Day must provoke comment. In particular, we
must ask what precisely differentiates Bim and Tara from Desai 's previous
heroines? What elements of personality secure their wholeness and assure them
some measure of fulfillment in an otherwise repressive situation?

As personality types--the strong, rebellious woman and the insecure,

introverted one--the two sisters are easily recognizable from Desai 's previous
fiction. Their experience of childhood has been typically festering and
messy. Yet now family life also has the ability to sustain not merely stif-
fle, to connect individuals in meaningful relationships. This duality of fam-
ily life is most vividly captured in the image of the house where this drama
unfolds. The house is constricting and decayed but also a refuge. Because it
allows her to focus on relationships, the house--and the family within it--
offers Desai a more satisfactory symbol for the duality of women's experience
than the archetype of Goddess Kali in Voices in the City. Conversely, the
limited role with an inner strength frees some women from the spurious iden-
tity of accepted social roles or the more dangerous Odysseys into the self,
leading to madness or self-annihilation.
Desai has not retreated into a sentimental vision of the family, for the
picture remains as disturbing and scathing as before. The parents of Tara and
Bim, in their indifference and self-absorption, have left the children emo-
tionally destitute. They exist in a shadowy off-stage, unseen and unconnected

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to the children. The father is described as a "man who appeared to deal with
both family and business by following a policy of neglect" (52). The severely
diabetic mother "either sat at the card table, playing, or lay very still on
her bed, with a suffering face tilted upwards in warning so that . . . [the
children] did not dare approach" (102). When Baba is unexpectedly born to her
in middle age, she soon "tired of carrying him about . . . became restless,
spoke of her bridge four; 'My bridge is suffering,' she complained" (103).
When she dies, the children feel nothing, only guilt at their lack of feel-
ing. "It was a little difficult for the children to remember always that she
was not at the club . . . but dead" (54). So, too, with the death of the
father: "How little difference his death made to the household-they were so
accustomed to his absence that it was but a small transition from the tempo-
rary to the permanent" (64).

This void has, to some extent, been filled by their widowed aunt, Mira-
masi , summoned to look after the retarded Baba, but becoming very quickly a
surrogate mother for all the children. Through Aunt Mira, Desai offers yet
another dimension of the cruelty of Indian families, particularly towards
women who exist merely as appendages to their men. Married at twelve and wid-
owed at fifteen while still a virgin, Aunt Mira has been shunned as bad luck
and made to pay for her "guilt" by becoming a domestic slave, a "maid of all
work" (104). Premature aged, growing "shabbier and skinnier and seedier" with
use (104), she is discarded to another household when no longer indispensable.

This "cracked pot, torn rag, picked bone" (108), Aunt Mira, becomes the
sustaining center in the lives of the children. "To the children she was
... a tree that can be counted on not to pull up its roots and shift in the
night. She was the tree that grew in the centre of their lives and in whose
shade they lived" (110). Desai extends the image of the tree to represent
what the experience of mothering felt like to Aunt Mira. Given her desperate
situation as an unwanted widow, a life emptied of love and meaning, this new
vocation can only be fulfilling. As the children crowd around her, she sees
them as a "protective railing about her. Now no one could approach, no
threat, no menace" (111). The children's possessiveness is reassuring: "They
owned her and yes, she wanted to be owned" (111). There is something positive
and natural about her giving of herself, for to stand alone "was not her way
any more than the way of nature." A few lines later, the sentiment is
repeated in a subtly altered form: "she would give in without any sacrifice of
will --it seemed in keeping with nature to do so: (111; italics added).

With that "seemed," Desai has introduced a doubt which at the moment Aunt
Mira is unwilling to acknowledge. Despite the mutual need, Aunt Mira is
likely to be smothered, "choked," and "sucked . . . dry of substance" by her
mothering role until she becomes "just the old log, the dried mass of roots on
which they [the children] grew" (111). Later, when her consciousness is frac-
tured through alcoholism, Aunt Mira has a nightmare vision: "A drudge in her
cell, sealed into her chamber. A grey chamber, woven shut. Here she lived,
here she crawled . . . from cell to cell, feeding the fat white larvae that
. . . swelled on the nourishment she brought them" (89). "The children must
have their milk," but Aunt Mira dreams of herself as being starved- -"leave a
little for me, please, just a drop" (90). She becomes identified in her mind,
as well as Bim's and ours, with the bridal cow, the quintessential mother for
Indians, drowned in the well, tumbling down to the drink that nourishes and
annihilates. Significantly, Bim, too, will be haunted by thoughts of drowning
in the well when she finds herself inwardly chaffing at her role as the sus-
tainer of the family. And in her own need for solitude, Bim will also come to
recognize Aunt Mira's need. "Perhaps that was what Aunt Mira had needed . . .
they had never allowed her to be alone, never stopped pursuing her . . . for a
minute" (173).

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 Desai apprehends the cultural manifestations of motherhood in their full
complexity. If mothering can devour the mother, it can also diminish chil-
dren. The mother may exploit her self-sacrifice to manipulate the children.
The exploitation so unsatisfactorily imaged in the devouring Goddess Kali
of Voices in the city is much more plausibly and comically rendered in Mrs.
Biswas, the mother of Bim's hapless suitor, Dr. Biswas. Aptly, Mrs. Biswas
has made a fetish of feeding her child. If/Eat a little, Shona,' she coaxed in
a discontented mutter like a pigeon's." And when he refuses to oblige, she
limps away from the table. "Earlier she had not limped, Bim notices, "it was
his not eating that brought on her limp" (91). Complaining variously about
her dead husband, her painful arthritis, and the servant boy who has run away,
Mrs. Biswas summons attention to her perpetual martyrdom. Her gift for load-
ing her self-sacrifices onto others that Bim finds so distasteful functions
both as a manipulative device and as a means of ratifying her identity as a
long-suffering woman and mother.

Desai' s most determined challenge to cultural stereotypes of motherhood

stimulates her to create in Tara and Bim more unusual versions of the nur-
turing woman. Tara is traditional, a woman waiting for marriage as her
destiny. Yet she also has a quiet inner intensity and passion we must imagine
lacking in her more common counterparts like the Misra girls. Indeed, in her
shrinking tremulousness, Tara has much in common with Desai' s earlier nervous
and agitated heroines who are so appalled by ordinary domesticity that they
withdraw into complete inwardness. Tara avoids this neurotic, subjective
indulgence, but she also avoids the other extreme of complete loss of autonomy
and individuality. She is able to do this, Desai seems to suggest, both
because of her inner vitality and the fulfillment she achieves as a mother.
Tara is Desai' s portrait of an unfulfilled wife yet a contented mother, a com-
mon Indian type but here transfigured because free of all hints of self-
sacrifice and obsessive absorption with or vicarious fulfillment through
children.

Much younger than her vigorous and outgoing brother and sister, Tara,
even in her maturity, remains somewhat child-like and vulnerable. She is eas-
ily distressed, for instance, at Bim's careless crumbling of a rose in full
bloom (2). Her childhood memories evoke similar discomforts. Thus, she had
hated school where she had felt exposed and defenseless. She is so morbidly
sensitive to ugliness and pain that the weekly rounds of charity wards to dis-
tribute fruit make her physically sick (126). At home, though comforted by
Aunt Mira, she feels similarly excluded from the life of her siblings:
"Throughout her childhood, she had always stood on the outside of that en-
closed world of love and admiration in which Bim and Raja moved" (26). While
Bim and Raja dream of becoming heroes when they grow up, all Tara desires is
domesticity and motherhood: "I am going to be a mother and knit for my bab-
ies," she declares to her outraged and scornful brother and sister (112).

Predictably, then, when Tara arrives home with Bakul one night, Bim
recognizes with a shock the absolute rightness of such a pairing of Tara with
an eligible suitor. For Tara, as for the Misra girls with whose lack of ambi-
tion for career and education Tara secretly empathizes, marriage is the neces-
sary rite to adulthood. Where self-definition and sei f-di recti on are lacking,
marriage alone can confer identity and impose direction to life. For Tara,
marriage also provides escape from a strange, unhappy household. We may note
Desai 's care in avoiding all hints of self-sacrificing womanhood in Tara by
making her escape into marriage during a time of immense crisis for the fam-
ily-when, after the death of the parents, Bim must cope with Raja's illness
and Aunt Mira's alcoholism.

While Bakul is her instrument of escape, he is also exactly the kind of

man- -pompous, glibly suave- -likely to impress an insecure and impressionable

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Tara. Our glimpses into their relationship years later confirm the continuing
dependence of Tara. Yet Desai suggests that Tara has sufficient autonomous
existence, subtly rooted in inwardness, to rebel against Bakul's overbearing
control of her life. With "unaccustomed stubbornness," she chooses to stay
home with Bim and Baba rather than visit relatives with Bakul (17). And,
apparently, Bakul's efforts to mold Tara into an active, organized woman have
met with only superficial success. So, too, she can rise above life-long hab-
its of diffidence to oppose Bim's evaluations of Raja and of marriage and dom-
esticity. However unsatisfactory her marriage, Tara has achieved "her own
calm and happiness" (150), associated clearly at the end of the novel with her
role as a mother. When her daughters arrive, Tara is relaxed, subtly at ease,
even content. When Tara proudly offers her daughters to Bim, as if they were
the "fruit she had raised," Desai evokes for us the image of the rooted tree,
secure and nurturing.

These hésitent assertions of Tara are contrasted with Bim's more vigorous
self-expression. Indeed, Desai 's deliberate contrast between the two sisters
becomes one of the structuring principles of the novel. Where Tara is tradi-
tional and subdued in behavior and thinking, Bim is ruggedly unconventional.
She has short hair; she smokes; and she has a careless disregard for propri-
ety. Her mannerisms are decidedly unfeminine, given as she is to sitting with
her legs up and laughing heartily. Her bluntness and sardonic humor set her
apart form the typical Indian woman who is restrained and hésitent of
speech. Bim also has a very unfeminine disregard for appearance. On their
first morning on the verandah, the sisters' clothes offer a vivid contrast.
Tara wears a demure, pale blue nylon nightgown and elegant slippers whereas
Bim is dressed in a shapeless, although decidedly comfortable, concoction that
she has fashioned out of an old sari. She is also a slovenly housekeeper with
little of that pride of place that characterizes women, and is more likely to
spend her money on books than on refurbishing the house.

Bim's present behavior is rooted in her early chaffing at restraints

imposed on girls. A childhood episode most poignantly captures Bim's craving
for freedom so much more easily available to men. In a childish prank, at
Bim's direction, Bim and Tara dress up in Raja's clothes to discover the lib-
eration masculine attire offers: "Great possibilities unexpectedly opened up
now they had their legs covered so sensibly and practically and no longer
needed to worry about what lay bare beneath ballooning frocks" (132). These
great possibilities Bim longs for in her dreams of a blazing career as a
heroine.

So Bim chooses to pursue a career rather than to get married. She is

bored by young men like Bakul and Dr. Biswas. She views marriage as a limit-
ing of possibilities. Her disgust at the early marriage of the Misra girls
prompts the passionate declaration that she will never marry: "I shall work- -I
shall do things ... I shall earn my own living . . . and be independent"
(140). While one of the ironies of the novel may be that Bim's adult life is
rather restricted in space and activity, she is not wrong in her fears that to
regard marriage as the sole avenue of feminine fulfillment is to court disas-
ter. Her dark warning about the Misra girls--"They might find marriage isn't
enough to last them the whole of their lives" (140)--is distressingly accu-
rate. We see Jaya and Sari a abandoned by their husbands. They return home to
a pathetic existence as exploited drudges of wastrel brothers whom they sup-
port by running a preschool, an occupation, Bim senses, they hate.

Bim's desire for independence accompanies a capacity to stand alone and

assume control over events rather than allow herself to be passively buffeted
by experience. When their childhood world collapses, Bim takes charge, nurs-
ing Raja to health and managing family affairs because Raja evades the respon-
sibility. It is she who must worry about "the rent to be paid . . . people to

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be fed every day, and Tara to be married off, and Baba to be taken care of for
the rest of his life" (67). We are given a touching image of Bim waiting late
at night for Tara to come home, as their mother might have had she cared and
been alive, and as Aunt Mira would have had she been capable. Bim has, in
effect, become the mother of this household; and in her skill as a nurse she
is most closely associated with Aunt Mira, and with the feminine stereotype of
the nurturing, sustaining woman. Even later in her life, we continue to see
Bim in this role. She mothers animals, sardonically aware of the spinsterish-
ness of this proclivity, and acts immensely protectively of Baba.

Desai is, once again, very careful to separate Bim's nurturing from any
predeliction for self-denial associated with Indian women. When Dr. Biswas
piously declares, "Now I understand why you do not wish to marry. ... You
have sacrificed your own life for [your family]," Bim is at first astonished
at his assumption. Then she is enraged and frustrated "at being so misunder-
stood, so totally misread" (97). The price Bim must pay for choosing not to
marry is, perhaps, of another kind. Her choice to go her own way has made her
somewhat eccentric. At moments, we, like Tara, see her as "headstrong." We
note her unpleasing meanness about food with her guests, which is oddly con-
tradicted by her lavishness with Baba and her pets. And the gardner complains
about manure uselessly dumped in the garden while Bim refuses to furnish money
for seeds.

More important is our realization that Bim's thoroughgoing independ

has made her intolerant of weakness in others. This intolerance causes the
festering resentment against Raja, from which Bim must free herself if s
to be whole. Also, the flip side of self-sufficiency can be loneliness bree
ing an inner desperation which erupts during the last few days of Tara's
visit. Her fears are imaged through a haunting account of Emperor Aurengzeb's
death: "Alone he had lived and alone he made ready to die" (167). She is able
to still such fears through reenacting her mother-child relationship with
Baba. First, seeking assurance of love, she is driven to hurt Baba. She
walks into his room to "demand some kind of a response from him, some kind of
justification from him for herself, her own life, her ways and attitudes," and
then is led to emotionally blackmail him (163). Finally, she seeks forgive-
ness by touching him. Now she is free to forgive Raja and heal the wound by
tearing up his "unforgivable" letter.

The transformation is signalled for the reader by the image of the tree
both nourished and nourishing which reappears, for the final time, in associ-
ation with Bim. With her inner eye, she envisions the house "where her deep-
est self lived" as the soil which has nourished her sister and brothers: "the
soil in which to send down their roots, and food to make them grow and sp
reach out to new experiences and new lives, but always drawing from the
soil" (182). She achieves this epiphany after passing through a torturous
dark night of the soul where she imagines her family sipping her blood: "All
of them fed on her blood, at some time or the other had fed--it must have been
good blood, sweet and nourishing" (153). This echo of Aunt Mira's nightmare
establishes the identity of their roles. Unlike Aunt Mira, however, Bim is
able to emerge whole to affirm again her relatedness to her family: "She saw
how she loved ... all of them who had lived in this house with her. . . .
They were really all parts of her, inseparable, so many aspects of her as she
was of them?" (165). The difference between Aunt Mira and Bim must be that
Bim has not allowed herself to be consumed by her role, has not lived exclu-
sively through that role. She has achieved both the autonomous existence and
the privacy that Aunt Mira lacked. Through Bim, Desai is able to affirm nur-
turing as an essentially feminine attribute while simultaneously freeing the
feminine role from stereotypical associations of dependence, weakness, and
passivity.

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 And yet, despite the uplifting conclusion of the novel, we are left with
residual question. Why is it that self-sufficiency for women never seems to
be possible within marriage? Since Desai chooses to describe marriages
between temperamentally incompatible people, we cannot determine if she
regards the married state in itself as unsuitable fostering ground for self-
actualization for women. Or is it only marriage as it exists among the Indian
middle class, which limits women thus? Similarly, why is it that for all its
emphasis on marriage and procreation, Desai 's world is denuded of sexual pas-
sion? We could assume that Desai is rendering a characteristically Indian
reality. Segregation of the sexes during most activities and the joint-family
system inhibit sexual expression of affection. Nevertheless, it is hard to
imagine that a woman like Bim has experienced no sexual stirring. Or has she
merely sublimated her desires into this larger love of the family? Desai, we
might conclude, has accepted the cultural stereotype that good women are not
sexy. If, however, the man-woman relationship is to be recast to allow women
full freedom and development, then, the potential of sexual passion to contri-
bute to this fostering must also be acknowledged. As she continues to examine
and recast cultural stereotypes, Desai may yet offer us that sexually alive,
full-blooded, autonomous nurturing woman so far absent in her fictional world
and rarely present in the milieu she so faithfully recreates.

Works Cited

Desai, Anita. Voices in the city. 1965; rpt. Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1982.

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