CHAPTER - I1
MAKING OF THE NOVELISTS VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ANITA DESAI
Virginia Woolf
I n one of the letters to his daughter, Jawaharlal N e h n ~has written
thus about Virginia Woolf
I have been reading Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The more I
read her the more I like her. There is a magic about her writing,
something ethereal, limpid like running water, and deep like a clear
mountain lake. What is her book about? So very little that you can
tell anyone; and yet so much that it fills your mind, covers it with a
gossamer net, out ofwhich you peer at the past, at yourself, at others.
Did you ever meet her?'
One must agree with Nehm, because to write about Virginia Woolf
is as difficult or as simple as giasping the very mystery of life. This feminine
genius, who is as elusive as the plots and characters in her novels, intrigues us.
Yet, attempting to delve deep i n b ~the enigma that is Virginia Woolf is interesting,
gripping and astonishing.
The recent resurgence of interest in this extraordinary writer has
produced a multi-faceted attituc.e of looking at this author from different
perspectives. Books and article:: on Woolf have come forth revealing the
psychoanalytical point of view, the feminist point of view and the post-modemist
point of view. These have added to the already existing traditional points of view
of Bernard Blackstone and Joan Bennett. As Woolf herself says in Three Guineas
(although in a different context),"Indeed the more lives we read, the more speeches
we listen to, the more opinions wl: consult, the greater the confusion becomes.. .,,2
To overcome such confusion, she lerself prescribes an antidote:
Our first task, and it is often formidable enough, is to master his (the
writer's) perspective. Until we know how the novelist orders his
world, the omamenis of that world, which the critics press upon us,
the adventures of th: writer, to which biographers draw attention, are
superfluous possessons of which we can make no use.3
A basic knowledge about her life is necessary to understand how she
had ordered the world in her novb:ls. Lyndall Gordon comments that life and work
were complementary for Virginia Woolf. "There were, of course, other influences
from literature and history, but her life was her main s ~ u r c e . " ~
Hence a bare outline of her personal history will not be amiss here. I
can thus posit why 'inner desolation', the theme of this thesis, is a characteristic
paradigm in all her novels.
Personal History
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born into the late Victorian intellectual
aristocracy in Hyde Park Gate, Lolidon, on January 25, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie
Stephen, the eminent literary critic and historian, was the founder of the Dictionary
of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Duckworth, was a widow with three
children when she married Leslie Stephen, who was a widower himself, in 1878.
Virginia was the third of the four children of this marriage.
Being a nervous and delicate child, she was educated at home,
mainly by her parents. While Woolf received no formal education, she was raised
in a cultured and literary atmospllere, learning from her father's extensive library
and from conversing with his frierds, who were prominent writers of the era.
The uneducated daughter of an educated father, Virginia Stephen,
was born into an already crowdeci family. Her parents were ageing when she was
born - Leslie Stephen was alreadj. S0.Both her parents had had their shares of lifeshocks, having experienced the deaths of their spouses of their earlier marriages.
Married to Harriel Marion (Minny) Thackeray in 1867, Leslie
Stephen had a troubled daughter Laura, who had the misfortune of being a
perennial prisoner in a lunatic asylum. After the death of Harriet Marion, Leslie
Stephen fell head-over-heels in love with Julia Duckworth, Minny's friend who
had come to comfort him in his misery. She was one, who herself had experienced
the desolation caused by the loss of a spouse and had not fully recovered from that
shock. Being a reserved woman, she used to lie upon her first husband's (Herbert
Duckworth) grave. She developed an intense sense of sympathy towards everyone
who was in agony, and had even tleveloped a vocation for nursing.
These two lonely and miserable souls united in marriage on 261h
March 1878. Leslie made Julia "a goddess and was pampered in return. He
became, as he grew older, more infantile and dependent, 'lopsided' and 'unreal'
without her."5. Stephen was alw;iys weighed down with a sense of failure, which
drove him to "accents of self-aba~ement."~In the 1890s the Stephen children were
growing up in the home of a man 'old enough to be their grand father."'
The year Virginia was born was also the year, which found Leslie
Stephen facing the failure of his book, The Science of Ethics with which he had
"hoped to establish himself as a speculative philosopher."8 This failure made him
turn into a sulky scholar comp~lingthe Dictionarv of National Biomaphy. A
hypersensitive girl, born into a family of creative writers and artists, Virginia
began her life with more than an ordinary share of shocks, hurts and the misery
accompanying
it. All through he- childhood she had to struggle with a 'failed'
philosopher, who was a greater fa~lureas a father. As a child, she used to think that
the sudden shocks, which she reseived from life were "simply a blow from an
enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily lifen9
Woolf herself writes about her birth in "A Sketch of the Past" in her
Moments of Being
Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen.. . descended from a great
many people, some famous, others obscure: born into a large
connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born
into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, articulate late
nineteenth-century norld1°
Early Impact of her Family Baclrground
Roger Poole, the author of the voluminous biography, The Unknown
Virginia Woolf, had revised the conventional view of Woolf as 'mad' by treating
her breakdown as socially intelligible. This intellectual biography is one of the
classic studies of Woolfs life and work. Poole, who traced Woolfs fear and
resentment to her childhood and adolescence, writes about her childhood:
The pressure of 1ivi11gin the household of Leslie and Julia must have
been enormous. Tremendous currents of energy flowed between
Virginia's father and mother. Virginia felt herself powerfully
attracted to her mother in face of the demands made by Leslie
Stephen on his wife and all his womenfolk. Yet Leslie Stephen too
was a powerful, dominant, compelling figure. To Virginia, it must
have seemed as if her mother were all gift, her father all demand."
The extreme admiration and trust which Virginia felt towards her
mother found expression in almost all her novels - Mrs. Hilbery in Night and Day
and Helen in The Vovage Out are in some ways Julia's counterparts in the fictional
world of Virginia. But it is in Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse that Virginia
gives her full impression of Julia. Virginia felt an "impotent fury"I2towards her
father, the intellectual scholar who was struck by an inner sense of failure and selfpity which made him lean clamp-like on the womenfolk in the family.
The emotional strain she suffered due to the tyrannical demands of
her father was bad enough. Added to this was the sexual interference from both
her half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworths. At a very early and most
impressionable age (when she was barely six years old.), Gerald assaulted her
sexually. This was followed by George's interference when she was thirteen.
These experiences scarred her very spirit and its guilt was to haunt her until her
death at the age of sixty.
On May 5, 1895, Julia Stephen died and "life changed for all of
them. They found no consolation in religion. Both Virginia's parents were
agnostic. Though their children had 'sponsors', none of them was baptized."''
Virginia had her first bout of madness during the summer of that year. Her father's
indifference to the children's feclings could be one of the reasons for her mental
breakdown.
Leslie Stephen's tieterioration reached its peak immediately after
Julia's death when what Virginia described as an 'oriental' grief
blinded him to his children's right to their own feelings and finally
cut him off from tkeir sympathies.. .Virginia, aged thirteen, stretched
out her anns to thi: man as he came stumbling from Julia's deathbed,
but he brushed impatiently past. This scene imprinted for life on her
memory, is emblematic of the emotional impasse, which was to
persist in their relations from 1895 until Leslie Stephen's death in
1904."'~
Early signs of desolation
In the article "Unde~standingDepression", Erica E Goode, a senior
editor with the US News & World Report, states that scientists consistently find
that "being the child of a depresszd parent may double or even triple the risk of
depression in later life.'"'
Such studies indicate that in such cases, the depressive
parents are likely to be irritable and critlcal during child rearing. They will thus
transfer their pain to their offspring. The personal history of Virginia Woolf
proves this fact. Both Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen were intensely depressed
persons. Both tried to submerge heir grief in work. Their daughter Virginia seems
to have imbibed those intense anc exaggerated feelings of gloom even in her early
childhood.
Perhaps the most devastating is the loss of a parent in childhood,
either through dealh or abandonment ... those who have lost a
parent, especially the mother, are more likely to develop serious
psychiatric problems and, more specifically, to become psychotically
depressed and suicidal. Work by University of London researchers
George Brown and Tirril Harris demonstrates that women who lose
their mothers before the age of 17 are significantly more prone ro
depression as adul~s. The crucial factor, Brown and Hams say, is
how the father or parental surrogate provides for the child.
Inadequate care.. roughly doubled the risk of depression in
adulthood.16.
The chances of psychotic depression are unusually high among
artists. In the 1970s, the eminent American psychiatrist Nancy C. Andreasen of
the University of Iowa examined 30 creative writers and found 80% had
experienced at least one episode sf major depression or mania. She suggests that it
is possible that "the sensitivity, openness, adventuresome nature and independent
character of creative individual:: in some way makes them more vulnerable to
mental illness, in particular mooc disorders."" The case of Virginia Woolf is cited
thus in this article in
"As an experience, madness is tenific I can assure you, and not to be
sniffed at", British novelist Virginia Woolf ...once wrote to a friend.
Woolf, author of To The Lighthouse and Orlando, among other
works, careened from feverish periods of writings to weeks
immersed in bottoinless gloom, according to the memoirs of her
husband Leonard ~ ' o o l f . ' ~
Chain of deaths in the family, and its impact on Virginia.
Two years after the death of Julia Stephen in 1895, another death
followed in the household. Virginia's stepsister Stella Duckworth, who had taken
up the responsibility of the mother, died suddenly in 1897. The two deaths were
too much for the young, sensitive Virginia. She felt that the stable and secure
world of her childhood home at St.Ives was crumbling. George Spater and Ian
Parsons comment thus:
The stable world of pre-1895 ST. lves began unfolding to a sensitive
child as one of chamx in which, without warning, a devoted mother
could die at 49 and a happy Stella could die at 28, while the
unhappy, unbalanced Laura lived in asylums and nursing homes until
she was 75.19
Other deaths folloved. Leslie Stephen died of abdominal cancer in
February 1904 after an illness, wtich lasted for nearly two years. These years were
of great emotional burden to the young Virginia who still felt attached to this old
father in spite of his tyrannical demands for sympathy. Vanessa, her elder sister,
had already shrugged off all responsibility towards her father because she could
not tolerate his nagging demand:; for affection and sympathy anymore. But the
sensitive Virginia could penetrare through his hateful nature and was able to
"appreciate his integrity, his underlying humility and his intelligence.
Almost
daily reports of his illness were :ent to a new friend Violet Dickinson, a woman
seventeen years older than ~ i r ~ i n i a . " ~ '
Her Hypersensitivity
In spite of having done so much for her father during his illness, the
hyper-sensitive Virginia still felt guilt-ridden when he died in 1904.She felt that
she could have done better or much more while he was living. So, in order to
distract her, her brothers and sister took her first to Wales and then to Italy and
France. But when they returnecl, it looked as though the travels were in vain.
Virginia had her second bout of madness in May 1904. She was taken to Violet
Dickinson's house where she made her first attempt to committ suicide.
While Virginia was away at Violet Dickinson's
house at
Burnhamwood, the practical Vanessa had "cleared out the debris of three
generations of Stephens from 22 Hyde Park Gate, and moved the brothers and
sister to 46, Gordon
Here the Stephen family was able to regain some of
the cheerfulness of St. Ives. They revisited Cornwall together in 1905 and "peered
through the hedge at Talland House, where they had spent so many joyous
childhood days."22
In 1905, the Stephen children -Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian
-
went off to Greece with Violet Dickinson. But another misfortune was to strike
them unawares. During this trip l'hoby contracted typhoid fever and died after a
month. Henry James had once termed 22, Hyde Park Gate as "that house of
death^."^' But it looked as though death followed them even after moving out of it.
Two days after Thoby's death, Vanessa decided to get married to
Thoby's friend Clive Bell. After Vanessa's marriage, Virginia shifted residence to
a house in the nearby Fitzroy square with Adrian. She felt very lonely here and
used to go back to Cornwall in her "struggle to recapture what was lost"24
Bloomsbury Influence
Virginia was born illto a milieu of cultural aristocracy. Although ill
health had prevented her from gc:tting a conventional education, she managed to
get herself educated through her educated father who had given her complete
access to his library and the freedom to choose books of her liking. Moreover she
met her father's friends Thomas hardy, Henry James and Meredith and also learnt
Greek with a teacher at home. She loved to walk through the parks, the squares
and the streets of London, a hallit developed in the company of her father. It
provided her with ideas and backgrounds for her novels. This habit had even
inspired her to write an essay named "Street Haunting".
In 1904, when Woolf moved with her sister, Vanessa Bell, to
London, she met regularly with many of England's finest young artists and
intellectuals. 'The Bloomsbury Group', as they came to be known, began as a
friendship group among the stutlents at the all-male Cambridge but became an
informal discussion group of young men and women. It was a group of cultured
elite, influenced by the ideas of (1.E. Moore, a well-known lecturer at Cambridge.
It started functioning after Queer1 Victoria's death till the outbreak of the Second
World War. Like several of the schools of the Romantic period, the Bloomsbury
Group consisted of writers and artists. The name 'Bloomsbury' came from the
section of London in which mcst of the members of this group of avant-garde
artists lived and worked. The members of the original Bloomsbury group were
Adrian, Virginia and Vanessa Stephens, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, John
Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Edward Morgan, E.M.Forster,
Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Desmond and Molly McCarthy.
This intellectual group proved to be of great significance in Woolfs
development as a writer. It also proved to be of great importance to her personally,
because she married Leonard Woolf, one among the intellectual thinkers in the
Bloomsbury group. He was a political commentator, translator of Russian
literature, editor, literary critic, and publisher. Though not as famous as his wife,
he was an accomplished political thinker and editor.
Mulk Raj Anand in his preface to Conversations in Bloomsburv
refers to it as the world "where the pleasures of literature and art were considered
~ ~ Bloolnsbury group was a kind of intellectual clan. As
ends in t h e m ~ e l v e s . "The
Christopher Isherwood recollects :
The Bloomsbury Family held together by consanguinity of talent.
That you could express yourself artistically though the medium of
writing or painting or music, was taken for granted. This was the real
business of life: it would have been indecent, almost, to refer to it.
Artistic integrity was the family religion; and in its best days it could
proudly boast that t did not harbour a single prostitute, pot boiler or
hack. Nevertheles:; one must live. Some of the brothers and sisters
have very odd h a b i ~ s . ~ ~
Virginia used this range of social and intellectual experience
creatively yet critically.
She always kept herself detached and aloof even in
Bloomsbury group and in the social milieu.
Marriage:
She was thirty years old, when she decided to get married to Leonard
Woolf, the most rational amon:; the Cambridge intellectuals of the Bloomsbury
group. He had joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1912 on
leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia, and she eventually
agreed. They were married in St.P;incras Registry Office on 10 August 1912.
It was certainly not physical attraction, which made her decide to
marry this rational Jew. Yet the way he cared for her was overwhelming:
"Leonard became doctor, nurse, parent, semi-husband and chief literary adviser",
for her. And Virginia adored Leonard. In her diary, she wrote: "Leonard thinks
less well of me for powdering iny nose and spending money on dress. Never
' founded the Hogarth Press to help Virginia during
mind, I adore ~ e o n a r d . " ~He
her troubled times.
In spite of that, the fact remains that the intellectual Leonard Woolf
had really driven her to a state of deep psychological imbalance. Leonard, with his
male inability to sense the fer.inine sensitivity of his wife, called her mental
condition 'insanity' and soon alter their honeymoon days, he started consulting
specialists who were worse than Leonard in their perception of a feminine mind.
She was given medicines for her nerves and special diet for her body. But they
neglected her inner spirit, which really needed the healing touch of love. Logic or
rationalism is a very poor substitute for love and no amount of logical
understanding can heal the wour~dedspirit of a sensitive woman. The worst among
the prescriptions by these speci;ilists was that she should not have children. And
the net result of all these was t1e development of Virginia Woolf as a wonderful
creative artist sans any spiritual peace. Her turbulent mind searched for an anchor
to lean on, but could not find any.
71367
The Socio-Political Influence
It is almost impossik~leto pin point the exact age and generation to
which Virginia Woolf belongei. Christopher Isherwood, one of Woolfs
contemporaries, remarks that she 'simply defied analysis' because she was 'very
rare' and "this world was no place for her."" She spent her infancy and childhood
in the England, which was witnessing very rapid changes due to the advent of
Industrialization. The Agrarian lift: style was giving place to the new urbanization
with its brood of vices. The widespread increase of vulgarity and the rapid fall in
the standards of morality has had i s effects on the literature of the period.
Most of her importait works were written in the nineteen twenties, a
period in History which witnessec the degeneration of social, ethical and aesthetic
standards. It was the age of the so-called lost generation for whom the world
looked like a chaotic sea in which the individual was left adrift.
If the Twenties can be called the age of irresponsibility, they have
been called the Caleless Twenties, and, not very aptly, the age of
Beautiful Nonsense
-
if in that decade the individual adrift was
thrown back upon himself, clinging desperately to his iceberg tip of
consciousness in a green and heaving sea of doubt, not very sure
even of that, sinc: ever and again the submarine mass which
ballasted his foothold heaved alarmingly from below, if that was his
world picture, a swimming sea-scape with no sea-marks and no
landfall, what can be said of the Thirties? They began in depression,
continued in crisis and ended in war.29
In this disintegrated wasteland full of hollow men, artists like
Virginia Woolf tried to capture the "scraps, orts and fragments"30 of the
contemporary scene. E.M. Forste~writes about this age into which Virginia Woolf
struggles to belong:
She belonged to an age which distinguished sharply between the
impermanency of man and the durability of his monuments, and for
whom the dome of the British Museum Reading Room was almost
eternal. Decay, she idmitted: the delicate grey churches in the strand
would not stand forever; but she supposed, as we all did, that decay
would be gradual. The younger generation
- the
Auden - Ishenvood
generation as it is convenient to call it - saw more clearly here than
could she, and she did not quite do justice to its vision, anymore than
she did justice to its experiments in technique - she who had been in
her time such an experimenter. Still, to belong to one's period is a
common failing, and she made the most of hers. She respected and
acquired knowledge, she believed in wisdom. Intellectually, no one
can do more.. .3 1
Woolf herself has vividly portrayed the degeneration of the age in
which she lived, in her last novel, Between the Acts. The very burthen of the music
throughout the pageant organized by Miss La Trobe in the novel is about the
dispersion of the characters. The semblance of unity in which the spectators are
held together gets lost even between the acts of the play:
At that, the audience stirred. Some rose briskly; others stooped,
retrieving walking sticks, hats, bags. And then, as they raised
themselves and turried about, the music modulated.
The music
chanted: Dispersed r e we. It moaned: Dispersed are we, as they
streamed, spotting the grass with colour, across the lawns, and down
the paths : 1)ispersed are we.32
Her Attitude To Religion
Virginia had imbibe.-l a little of the agnostic attitude of her parents.
So the atheistic ideas of the Blo~)msburygroup could easily influence her. The
snobbish intellectuals of this highl~rowclub believed that the rational mind or the
intellect was the only or the most significant aspect of a human being. Moreover,
she married the most rational amcnng those Cambridge intellectuals. This rational
group had killed one of the most basic human needs in her, viz., faith in the
existence of God. It must be remembered here that there was a time in the life of
Virginia when she really wanted to believe in God. On October 8, 1929, she wrote
in her diary:
It was Elizabethan prose writers I loved first and most wildly, stirred
by Hakluyt, which Bther lugged home for me
-
I think of it with
some sentiment - father tramping over the Library with his little girl
at Hyde Park Gate in mind. He must have been 65; I, 15 or 16 then;
and why I don't know but I became enraptured, though not exactly
interested, but the sight of the large yellow page entranced me. I
used to read it and dream of those obscure adventurers and no doubt
practiced their stylt: in my copybook. I was then writing a long
picturesque essay upon the Christian religion, I think; called "Religio
Laici", I believe, prc ving that man has need of a God.j3
But in the Bloomsbury circle consisting of intellectual pedants like
G.E.Moore, "religion was
They considered faith as a personal
weakness and skepticism was a moral duty for them. Roger Poole, in his book The
Unknown Virginia Woolf notes thus, "Far from being the 'queen' of Bloomsbury,
was she not going to be its Antigo~ie? Was not this illuminated, narrow, affectedly
logical group going to surround he -, punish her, and drive her to d e ~ ~ e r a t i o n ? " ' ~
Having imbibed the atheistic attitude of her peers in Bloomsbury, she
was shocked to find one of their friends, the poet T.S. Eliot turning to religion. She
made a very provocative comment on this, in one of her letters to her sister
Vanessa:
I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear
Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us from this day forward. He
has become an Anglo Catholic, believes in God ... and goes to
church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more
credible than he is. I mean, there is something obscene in a living
person sitting by the tire, and believing in G0d.j"
But this atheistic trait in Woolf might have been her pretence in
order to survive among her intell':ctual friends in Bloomsbury. In fact, she had
copies of the Quaker classics
mt Arising and Ouaker Stronnholds in her private
library till the end of her life. The author of these books was the Quaker
theologian, Caroline Emelia Stephen, Virginia's paternal aunt. Dr. Alison M Lewis
thinks that it "seems unlikely that she would have retained these books for purely
sentimental reasons. They must have been meaninghl to her on some deeper
level.""
When her father died in 1904, Virginia suffered another of the
mental collapses she had experielced since childhood. There might have even
been a suicide attempt at this time It was to the home of her Quaker friend Violet
Dickinson that she was sent to recwer. There she stayed for almost three months.
Later she was sent to Caroline Stephen's Cambridge home, known as "The Porch,"
for additional rest.
She called The Porch at one point "an ideal retreat for me" ... She
attended Cambridge Meeting with Caroline and offered to bring
Violet there on a visit as well ... Caroline found freedom from
intellectual and thec~logical controversies in silence, and Virginia
found a near type of freedom as well ...The focused quiet of Quaker
meeting must have given Virginia a needed opportunity to rest, turn
inward, and recollec:t herself from her trauma without having to
"perform" for others. Although there was sometimes tension between
the two women, Caroline's presence must have also been of help.
Virginia writes of her aunt: 'We talked for some nine hours; and she
poured forth all hei- spiritual experiences. All her life she has been
listening to inner v'>ices, and talking with spirits' ...This revelation
may have been v e y important to Woolf, who had been troubled by
voices at the worst
The human ego cannot withstand too much frustration. To
compensate failure or frustration, the human mind should aspire for the existence
of goals, which transcend this w ~ r l d . Religion can release one from sorrow and
fear. It also provides release from guilt, the very thing it instills. Researchers on
the human brain have come to the conclusion that the human brain craves to make
sense of things. Amy Ellis Nutt, a feature writer for The Star Ledger of New
Jersey, reports how the Neurosci1:ntist Rhawn Joseph and the radiologist Andrew
Newberg in their quest to understand the universality of spiritual experience have
come to the conclusion that there is a physiological basis for religion. In the article
"Researchers Seek Answers to Faith's Place in Psyche", Ellis Nutt states that both
Rhawn Joseph and Newberg believe that the connection between the brain and
spirituality suggests that there is a physiological basis for religion
--
that human
beings, in essence, are hard-wir':d for God. Their conclusion is that there is a
neurological, even genetic, explanation for religious belief and spiritual
experience. Human beings, accortling to their research, have
... evolved the capacity to experience God primarily through the
amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure buried deep in the brain.
The amygdala, along with the hippocampus and hypothalamus, make
up the limbic systen~,the first-formed and most primitive part of the
brain, where emotions, sexual pleasure and deeply felt memories
arise. 39
According to Iona h4iller of Asklepia Foundation, heavenly states are
dependent on the limbic system or emotional part of the brain, and hormonal
secretions.
Mystical states are not fantasies, delusions or intangible events
-
they are the end result of complex chemical and neurological
processes. 'They bei;in with instinctive awe and indefinable thrills,
floating sensations, and perhaps spiritual hunger .... Scientists are
using dynamic brain imaging techniques . . . to directly view the
activation of brain circuitry. We can watch both blood flow and
electrical activity in real time.40
It is a pity that Virginia Woolf rejected religion, which would have
contributed to the integration of her otherwise magnificent personality.
The Impact of Psychology and Psycho analysis.
By the end of the n neteenth century, discussions on the meaning of
hfe, the nature of consciousness, mind, ego, evolution, and related topics
dominated the scientific and the cultural scenario. William James, an American
trained as a physician and emplo).ed as a Harvard professor, examined the various
philosophies of the previous two millennia and picked out those aspects relevant to
psychology. He then compared and sorted them to reveal their value as
unambiguous theories that might be tested by research. Reflecting on its evidence
he tried to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness of the waking
mind. In 1890 he published his rrincivles of Psvchologv. According to James, the
use of introspective analysis was the major approach to investigate the conscious
mind. Consciousness, according to him, was exclusive, personal, and selective.
James asserted that the reality most immediately perceived by that method is the
unbroken flow of complex conscious thought:
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped in bits. Such
words as "chain" o. "train" do not describe it fitly as it presents itself
in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A "river" or a
"stream" is the melaphor by which it is most naturally described. In
talking of it herenfter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or c f subjective life. 4 1
The modernist mwement in literature imbibed the new theory
expounded by James with great enthusiasm. It created an incredible change in the
way writers viewed their art. The phrase 'Stream of Consciousness' used by James
in Principles of Psvchologv, became popular among the new writers who were
affected by the new perception of the world and of the human predicament. They
tried to communicate their fear:; and opinions through uniquely different writing
styles. Many of the writers decided to radically change their writing to suit the new
age. World War I, the rampant materialism, and the depression influenced these
writers. In her essay "Mr. B e ~ n e t t and Mrs. Brown", Virginia Woolf had
commented: "On or about Decemller 1910 human character changed."42
The concept of the stream of thought was immediately taken up by a
number of authors who sought to write in the stream-of-consciousness style.
Marcel Proust, the French novelist, is considered as the pioneer among these
experimental writers. His multivoluminous work A la recherche du temps perdu
(1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-193 1) experiments with narrative
pacing and the use of symbolic patterns. Beginning with the childhood memories
of its narrator, it expands into a lyrical-pictorial series of impressions about the
town of Combray, in northern France. The entire work becomes an attempt to
conjure up the past through sharp sensory moments of sudden remembrance. The
publication of "Swann's Way", (the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past)
in the year 1913, had brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of fiction
writers of that time. The Irish writer James Joyce soon picked up this new
narrative technique in his pioneer~ngcollection of short stories, The Dubliners,
which was published in 1914. He explored the concepts of time, memory, and
and depicted the characters' inner thoughts in a much
people's inner co~~sciousness
more direct way than previous w~.itershad ever attempted. Joyce continued to
write in this new style in his later riovels. 111 1915 Dorothy Richardson's life-long
experimental novel Pilgrimape began appearing. It was Richardson's writing
which was the first to be described as 'stream of consciousness', and Virginia
Woolf credited Richardson with the invention of something that Woolf licrself
w o ~ ~ lgo
d on to make famous
-
"the psychological sentence of the femininc
gender."43 Virginia Woolf was definitely influenced by these writers and she
strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. The result was an
intense, and sometimes disorienting, exploration of individual consciousness.
It is clear from her diaries that Woolf was interested in
psychoanalysis. There are scatterc:d references to it in her writings. In her essay
"The Leaning Tower", while discussing the differences between the Victorian and
the modem experimental novelists: she mentions Freud :
By analyzing themselves honestly with the help of Dr. Freud, these
writers have done a great deal to free us from nineteenth century
suppressions. The writers of the next generation may inherit from
them a whole state of mind, a mind no longer crippled, evasive,
divided.44
Woolf was familiar with Freud's work from an early stage since it
was translated into English by her friend James Strachey, and was published by the
Hogarth Press from 1922 onwards. In her review of J.D. Beresford's An Imperfect
Mother, she comments on the new Psychology:
... the new psychology, which in the sphere of medicine claims to
have achieved positi1.e results of great beneficence. .. . The triumphs
of science are beautifully positive. But for novelists the matter is
much more complex; and should they, like Mr. Beresford, possess a
conscience, the question how far they should allow themselves to be
influenced by the tliscoveries of the psychologists is by no means
Virginia Woolf, the Writer
Virginia Woolf is one of the most prominent literary figures of the
twentieth century. She is chiefly renowned as an innovative novelist, and in
particular, for her contribution to the development of the stream-of-consciousness
narrative technique. Her novels are noted for their subjective exploration of
character and theme and their poc:tic prose, while her essays are commended for
their perceptive observations on nearly the entire range of English literature, as
well as many social and political concerns of the early twentieth century.
Both Vanessa and Virginia had been educated at home, but their
brothers were sent to preparator) and public schools, and then to Cambridge.
There, Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon SydneyTurner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the
Bloomsbury. Vanessa went to study art at the Royal Academy Schools, but
Virginia did not have more formal education than what had been provided at
home. Though she had a very sketc:hy education, Virginia was allowed uncensored
access to her father's extensive libr.ary. Moreover, being the daughter of a wealthy
intellectual, she was exposed to some of the great creative minds of her times like
Thomas Hardy, Robert Lewis Stevenson and John Ruskin. From an early age she
had determined to be a writer.
The unconventional atmosphere and the freedom afforded by the
Bloomsbury milieu was conducive to her literary inclinations, and the need to earn
money led her to begin submitting book reviews and essays to various
publications. At the end of 1904 Virginia started reviewing anonymously in
Guardian. a weekly newspaper for the Anglo-Catholic clergy; in 1905 she started
reviewing in The Times Literan Supplement and continued writing for that
journal for many years. Subsequently Woolf published reviews and essays in a
number of other periodicals, including the National Review, and the
Times
Literan Suvplement. Woolfs lett8:rs and diaries reveal that journalism occupied
much of her time and thought between 1904 and 1909.
Virginia started writing her first novel The Voyage Out in 1908. It
was finished by 1913 but, owing t3 a severe mental breakdown after her marriage,
it was not published until 1915. The novel was fairly conventional in form. She
then began writing her second novel Night and Day, which was even more
conventional in form and it was published in 1919.
In 1917 while livin:; in Richmond, Surrey, The Woolfs bought a
small hand printing-press. Since tney were living at Hogarth House, Richmond at
that time, they named it the Hogiirth Press. More than as a hobby, printing had a
therapeutic effect on Virginia. Sht: noted in her diary, "Now the point of the Press
is that it entirely prevents b r o o d ~ n ~ Virginia
. " ~ ~ wrote, printed and published a
couple of experimental short stoxies, The Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens.
Virginia's first collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday, most of which were
experimental in nature, was published in 1921. In 1922 she published her first
experimental novel, Jacob's
Ram In 1925 Mrs. Dalloway was published,
followed by To the Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in 1931. These three
novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a modernist
writer. Her involvement with the i~ristocraticnovelist and poet Vita Sackville-West
led to Orlando in 1928.
Two talks to womerl's colleges at Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room
of One's Own in 1929; mi, a fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning's dog appeared in 1933; The Years in 1937; and Three Guineas in1938
and in 1940 she published a biography of Roger Fry who had died in 1934. She
had completed her final novel Between the Acts in 1941, the year she committed
suicide by drowning in the River Ouse near Monks House.
Virginia Woolf is regarded as a major figure in the Modernist
movement, and as an experimenter and innovator in novel writing. The poetic and
symbolic quality of her novels is much appreciated. In her novels, the emphasis is
not on plot or action but rather the psychological life of the characters. Her novels
are also known for their delicac) and sensitivity of style, their evocation of place
and mood, and their background of historical and literary reference. Psychological
effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character
unfolds by means of the ebb and flow of personal impressions, feelings, and
thoughts. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and the ordinary events in their
lives are made to seem extraordinary
Besides novels, Woolf also published many works of nonfiction,
including the two extended essa:ys exploring the roles o f women in history and
society: A room of one's own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), where she
examined the necessity for women to make a claim for their own life and
literature. Her works of literary criticism include The Common Reader (1925) and
The Second Common Reader (1432). After her death, Woolf s diaries were edited
and published in five volumes bztween 1977 and 1984 as The Diary of Virginia
U f . The Letters of Virginia W d f appeared in six volumes from 1975 to 1980.
Woolf was a prolific essayist; she published about five hundred
essays in periodicals and collections, beginning from 1905.
Last Days and Suicide
The Monks House: in the village of Rodmell, which the Woolfs
bought in 1919 was a small weather-boarded house (now owned by the National
Trust) which they used principally for summer holidays until they were bombed
out of their flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1940 when it became their home. From
July 1940, the Woolfs became afraid of Nazi invasion, since Leonard was a Jew,
and they decided to gas themse11,es with car fumes if the invasion came. They kept
enough petrol for this purpose.
By 1941, Leonard became increasingly concerned about the
deterioration in Virginia's heal~h.Her depression grew as the fear of madness
enveloped her. On 28 March 1941, she loaded her pockets with stones and walked
into the River Ouse at Rodmell, Sussex and was drowned. In her last letter to
Leonard, she wrote thus:
But I know that I sh,ill not get over this: and I am wasting your life.
It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can
work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write
this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this
disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No
one could have beer so good as you have been, from the very first
day till now. Everyone knows that. v.~'
Anita Desai
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, 1 ke a frog
To tell your n.ime the livelong day
To an admiring bog.48
So wrote America':; most interesting and enigmatic woman-poet
Emily Dickinson, who preferred an incognito existence. Anita Desai, one of the
best known Indo-Anglian novelists, echoes Dickinson's attitude when she says, "I
have too great a need for secrecy and silence"49
In 1981, in a letter t~ S. Jamkhandi, who was the guest editor to the
special issue of Journal of Indiar Writing in English entitled "Anita Desai: The
Woman and the Novelist", a puzzl8:d Desai wrote:
May I ...say that I find its title, "The Woman and the Novelist"
rather mystifying? 'The articles can surely be only about my novels
and not about me pel,sonally, which would make the first half of the
title i r r e ~ e v a n t . ~ ~
So cautious is Desai about her privacy. Because of this special nature
of hers, precious little is known about her. Compared to Virginia Woolf, on whose
personal history there are innumerable volumes, Anita Desai, the woman behind
her novels, still remains as an enigma. If Virginia Woolf, the "uneducated daughter
of an educated father, jotted down so religiously almost every thought and feeling
that kept her mind on the move, here is a novelist who does not even bother to
write a scrap of a journal. The very idea of keeping a personal diary is condemned
as "pure self indulgencen5' by Des li.
Hence it is to her novels, short stories, articles and the occasional
interviews where one must look to in order to have a peep into the mysterious
vision of this great Indo-Anglian novelist. Her written works are in fact the silent
answers to our quest for the author. Like Deven in Desai's In Custody finds his
answers in the silence of the park. from where he watches the dome and the high
wall of the mosque, we too should look into the fictional world of Desai to get a
feel of her vision. For Deven it mas a moment of being when he senses the sound
of silence thus: "Since it was silent, he could not hear it, but he felt it impress its
shape upon his eyelids, very gently, very lightly, like fingertips pressing them
down to sleep."s2 So are the r~ovelsof Desai. They are in a way a 'silent
exa~tation'~'of her inner being. In them we can feel the vision of the novelist
impress its shape upon our eyelids, very gently and very lightly.
Desai's fictional world abounds with the entangling complexities of
life, especially the life within the social structure of a family. She has an abiding
impulse to probe what she once called "the web of [family] relationships, sticky
and sweet, clinging and trappingNs4 She writes with such ease that English
becomes another of the various regional languages of India. She uses this language
with a characteristic elegance to u7ite about the Indian traditions, lifestyles and the
inner workings of the human psyche, thus proving the universality of human
sensitivity.
Personal History
Anita Mazumdar was born in Mussourie, a Himalayan summer
retreat, on June 24, 1937. Her fatber - D.N.Mazumdar, was a Bengali businessman,
and her mother, Toni Nime, w3s a German. Maya Jaggi, the award-winning
journalist and critic, and a leading voice in the British media on postcolonial
literatures and cultures, and who is currently a profile writer and regular reviewer
for The Guardian, has interviewed and traced the family background of Desai. She
writes that Desai's father had met her German mother, a teacher, while an
engineering student in pre-war Berlin. They married when it was still rare for an
Indian man to wed a European woman, and they moved to Old Delhi. They had
three daughters and a son. Anita was the youngest of the four, and she describes
her family as small and intensely close knit. "My family was an oddity; it didn't
belong where it was. Going to sc:hool, I became aware of its difference, of things
that set us apart."55
The Mazumdars spoke German at home, and Hindi to friends and
neighbours. She first learned English when she went to the mission school - Queen
Mary's Higher Secondary School, Delhi. English was the language in which she
first learned to read and write, artd so it became her literary language. Her father
died when she was 18, and the f:%milymoved to Calcutta. It was in Calcutta that
she picked up her father's language, Bengali. According to Desai, languages "tend
to proliferate around one in India and one tends to pick up and use whatever is at
hand. It makes one realize each language has its own distinct genius."s6
Her German mother had given up her German citizenship and
became an Indian citizen. She adapted herself to the Indian situation so well that
Desai admits that she wasn't even aware of her mother's being a foreigner because
she dressed in a sari and cooked Indian food. But Desai adds:
Everyone in India hls close affiliations to state, home town, religion,
caste - all the things missing from my life. That leaves one feeling
free to invent whatever kind of home you want. I do have all the
passions one's supposed to have for one's home country, but I know
I'm not part of Indian society - it perplexes and amazes me. I find
myself reacting shaiply, as my mother would have. I don't think I'm
sentimental about India ...
My mother's not being Indian was so little a conscious part of my life
that when she died I went with my sister to cremate her, and immerse her ashes in
the river. It was only on the way back, when we passed some English graveyards,
it struck me, may be she would have liked to be buried. It never occurred to me to
ask, nor her to tell. 57
In an Interview with the DW-WORLD at Berlin's International
Literature Festival, while discussing about her book Baumgartner's Bombay, Anita
Desai spoke of her German-Indiim roots and how the collision of cultures has
shaped her writing. Her mother m,:t and manied her father in Berlin and came to
India as a bride, much adored by her father's family. Desai realized that her home
was different from other Indian homes and that it was somewhat European.
Though her mother seemed to adapt to Indian life very comfortably and very well,
Desai admits:
Certainly a part of me was aware that she was not an Indian woman,
she was a Europeari woman and very often the ideas she would
express were obviously Western ones. I was aware that she thought
of India differently - her reactions to it were analytical, rational,
intellectual. My father's and mine were much more emotional and
instinctive ...We did speak German at home, but never outside the
home. Of course there were also a lot of British and American troops
in India at the time and my older brother and sister were much more
conscious of the political situation than I was. I remember they told
my mother 'don't wear dresses out on the streets, please wear saris,
and don't speak to us in German.' That was for her own safety.s8
Though her mother did adapt quickly to the Indian lifestyle, Desai
feels that it might have been through a great deal of self-sacrifice and a great deal
of wisdom. Desai says:
She used to tell me that her mother told her before she left for India,
'don't bring up you1 children to think that they are German, they'll
only be unhappy living in India.' And my mother did exactly that,
we were surprised if anyone mentioned she was German. We'd
forgotten it ourselvej.. . My mother was a wonderful storyteller and
we would go to be$l listening to German lullabies and wonderful
stories of Christma: or Easter in Germany. To us they were like
fairytales, we never thought as being real. I didn't realize that when I
was young, but as 1 grew up I realized what an immense well of
nostalgia and hon~esickness my mother must have felt for
~erman~.'~
Desai grew up during World War I1 and had seen the anxiety her
German mother was experiencing about the situation and her family in Germany.
After the war when she realized :he Germany she had known was devasted, her
mother never returned there, nor had she any desire to return. Anita herself did not
visit Germany until she was a you lg adult. "I couldn't recognise a single thing; my
mother hadn't known how totally i t was destroyed and rebuilt after the war. I felt a
complete stranger, devastated at finding the dream didn't exist at all." 60
Asked why she is repeatedly drawn to "failures and wrecks" as
characters, Desai says: "I remember being very lost at school, not
being popular or suc cesshl. It was always a great struggle to belong.
It was an immense r-lief to come home to books, to be alone. I had a
great need for privacy that was unusual for a child but not at all for a
~riter.~'
Desai's own German half of the parental heritage is in the
background of her 1988 novel Baum~artner'sBombav. It is the story of Hugo
Baumgartner, a Jewish teenager in Berlin, who is sent to India to escape the Nazis.
In India Baumgartner remains as a perpetual outsider, who is unaccepted in the
Indian society, where he's just afiranghi or a fair-skinned foreigner.
Following her reatling from Baumeartner's
Bombav at the
Northeastern University Symposium in Boston, Desai entertained questions from
the audience and responded thus to the queries:
I have often been asked how I came to write the history of a German
Jew, [since] my book; are almost invariably set in India. I should tell
you that I grew up in India as an Indian child speaking German
because, although
rn>l
father was Indian, my mother was German.
[So German] was my first language and the language I grew up with.
I experienced World War I1 and whatever happened there through
my mother.
All my adult life I was searching for a way to use the German
language, which I had known as a child. I had an uncomfortable
sense that I was supl~ressingan essential part of myself in writing in
the English language. I was always casting around for a theme that
would allow me to use the German language. I couldn't find the way
to do it in an 1ndi;m setting that [wouldn't seem] too bizarre. I
suppose that I coultl have written about my mother's life, but that
was far too personal. I didn't think of it in any stage of my writing
Desai had her early education at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary
School. Later, she joined Miranda House, Delhi, for her higher studies and she
graduated in English Literature ~vithhonors from the University of Delhi. She
began to write aged six, and l~ublished her first story at the age of nine.
Reminiscing her early years as a writer she says: "When I started I suffered from a
great sense of being utterly alone. I would have loved the society of other writers,
or even readers. I was working iri a vacuum, turning out words with no e ~ h o . " ~ '
During this time she met Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose mother was also German,
her father Polish, and who had nlamed an Indian architect who lived down the
road. Jhabvala was a great inspiration for the precocious Anita, who
acknowledges: "I saw you could live in Old Delhi and write books. She was very
encouraging - a woman with tw3 small children - while I was a schoolgirl"64
Jhabvala, now in New York and still a friend, recalls the 18-year-old she would go
swimming with as "absolutely beautiful, very quiet, tremendously well read and
sensitive, and self-contained; she had a halo of perfection around her. I see Anita's
writing, which is very exquisite arid beautiful, as a reflection of her."65 About her
mother Jhabvala says: "Her mother was a very cultured lady who encouraged her,
but when Anita moved to Calculta and Bombay, she was surrounded by more
conventional social circles, where ihey tell you, 'writing is such a nice hobby.3 1166
Desai, met her husband Ashvin Desai, a businessman, at 19 and
married at 20, moving to Bombay and bringing up two sons and two daughters. Of
these, her daughter Kiran Desai has published a novel 'Huilabaloo in the Guava
Orchard'. Anita Desai is known to be a good and efficient mother. She wrote in
tern-time and put away her manuscripts during the school holidays. She lived a
very domestic life, and it remained so until her 50s, when she began to teach
abroad.
Since 1993, she has been teaching in MIT's Program in Writing-the
first professorial appointment by the university in fiction writing in 20 years. Anita
Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and she has been a
member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in
Delhi and a Member of the Amerlcan Academy of Arts and Letters. She has been
Visiting Fellow at Girton College Cambridge, in England, and has taught writing
at Smith College and has been the Purington Professor of English at Mount
Holyoke College in the United States. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature in London and she his been a member of the Advisory Board for
English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Member of the
American.
Although her parents were effectively exiled from Germany and East
Bengal by the upheavals of the second world war and Indian independence, for
which Desai's Bengali grandfather and uncle fought and were imprisoned, they
recalled mythic homelands that predated their twin partitions. Her father,
"removed, remote and distant", spoke of Bengal as "a wonderful green and fruitful
land", while her mother, with t e r "rich, warm, vibrant personality", quoted
German nursery rhymes and tales of Christmas in Berlin. As Desai notes
ironically: "We had beautiful pictures of both these countries very little tainted by
history or world events, which we had to learn as we grew
Her Growth and Development as a Novelist
Ever since she started writing at the age of seven, Desai has been
trying to discover deep truths about life. She has not had any formal training in
creative writing, except the fact that she read a lot and constantly practiced writing.
She read Wuthering Heights when she was just nine years old. She herself has
described the experience of reading, it:
It struck me with force of a gale and I still vibrate to it. Ever since,
literature has seemed to me more interesting, mare significant and
overwhelming than the real world. Later, of course other writers
meant more to me. In my twenties when I first began to work
seriously and consciously on my novels, it was D.H Lawrence,
Virginia Woolf, Henry James and Proust that influenced me more
~tron~~~.~'
About her favourite authors, she has said that she likes "the Russians,
Dostoyevsky and Chekov. ... amongst the Americans I do respect Saul Bellow. A
few poets mean a great to me, people like Emily Dickinson, D.H. Lawrence and
some French poets. I read a great deal of poetry."69
She admits that she was determined to be a writer even as a child and
since English was the language in which she first learned to read and write, it was
natural for her to write in English:
By the age of seven or eight I was certainly writing a great deal and
determined to be a writer. I didn't pick English out, I don't think a
child of seven is capable of doing so. I must have simply picked the
language which cam,: most fluently and easily to me. Why it came so
fluently to me, I sho111dthink because I did most of my reading in it.
I still find, although I do read German, and Bengali and Hindi, I do it
with more effort, whereas English requires no effort whats~ever.'~
As a Short Story writer
She began publishing her stories, poems and letters in children's
magazines even as a child. Later, while in college, she wrote stories and reviews
that were published in the college magazine and other journals. It was with the
publication of her short stories in magazines and journals that her literary career
started. Her first short story "Circus Cat, Alley Cat" was published in Thought.
More of her stories started appearing in The Illustrated Weekly of India,
w,
Writers Workshop Miscellany and
m.Her
short stories reflected her
fascination for the inner workings of the human psyche. Her collection of short
stories was later published as Qlmes at Twili~htin 1978. Her latest published
work to date is Diamond Dust, a collection of nine short stories, published in 2001.
These nine stories are set in Indiri, Canada, and Mexico, among other places, and
are frequently concerned with the way individuals struggling to cope or fail to
cope with dislocation and family ties in an alien culture. The stories reveal her
characteristic lucidity of style, subtle humour and concern for the middle class
society. In this brilliant collecti~,n of stories, Desai has created unforgettable
moments of ordinary lives in a disintegrating world. The stories include
"Winterscape", which is about a woman who has sacrificed everything for her
son's success, and "The Rooftop I>wellersUabout a young woman trying to live a
liberated, independent life in Delhi in a strange rooftop community. In the title
story, she mischievously tells th: story of a pet dog who brings nothing but
disaster to its obsessed master. H1:r stories, which provide a rare insight into the
complexities of human behaviour. are rich in its delicacy of language, and sharp
wit.
As a Novelist
When she was 26 years old Desai made her debut as a novelist with
Cry, the Peacock, which was published in Britain by Peter Owen in 1963. It
received wide acclaim. From the very beginning Desai used the intricate and
delicate web of family conflict as her greatest theme. Her pet themes include
alienation, both physical and psychological. Her earlier novels are notable for their
brilliant combination of elegant prose, suggestive understatement, and well
thought out melodrama. Her chancters usually strive to achieve their goals in a
complicated and unsympathetic world. The struggle of women to assert their
independence in the narrow confiiies of the Indian society is one of the recurring
themes in her novels.
Most of Desai's nov8:ls explore the tensions experienced by middleclass women due to their inability to share feelings inside the family, their
disillusionment, and their sense c,f alienation. Desai's women characters usually
pose themselves as 'outsiders' and rebel against patriarchal tyranny. As they
attempt to explore their own strer~gthsso as to live on their own terms, they are
forced to face drastic consequences. Thus we find the sensitive and sensuous Maya
in Cw the Peacock, rebelling against the extreme logical rationalism of her
husband Gautama, who tries to force the Vedantic philosophy of detachment on
her.
Probably, Desai was the first novelist to introduce depth psychology
in Indo-Anglian literature. As S.L. Paul comments:
Anita Desai's view .of human personality is indebted to Freud in so
far as her characters are impelled by unconscious purposes, but it is
doubtful whether they are compelled by unconscious motivations
mainly sexual at bottom, Maya's affection for her father is part of her
larger creative life which seeks among others, thrills of beauty. ...
The unconscious, which. Anita Desai explores has roots in our
instincts, our impulse:;, our desires and not in our mental fixations of
the Freudian cast."
Her second novel N l c e s in the City was serialised in The Illustrated
Weekly of India in 1965 and was published as a novel the same year. Based on the
life of the middle class intellectuals of Calcutta, it tells the story of three siblings
and their different ways. They art: trapped in the clashing currents of changing
social values at the time of Indias social transition and the conflicting cultural
ideologies persist around them z.s stumbling blocks in their way to become
liberated individuals.
Other than her eleven novels and the collection of short stories,
Desai has published several books for children including The Peacock Garden and
The Village Bv the Sea, which lias been serialized for the BBC. She has also
written the screenplay for the film version of In custody. She has won the Winifred
Holtby prize of the Royal Societj of Literature and the Sahitya Academy Award
for her Fire on the Mountain. She bagged the Guardian Award for children's
fiction for her novel The Village bv the Sea. The novel Baumgartner's Bombay
has earned her the Harold Ribaiow Prize, thus consolidating her international
reputation. A recipient of the Padmashri Award, Desai published her novel
Journey to Ithaca in 1995 and &sting and Feasting in1999. Three of the novels,
Clear Liaht of Day and In Custody, and Fasting and Feasting were short-listed for
the Booker Prize.
At present, Desai is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a
member of the American Acadeiny of Arts and Letters, as well as a Fellow of
Girton College, Cambridge. Anitit Desai lives in the United States, where she was
the John E. Burchard Professor of Writing at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Desai recently rstired from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where she had been a professor of creative writing for more than a
decade. She earlier taught at Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges. She has been a
member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in
Delhi. In her latest novel W g . Feasting, she vividly picuturises the family
atmosphere in two different cultui.es.
She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the Guardian
Prize for Children's Fiction, 1983; the Hadassah Prize from Hadassah magazine in
1989, and the Literary Lion Awlrd from the New York Public Library in 1993.
Though Desai has taught for years at Mount Holyoke and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and spends most of the year outside of India, she does not
consider herself part of the Indian Diaspora. She considers herself lucky for having
not left India until late in her life. because she feels that she has been drifting away
from it ever since: "I can't really write of it with the same intensity and familiarity
that I once had."72 Yet she cannot feel at home in any other place or society than
India.
Her forthcoming iiovel, The Zigzag Way is due for release on
September2, 2004. In this new novel, Desai paints a subtle, miniaturist history of
20th century Mexico, seen from unexpected perspectives, that evokes the
exploitation of the Mexican Indians.
As an Indo-Anelian Novelist
Sundry are the factocs that have contributed to the upsurge of Indian
writing in English. Chief among these is the growth of an Englishspeaking community in the post- independent India. Though the
English language was first introduced to function as a linguistic tool
for the administrati\e and other services for the British Empire in
India, it did not disappear with the withdrawal of the British in 1947.
Instead, the postcolonial period has seen an unparalleled rise in the
number of people who identify English as the most effective
language of communication. Moreover, as K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar
has observed :
English is the veritable Suez Canal for intellectual intercourse
between the West and the East
-
between England and India especially; and the
traffic is by no means altogether or e-sided."
Anita Desai started vriting her novels at a time when, to quote her
own words, an Indian writer had to face "outright dismissal"74 from English critics
or "hysterical derision"75 from the Indian reviewers. To be an Indo-Anglian writer
was definitely "not an enviable position in which to find o n e s e ~ f ' ~at' that time.
But she had the grit to write in a language that came naturally to her and with a bit
of noble arrogance, she claims thz t she did not choose English in a deliberate or
conscious manner, rather "it was the language that chose me"77. She considers it
her fortune to have been able to side-step the problems usually created for Indo
Anglian fiction writers who writc: "the kind of social document that demands the
creation of realistic and typical dialogue."78 Desai wrote the subjective,
psychological novels, which allowed her the freedom to "employ simply the
language of the interior. ..which has nothing to do with geography and can be
written in any language."79 ~ c c o r d i nto~ her, subjective writers with a private,
inner vision have an easier time with the foreign language than the objective
writers who write social satires.
The vast corpus of an area of literature now identified as Indo
Anglian Literature, has now gained recognition in the West, and it still continues
to generate interest both at home and abroad. The world of Indo-Anglian writing
has continued to thrive since Rushdie's publication of the Booker Prize-winning
Midnight's Children in 1981. Ani:a Desai herself has commented about this:
It was Salman Rushdie again, in Midnight's Children, who finally
brought the spoken language off the streets onto the printed page,
with such energy and electricity that the Indian reader was finally
won over and the Indian writer saw the two tongues as one. And so
we are back in the days of oral story telling, when the language
employed had to be accessible, demotic, of and for the people.80
Among the pioneer women writers of Indo-Anglian fiction, Kamala
Markandaya concentrates on soc:ial themes, while Nayantara Seghal deals with
politics. Ruth Pawar Jhabvala concentrates on the East-West encounter in her
novels. But Anita Desai can be said to have introduced the psychological novels
to the Indo-Anglian literature. As K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar puts it:
Her forte.. . is the exploration of sensibility
-
the particular kind of
modem Indian sensibility that is ill at ease among the barbarians and
the philistines, tht: anarchists and the amoralists. Since her
preoccupation is wi~:hthe inner world of sensibility rather than the
outer world of action, she has tried to forge a style supple and
suggestive enough to convey the fever and fretfulness of the stream
of consciousness of her principal chara~ters.~'
Desai believes that writing is a spontaneous act, and not one of
"deliberation, reason and choice'82 For her, "it is the image that matters, the
symbol, the myth, the feat of associating them, of relating them, of constructing
them."83 This can be done in any language, she remarks, "only it must be done
spontaneously, compulsively, sul~consciously. 'Only Connect.' That is what a
writer's existence is all about- he connects, all the time he connects"84 Such a
process will transcend all boundares of language.
She is part of a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English,
which dates back only to the '30's Dr '40's. Her new style of writing is also different
from many Indian writers, as it is much less conservative than Indian literature has
been in the past. Throughout her novels she portrays the cultural and social
changes that India has undergone as she focuses on the incredible power of family
and society and the relationships between family members, paying close attention
to the trials of women suppressed 11y Indian society.
Her concept of India
In spite of the Gelman part of her background, Desai considers
herself as a complete Indian. In an interview with Corinne Demas Bliss, she says:
I don't think of myself as half-German at all because I have so little
connection with Gc:rmany, apart from the language.
I think of
myself as totally Indian because I was born there and grew up there.
And it's been my whole world ...I am able to look at a country I
know so intimately with a certain detachment, and that certainly
comes from my mo.:her because I'm aware of how she would have
reacted to people and to situations. I feel about India as an Indian,
But I suppose I think about it as an ~utsider."'~For her, India is "the
most familiar place on earth.'"
She feels overwhelmed by the fact that while in most countries
brutality is obscured and veiled, in India every human experience is left on the
surface:
Nothing screens thsm from your view. You feel exhausted and
battered by all that India throws at you.
At the same time it's
extremely honest, it's extremely open, and it's extremely basic. If
brutality and harshness are so obvious in India, so are affection and
family
ties and fiiendships.
They're heightened, too, in India.
They're also very much more open and vivid. And I suppose they're
what makes life wonderfully livable there-the warmth and the color
and the exuberance one misses elsewhere."
In her novels, past and present seem to overlap each other because
she believes in the Indian concepr: of time as circular. She has the conviction that
life does not end; only episodes come to an end, only to be followed by other
episodes. Experience has taught her that :
...all forms of ending and destruction are surely violent. Some can
be made to seem n8)t so, but they are inherently violent.
happiness being cut short or coming to an end
-
Life or
these are forms of
violence, violence done to living things. In the Holocaust, it was the
scale that was unpre'zedented and appalling -the violence was neither
new nor unique. 88
Her Mission and Purpose in Writing
Like Virginia Wooll., Desai too writes out of compulsion. She does
not have any utopian dream that her novels can change the world or destroy evil.
She is aware of the bleak picture that life offers, of what human nature is capable
of. She knows that human beings can be impatient, pugnacious and cruel. But that
does not mean that she feels she can arouse a general awareness among human
beings and thus change them. "A.bsolutely not", says Desai, "I don't think even
religion or philosophy had had that effect. How can literature, which isn't even
read?"89
Then, why does she wrile? To this she replies:
A lament, a protest, a statement. Those have to be made. I suppose
that is what we write for. The human animal certainly has a need to
make his statement, r:o retrieve something from the wreck of time.90
Desai repeatedly says that she writes out of compulsion:
I've always written out of compulsion. And it's occasionally
pleasurable. The pleasure lies in working out the situation, working
out a character. I think what it really is the sense of the world being
a great mass of chaos and when one is at a desk and when one is
writing and one line follows the other, one seems to be putting it in
order.9'
In another inter vie^ with Magda Costa, Desai claims that she does
not try to be deliberately pessimistic in her novels. Instead she prefers "to think of
them as facing the truth, not having i ~ l u s i o n s . " ~ ~
The Language She Uses
Having had the p~ivilege of growing up with three languagesGerman, Hindi and English she has patched up a "family language and simply
seized whatever word or phrase sj:emed appropriate to the moment."" She admits
that in her earlier writings she did try to achieve a purity of language.
increasingly, she found herself, concerned with :
But
. .. amalgamating the languages of my childhood and the languages
of India in my prost:: not to dissolve them all into one bland tongue.
But to differentiate between them and use their different qualities,
rhythms, tones.
Of course each is loaded with its own cultural
references and that rnakes writing denser, to my mind richer.94
The Autobiographical Element in Her Novels
Anita Desai had bet:n nourishing a sense of privacy so painstakingly
from the beginning of her career and preferred an almost incognito existence, "as if
enveloped in mystery, being a name on a printed page, combining presence with
absence.""
But from the latter years of the eighties, Desai has become more
accessible to her readers by participating in open discussions and writing
occasional articles and reviews where she expresses her personal views on the art
of fiction. Earlier in 1979, Desai had admitted the inevitability of the
autobiographical element in her novels.
The quality of one's experience must show through one's work. If
you mean whether the material is autobiographical or not, I can divide it up quite
clearly. The scenes and settings tire certainly the ones I have gone through myself.
As for the characters - the minor and incidental characters are also picked from
real life; I don't think any of the major characters in my books are taken from real
life. They are entirely imagin.iry or an amalgamation of several different
characters.96
In her later works, llesai has tried to make a deliberate effort to step
out of her own life and her past and has attempted to write something totally
unfamiliar. Yet she wonders whether writers could ever really escape from
themselves or whether escapisn itself is the point. "The point, surely, is
investigation, quest and dis~overj"~'
In her interview with Srivastava, she boldly proclaims, "If a
character of mine is capable of possessing both a sane and insane half, then so am
I."~' For her, art is "an exploration, an enquiry, not an escape"99
The Characters in Desai's Novels
The introspective nature of the protagonists in Desai's novels makes
them defiant individuals who s w m against the routine-ridden currents of ordinary
life. They struggle against conformity and rebelliously utter the 'Great No', which
ultimately leads them to their desr:iny. Usha Pathania comments:
Living, for her prctagonists, means keeping their identities in tact,
whereas love demands surrender
deeper than that
-
-
a fusion not on the sexual level alone, but
an emotior al interaction which is unifying and mutually
gratifying.'00
Such unwillingnes; to share is in fact the symptom of a mental
illness which is common amorig highly individualistic and egocentred human
beings. Unless they break.that hard crust of egocentricity, there is no salvation for
them from the terrible pangs of tlesolation which will haunt them throughout their
lives. They fail to make rneanini:hl interpersonal relationships. Desai herself is of
the opinion that "all human relaticlnships are inadequate"lO' This inadequacy is due
to the basic solitude of every human being. According to her, "involvement in
human relationships in this world nvariably leads to d i s a ~ t e r " ' ~ ~ .
But such a privatized attitude of introversion could prove to be more
disastrous. Man needs love and the fellow feeling, which accompanies it. One of
the tragedies in life is that man has forgotten to love and to be loved. Keeping
one's self only for oneself is nothing but selfishness. Such selfishness can in turn
produce only the desolation of thz mind which are manifested in different forms
like anxiety, fear, shyness, guilt
01.
some other compulsive habits. These are signs
of deep inner disorder. Most of Ilesai's protagonists suffer one or more of such
symptoms. Most of these characters are hypersensitive and insecure. They show a
negative response to life. Like 'Jirginia Woolf's characters, they too reach the
threshold of individuation, but refuses to make that last leap into individuation.
They are afraid of losing themsel1.e~in the attempt. It is the ego, which prevents
them from making the splendid sacrifice. In their attempt to become liberated
individuals, they submit themselves to a self-chosen withdrawal. But inadvertently,
such withdrawals lead them onlv to a sense of utter forlornness. Nirode, the
bohemian recluse in Desal's m : s in the City, for instance, wlshes he had a bell
to ring when he walks out of his room so that he could ring and call, "I am a leper,
diseased with the loneliest disease of
So weary was he of the company of
others. But even in that self-im13osed isolation, he realizes its worthlessness.
"Nothing existed but this void in which all things appeared equally insignificant,
equally w o r t h ~ e s s . " 'Deven
~~
in
Custody, Matteo in Journey to Ithaca, or Arun
in Fasting and Feasting are some clf the other male characters in the fictional world
of Desai who can be cited as suc11 disgruntled outsiders. They are caught up in a
world of illusions and their ahsurd search for meaning and self-discovery
invariably end up in total fiasco. For instance, Amn on reaching US, feels that "he
had at last experienced the tota freedom of anonymity, the total absence of
relations, of demands, needs, requests, ties, responsibilities, commitments.-105 But
as days pass by, we find h~rnall the: more entangled with new ties of relationships:
No, he had not esca~~ed.
He had travelled and he had stumbled into
what was like a pl'istic representation of what he had known at
home; not the real thing
-
fraught and compromised
which was plain, unbeautiful, misshapen,
-
but the unreal thing
-
clean, bright,
gleaming, without taste, savour or nourishment."'"
The women characte:rs in Desai's novels take the attitude of being
outsiders, as a form of weapon for survival in the patriarchal community. Their
attempts to swim against the current, often culminate either in death or in passive
resignation. The married women ci~aracterslike Maya in Cry, A Peacock, Monisha
in Voices in the City, Nanda Kaul in Fire in the Mountain, and Sita in Where Shall
We Go This Summer?, are depressed, violent or self-destructive women. Some of
them even become psychotic. Maya in Cry the Peacock even kills her husband.
Desai's women charicters want freedom within the community of
men and women, as it is the only way that will succeed in fulfilling them. Even
Sophie, a European woman, longs to experience the freedom, but within the
bondage of marriage, in Joumev to Ithaca. She willingly follows Matteo, her
husband, in his spiritual search tc India. But his indifference as a husband enrages
her, and her violent reaction to i~ causes the final tragedy. Monisha, in Voices in
the City, escapes her unhappy marital relationship by killing herself. Sita, in
Where Shall We Go this Summer? goes to her childhood island as a way to escape
from her frustrations as a wife and mother. Nanda in Fire on the Mountain endures
the exploitation from her husband and, finally, when he dies, escapes to the
solitary hills to live as a recluse. Amala, Monisha's sister, also breaks down after
the death of Monisha and her owr broken relationship with Dharma.
Gender equality in marriage does not constitute an ideal solution for
desolation in Desai's novels. In fact the character that seems to reach the near ideal
of an emancipated woman is the unmarried Bim in Clear Light of the Day. Yet
even Bim seems to succumb to the need to 'connect' as she finally decides to
reconcile with her brother. But Desai is of the opinion that "all human
relationships are inadequate. . . . EIasically everyone is solitary. 1 think involvement
in this world invariably leads to disaster"lo7 Desai does not totally negate marriage,
nor does she support withdrawal from community. There are a few women
characters in her novels, like Tar1 in Clear Light of the Day, who are quite happy
as married women.
Attitude to Religion
Though Desai is familiar with the Hlndu philosophy and quotes
profusely from Bagvat Gita in her novels like Cry the Peacock and Where Shall
We Go this Summer?, she is not basically a religious person. Rather, she uses her
knowledge as an added embellishment in her fiction. Her Journey to Ithaca is a full
length novel on spiritual quest. But it proves to be a spiritual wasteland in the end.
In her interview with Jasbir Jain, Desai has admitted that her quoting
of the Gita does not reflect any n:ligious attitude. "It belonged to a certain time of
my life, and it is there in my earlier books, but eventually I discarded it."108
Such a lack of spiritual anchorage is reflected in the characters of
both Woolf and Desai. Without zny foothold, the characters grope in the darkness
of their consciousness. They seem to be preoccupied with the human predicament
and their attention is forever tunled to their inner sensibilities. This introspection
leads them to a deep sense of inner desolation, from which very few manage to
climb out.
NOTES
I
Sarvepalli Gopal, ed. Jawaharlal Nehru. An Anthology, (Delhi: OUP, 1983) 194.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, (,ondon,The Hogarth Press, 1977) 20.
Virginia Woolf, "Robinson Crusoe", The Common Reader: Second Series, (London,
The Hogarth Press, 1974) 52.
4
Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life, (Oxford: OUP. 1984) 8.
Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 19.
6
Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 25.
'
Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 23.
*
Gordon, Virginia Woolf, 25.
9
Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, (London: Grafton
Books,1985) 8.
'' Woolf, "A Sketch of the Pastn,&40mentsof Being.
II
Roger Poole, The Unknown Virenia Woolf, (Cambridge, CUP, 1978) 7.
'' Poole. The Unknown, 20.
"
Nlgel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, (A LipperNiking Book), chapter 1 <http://partners.
nytimes.comlbooks/first~nlnicolson-woolf.html>ll-6-04.
14
Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (Oxford: OUP, 1984) 27.
Erica E Goode, with Nancy Linr on and Sarah Brooke, "Understanding Depression",
m,December 1990. 20.
I6
Goode, "Understanding Depression". 20
17
Goode, "Understanding Depressi~)n".17
"
Goode, "Understanding Depression". 17
19
George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of
Leonard and Virginia Woolf (Lorldon: Jonathan Cape and Hogarth Press, 1977) 20.
20
Spater, A Marriage 36.
21
Spater, A Marriage 37.
22
Spater, A Mamage 40.
23
qtd. in Spater, A Marriage 25.
24
Spater, A Marriage 40.
25
Mulk Raj Anand, Conversation;j in Bloomsburv, ( New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann,
1981) 6.
*' Christopher
Ishenvood, Recol1et:tions of Virginia Woolf bv her Contemporaries, ed.
Joan Russel Noble (London: Peter Owen Ltd.) 177.
27
Jane Dunn, ed. Virginia Woolf, An Illustrated Anthology (New York: Crescent
Books, 1994) 27.
28
Ishenvood, Recollections, 177 - 178.
29
R.L.Charnbers, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, (Edinburg: Oliver and Boyd Ltd.,
1957), 64.
O'
Woolf, Between the Acts, (Lon,lon: Granada Publishing Ltd., Panther Books, 1978)
140.
''
E.M.Forster, Recollections of Vrginia Woolf bv her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russel
Noble (London: Peter Owen Ltd ) 194
32
"
34
''
"'ev.
-
195.
Woolf, Between the Acts, 73.
Woolf, Writer's Diary, 148.
Poole, Unknown Virginia, 61.
Poole, Unknown Virginia 20.
Joanne Sanders ," Start Where You Are",November 16,2003,
<http:llreligiouslife.stanford.edu'uploadsldocumentsls 03 11 start.pdf > June 14,
2004.
''
Alison M. Lewis, Ph.D., "Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834-1909) and Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941): A Quaker Influen,:e on Modem English Literature", !&&sx
Theologv: Issue Number Three. Vol. 2, No. 2, Online Edition, Autumn 2000
~http:l/www.quaker.org/quest/issue3-3.ht14-6-2004.
38
Lewis, "Caroline Emelia Stephrtn (1834-1909) and Virginia Woolf'
" Amy Ellis Nutt, "Researchers Seek Answers to Faith's Place in Psyche", 2002 New
house News Service, 25 June 2004. <http://www.newhouse. com/archive/ stowla
122302.htmI>
40
Iona Miller,
"How
the B-ain
'Creates'
God',
the
Emerging
Science of
Neurotheology, Asklepia Foundation, 2003,
http:/lwww.nwbotanicals.orplo.WmagicWcreatesgod.htn~
4'
qtd. in Morton Hunt, "The Psy:hologist Malgre Lui: William James",
< http://~~~.emon/.edu~EDUCATIONlmfplhunt.html~
18 June 2004
42
Woolf, "Mr.Bennett and Mrs Brown", A Woman's Essays, Rachel Bowlby ed.,
(London: Penguin-Books, 1992) 69-87
43
Woolf, "Review of The Grand Tour, by Romer Wilson, and Revolvinc Lights, by
Dorothy Richardson, Romancf: and the Heart. From The Nation and the Athenaeum,
May 19, 1923, (Virginia Woolf'and Modernism Selected Articles from
Times Literary Supplement and The Nation and the Athenaeum)" 27 June 2004
<http:/lxroads.virginia.edu/-C1,ASS/worksho~97/Gribbin/romance-nf.html~
44
Woolf, "The Leaning 'Tower", A Woman's Essavs, (London : Penguin Books, 1992)
174-175.
45
Wo~If,'~Freudian
Fiction"(A Rcvicw of J.D. Beresford's An Imperficl Mofher
(Collins, 1920), first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 25 March 1920) A
Woman's Essays( London: Penguin Books 1992) 21-22
4"oo1f,
A Writer's Diaw , 69
47
Qtd. in Jane Dunn ed. Virginia Woolf An Illustrated Anthology 54
48
Emily Dickinson, "I'm Nobod!,! Who are You?", American Literature. an Antho1o.q
1890 - 1960, ed. Dr. Egbert S Oliver (New Delhi: Eurasia Publishing House, 1980)
49
Anita Desai, "The Indian Writer'!: Problem", Perspectives on Anita Desai ed. Ramesh
K Srivastava.(Ghaziabad: Vimalaprakashan, 1984) 3
50
S.R Jamkhandi, "Guest Editor's Word", The Journal of Indian Writing in English,
January 1981: V.
"
Bidulata Choudhari, Women and Societv in the Novels of Anita Desai, (New Delhi:
Creative Books, 1995) 41.
52
Anita Desai, In Custody, (Englad: Penguin Books Ltd., 1985) 192.
53
Desai, In Custody, 192.
54
qtd. in Maya Jaggi, "Intimate Escapes", 'Review of Diamond Dust and Other
Stories'. Saturday June 3, 2000, The Guardian. 4 July 2004 <http:!/books. guardian.
co.uWreviewslgeneralfiction.htm>.
55
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage from India", The Guardian, Saturday, June 19, 1999 <
http://www.guardian.co.uk> April 19, 2004
56
''
58
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
"Connecting the Cultural Dots", jlW-World.DE Deutsche Welle 18.09.2003
<l1ttp:Nwww.dw-world.de/englisll/0,3367,1441~A~973373~1~A,00.html~
59
"Connecting the Cultural Dots", IW-World.DE Deutsche Welle 18.09.2003
~http:/lwww.dw-world.de/englisl~/0,3367,1441~A~973373~1A,00.html~
60
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
61
Maya Jaggi, "A passage from India", The Guardian, Saturday June 19, 1999
http:!lwww.guardian.co.ukiprint/3,3858.38763 14- 103486.00.html
62
"Third World Views of the Holc~caust",Northeastern University Symposium Boston,
April 18-20, 2001,< http://www:iiolence.neu.edu/Anita.Desai.htnIMarch 30, 2004.
63
Maya Jaggi, "A passage from Inoia", The Guardian, Saturday June 19, 1999
<http:/!www.guardian.co.uWprint/0,3858,3876314-103486,00.html~
64
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
65
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
67
"
Maya Jaggi, "A Passage"
Ramesh K Srivastava, "Desai at Work" Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed. Ramesh K
Srivastava (Ghaziabad : Vimal Prakashan, 1984) 2 17
69
Jasbir Jain, "Interview, 1 6 ' ~November, 1979, Jaipur", Stairs to the Attic : The Novels
of Anita Desai, (Jaipur: Printwell Publishers, 1987) 14
70
Jasbir Jain, "Interview, 161hNovember, 1979, Jaipur", Stairs to the Attic, 8.
"
S.L.Pau1, A Critical Study of Anita Desai's 'Cry. the Peacock' , (New Delhi: Harman
Publishing House, 1988) 15-16
''
Elizabeth Ostberg, "Notes on thc Biography of Anita Desai." February 12, 2000.2
March 2004. <http://www.haverford.edu/engl/enel277b/Contexts/anita desai.htm>
"
K.R.Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English ,(new De1hi:Sterling Publishers,
1987) 15.
74
Anita Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problem", Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed.
Ramesh K Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1984) 1.
75
Desai, The Indian Writer's Problern", 1.
76
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problcm", 1.
77
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problem" 1.
"
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problem", 3.
79
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problem", 3
80
Anita Deasi, "Indian Fiction Today", Daedalus ,(Fall 1959 207-212) 212.
81
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, lndian Writing in English , (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,
1987) 464.
82
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Problen", 4.
Desai, "The Indian Writer's Proble:nn, 4.
84
Desai, "The lndian Writer's Probleln", 4.
85
Corinne Demas Bliss, "Against the Current: A Conversation with Anita Desai",
Massachusetts Review (Fall, 1988) 527.
86
BB~S,
"Against the Current", 527.
87
Bliss, "Against the Current" 528.
88
Bliss, "Against the Current" 532.
89
B ~ S"Against
,
the Current" 531.
Bliss, "Against the Current", 532.
91
Bliss, "Against the Current", 532.
92
Magda Costa interview with Anita Desai in Barcelona, 30 Jan 2001.
http:Nusers.cyberci~.dk/-dsl12095/interviewdesai.htm
23 August 2002
93
Bliss, "Against the Current, 532.
94
Bliss, LLAgain~t
the Current", 532.
95
Jasbir Jain, Stairs to the Attic: The Novels of Anita Desai (Jaipur: Printwell
Publishers, !987) 1.
"
"Interview, 1 6 ' ~~ovemher,1979, Jaipur", Stairs to the Attic, 13 - 14.
97
Bliss, Against the Current", 534.
"
Anita Desai, "Anita Desai at Uork: An Interview", Perspectives on Anita Desai,
ed.Ramesh Srivastava.(Ghaziabao: Vimal Prakasham, 1984) 219.
99
Anita Desai, Desai at Work" m,ectives, 220 - 221.
loo
Usha Pathania, Human Bonds ana Bondages: The Fiction of Anita Desai and Kamala
Markandava. (Delhi: Kanishka Publishing House, 1992) x.
Anita Desai, "Interview, 161hNovember, 1979, Jaipur", Jasbir Jain, Stairs to the Attic
lo'
: The Novels of Anita Desai , (Jai~ur:Printwell Publishers, 1987) 11.
102
Desai, "Interview", Jasbir Jain , Stairs to the Attic, 11-12,
103
Desai, Voices in the City, 61.
104
Desai, Voices in the City 63
Io5
Anita Desai, fast in^ and Feasting , (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999) 172.
""esai,
'07
'08
Fasting and Feasting, 185.
Desai "Interview", Jasbir Jain, St;lirs to the Attic. 11.
Desai "Interview", Jasbir Jain, S r s to the Attic. 13.
.:.>.