Existential Agony of a Woman in Anita Desai's

Anita Desai's women characters suffer because of their inability to strike an emotional chord with their spouses and to vent out their feelings freely. In this novel, Desai portrays Monisha, the protagonist's plight very graphically and carefully relates it to "the women who are like the female birds in the cage". All her novels revolve around the traditional status of women in the society dominated by the male chauvinists. As with the other feminist writers like Gita Mehta, Shashi Deshpande, Arundhati Roy etc. the crucial issue taken up by Desai is women's freedom. Freedom which men always possess but is denied to women flatly. Monisha like a caged bird trapped in an incompatible marriage with Jiban yearns to put her "head out of the window" but the "bars are closely set". And here Monisha is characterized by a remarkable quest for the self. But unlike Sarita in Deshpande's "Dark Holds No Terrors" or even Ammu in Arindhati Roy's "The God of Small Things", Monisha succumbs to the existential problems within the family fold. The novel ending in the tragic death of Monisha is a grim pointer towards the typical predicament of women in our times. And this is the tragedy of Indian Women leading to strings of suicides day after day. The present paper aims to dilate over this poignant social problem crying for urgent attention and remedial measures in this direction.