Infantile Women in Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock and Where Shall We Go This Summer?

Abstract

This essay explores the implications of representing adult women as infantile and childish in Anita Desai's Cry, the Peacock (1963) and Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975). Do these women infantilize themselves or are they infantilized by men, omniscient third-person narration and/or the author, and what are the slippages between these overlapping, if contradictory interpellations? Despite the narratives of overt hysteria and the impossibility of finding desired, radical subjects of feminism in her early work, I argue that Desai provides an invaluable historical snap-shot of the challenges faced by middle-class women entrapped in specific ways within an idealized imagining of family and nation.