Anita Desai Themes

Anita Desai explores the psychic depths of her female characters and portrays them as individuals facing single-handed, and ferocious struggle for identity. Carefully avoiding being associated with any Feminist movement, she makes it clear that her concern as an artist is with the individual men and women. Sincere to her principles as an artist, Desai, in her novels seizes upon that incomplete and seemingly meaningless mass of reality around her and tries to discover the significance by getting below the surface and trying to illuminate those depths until they become mere reflection of the visible world. The aspects of theme and technique in Anita Desai’s novels are not isolated entities. They are inter-related at many levels of structure and texture. The theme serves as the skeleton incorporating the whole life-perspective of the novelist by making use of situations and scenes that are peculiar only to her.

The mottos chosen from clear light of day are drawn from the poem of Emily Dickson and T.S. Eliot (Gopal, 2010). They let us know that this will be a novel about memory, about places and people who go through transformation in an attempt to find their true identities. According to one of the critic, each novel of Anita Desai is a masterpiece of technical skill (Gopal, 2010). In Clear Light of Day Desai portrays her characters through various uses of symbols and images, and the language is often very poetic. Desai’s protagonists ‘associate their emotion and feelings with the buds, flower, petals, birds, animals and insects around them’ (style and narrative technique, 2003). At the very beginning of Clear Light of Day we are given the images of singing koels, of ants, of rose garden, of a snail. All images that br...

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...r own, no liking that made her wish to sweep the old house of all its rubbish and place in it things of her own choice?’ (Desai,1980).

Desai uses imagery and symbolism as a ways of creating order in her novels. She often links her characters to something in nature or in history to give an indication to where the novel is heading. She is also careful to choose names that can give the readers a clue as to what will happen. For instance, the name of the Muslim neighbor of the Das family, Hyder Ali, is also the name of a Muslim ruler and commander who lived in 18th century and he also symbolizes the days when India still managed to preserve some of the magic from the Islamic cultural heritage. The name of Bim can also be said to give us an idea of what will happen. Bimla means ‘untouched’, and is a good description of how Bim ends up living her life.