Portrayal of Women Characters
A major chunk of Desai‘s works revolve around the turmoil in the minds of female protagonists so as to maintain their individuality and self identity. She lays stress on nature in her works. Nature for her is both the physical environment and the instinctive nature of man, affecting and getting affected by each other. For her, nature reverberates in the mind and behaviour of man. She clearly portrays how modern civilization is slowly going far from nature forgetting the natural human qualities like love and sympathy. All this constitutes the ecology of her works. Desai, in her Where Shall We Go This Summer, while highlighting the protagonist Sita‘s deep psychological involvement with nature and ecology also presents the violence, the boredom, and monotony with which the modern city life is enveloped. She has successfully portrayed the effect of existential problems on a sensitive mind like Sita‘s that intends to grab tightly the closeness and magic of nature- the identity of a female soul in a cruel world. The modern civilization, being exiled from nature, forces her to be unwilling to give birth to her fifth child and makes her search for the magic of nature by taking shelter in Manori island with her two other children. Sita struggles to break herself free from the burden and the problems of contemporary humdrum existence and sets out in search of a complete female identity. In her journey of the quest for self, she goes through a metamorphosis and becomes acquainted with the truth about her identity. Ecology helps in her journey towards self realization. By reconnecting herself with nature and ecology, Sita reclaims her individuality and re- establishes it.