Surrender to Social Injustice for the Sake of Personal Healing? The Ambiguity of Forgiveness in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day
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Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day (1980) focuses on women’s experiences of family life in twentieth-century India, raising important questions about the tensions and conflicts inherent within the concept of forgiveness. My chapter analyses these ambiguities and discusses the ambivalent implications of forgiveness on the individual, familial and societal levels. Among other concerns, the novel focuses on aspects of women’s oppression, gender inequalities, and the role of the traditional family in perpetuating these. Because Bim, the protagonist, is portrayed as a strong and intelligent woman who is, in many ways, in control of her own life and her own choices, the nature and extent of her victimisation by gendered familial structures emerges only gradually throughout the narrative. Burdened by anger and bitterness, her decision at the end of the novel to forgive her family for leaving her with so much responsibility is, on one level, an emotional liberation which leaves her with a profound feeling of peace and calm. Although Bim comes to accept what has happened and what she must live with and deal with, and although she comes to recognise the destructive effects of her anger and bitterness upon herself and the people she loves, some critics have seen her act of forgiveness as a defeat, in the sense that she surrenders to self-sacrifice and self-effacement. They argue that the social criticism in the novel is undermined by the harmonious ending, while others see Bim’s adjustment to her circumstances on her own terms as both realistic and essential to her emotional stability and mental health. My own view is that the narrative powerfully dramatises the ambiguous nature of forgiveness itself, exploring its value - indeed its necessity - for individuals in some circumstances, as well as its role in perpetuating social inequality.