Classics Corner: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong; Frank and Funny Feminist Novel from the 1970’s about Liberation, Sexual and Otherwise

Classics Corner: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong; Frank and Funny Feminist Novel from the 1970’s about Liberation, Sexual and Otherwise

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: I would like to give an advanced warning that this review will contain strong language which may be offensive to some Readers. Normally, I try to avoid such words but it's difficult with this book considering how prominent the terms are. Read at your own discretion.

It's difficult to imagine now how much of an impact that Erica Jong's Fear of Flying had on the public consciousness when it was first published in 1973. Based on Jong's experiences with her first two marriages, the book was published during the Second Wave of American Feminism and was loathed and lauded by critics and readers alike. Many found it vulgar and offensive and criticized its stance on marriage. Others found it refreshing that a woman could write so honestly about marriage and sexuality. It's legacy was assisted by prominent authors like John Updike and Henry Miller writing essays praising Jolng's work. Miller even compared Fear of Flying to his own landmark work calling it the female version of Tropic of Cancer.

After 46 years, Fear of Flying deserves that praise and more. It's a frank and funny book that is brutally honest and biting about a woman's marriage and her desire to break free from it.

Isadora Wing, the novel's protagonist, is accompanying her husband Bennett to a psychoanalyst's convention in Vienna. Observing that the flight includes Bennett's fellow convention goers, Isadora wittily realizes that she had been treated by most of the analysts including the one she is married to.

Isadora appears happy or at least settled in her second marriage and considering her first marriage was to an unstable man who was under the delusion that he was Jesus Christ at least her marriage to Bennett is uneventful. But inside, Isadora is unfulfilled and bored.

Isadora longs for what she terms “the zipless fuck.” A “zipless fuck” is an affair based on sex and nothing else. You're in and out quickly. There are no strings attached and no remorse. It is simply a means to relieve hidden lust, sexual frustration, and desires.

While at the convention, she finds her potential “zipless fuck” in another psychoanalyst, Adrian Goodlove. Unfortunately as the two begin to fancy each other, Isadora realizes the reality of her fantasy is not at all zipless. The affair goes on longer than she expected and she joins Adrian on a road trip through Europe at the cost of her marriage, a marriage that she is not sure that she wants.

Isadora's narration is filled with dry sarcastic remarks and one-liners turning her into the Dorothy Parker of the Me Decade. She has a rejoinder about everything even the darkest subjects. She lived in Heidelberg, Germany with Bennett for a time and felt out of place as an American Jewish woman living in Germany less than 20 years after WWII ended. (“Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised in fact for being so familiar.”) Isadora is constantly at odds with her mother, Jude, who blames her marriage and giving birth to four daughters for ending her artistic career and warns Isadora that she has to choose to either be an artist or have children. (“With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and given.up.”) Isadora studies English Literature earning a fellowship but finds it unable to hold her interest particularly as she reads the various analyses of Tom Jones. (“I had gone to graduate school because I love literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism.”)

Even the men in her life are no match for Isadora's sharp wit. After the difficulties of her first marriage, Isadora is drawn to Bennet's silent steadiness which proves to be a burden. (“At what point had I started to pretend that Bennett was somebody else? Somewhere around the end of the third year of our marriage. And why? Nobody had been able to tell me that.”) When doodling variations of her name with Adrian's such as Isadora Wing-Goodlove, M.B.E. she cheekily tries to make her vision of a third marriage different from her previous one, even if it is to another analyst. She begins a facetious invitation to a housewarming party but adds at the bottom “bring your own hallucinogens.”

These one-liners and wit while funny are also seen as a defense mechanism. They are Isadora's way of understanding the tangled relationships around her and help her make sense of the world.

As Isadora plunges headlong into her journey with Adrian, she alternates between having sex with him, trying to avoid difficult conversations about the future, and recalling events from her past. The flashback chapters are key as we understand how they shaped Isadora to the choices that she made. Besides her depressed mother, Isadora also has strained relationships with her three sisters each of whom made seemingly rebellious choices for husbands: Randy the oldest marries Pierre, a Lebanese businessman and gives birth to nine children. Lalah, her younger sister marries Robert, an African-American doctor and gives birth to quintuplets. Chloe, the youngest, marries Abel, an Israeli businessman and gives birth to one child. Isadora watches bemused as each of her sisters once unconventional settle into conformist marriages and motherhood and keep badgering her to give up her poetic ambitions and have children. (“Why must marriage always include children?” Isadora wonders)

Isadora gets a close up taste of her sister's brands of married life when she, Lalah, and Chloe visit Randy and Pierre at their home in Beirut. Pierre then attempts to rape Isadora who is disgusted by the thought of committing incest with her brother-in-law and is even more startled by Lalah and Chloe giggling about the whole thing. This moment opens her eyes about the hypocrisy with married couples particularly her sisters who live contented lives on the outside but are depraved and hypocritical on the inside.

Isadora's first marriage also provides necessary explanation for why she is so miserable in the present. Brian Stollerman is at first a brilliant eloquent man who is knowledgeable in everything from Medieval literature, Shakespeare's plays, to old gangster films. Isadora admits that “(they) blew it by getting married” as he pressured her to marry him or he would leave her. Brian's terrifying delusions begin to take hold as he keeps Isadora up all night with disconnected ramblings and questions about her religious beliefs and the Second Coming. When he believes that he is Jesus Christ, Isadora is so beaten down by his mental illness that she is unable to fight his abuse towards her. She surrenders custody of him to his parents with whom she does not get along and his institutionalization. It's no wonder that she then settles into the quiet of her marriage to Bennett Wing, considering an analyst a safe release after a mentally ill man.

Even Isadora's marriage to Bennett and her affair with Adrian are not without their struggles. While Bennett is not a cruel man, he does not fully understand or appreciate Isadora behaving less like a husband and equal and more like a mentor or father figure. He treats Isadora like a project always trying to analyze and place her in a little confined box. What was once a reprieve from the conformity of her family and the insanity of her first marriage, becomes suffocating as Isadora is afraid of losing herself to the ennui of married life.

Instead of Adrian being the release that she hoped for, he turns out to be more of the same. He claims to be a Nihilist but is actually using his beliefs as an excuse to be a controlling manipulator. He nags Isadora to leave Bennett and live freely with him yet does not cut himself off from his wife and children. When they finally end their relationship, Adrian abandons her in Paris. Instead of being zipless, Isadora just gets fucked.

However, when she's alone, Isadora finally comes to terms with what she has wanted all along. She wasn't looking for a casual sexual affair, or a third marriage. She was looking for a way to be herself. She was trying to liberate and free herself from the expectations set by her family, husbands, and Adrian and she does it.

The title comes from the opening chapter when Isadora admits that she has aviophobia, which is a fear of flying in airplanes. As the book continues, it is apparent that Isadora is afraid of flying away from the standards that she had placed on herself. Though she always questioned and ridiculed those standards, she never had the courage to separate herself from them. The book ends when she finally finds the courage to be herself and fly.