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.

Classics Corner: Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews; Emotional Moving Gothic Novel Is More Than Its Titillating Controversial Reputation

Classics Corner: Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews; Emotional Moving Gothic Novel Is More Than Its Titillating Controversial Reputation

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews




Spoilers: If I were to ask people to name one thing about V.C. Andrews's Gothic novel, Flowers in the Attic, it would be “Brother and Sister Incest.” The answer would be “Well yes, technically.”




As though it were the Fifty Shades of its day, the first book in Andrews's Dollanganger Series raunchy reputation precedes itself. Though with E.L. James’ barely disguised Twilight fanfiction (and badly written Twilight fanfiction at that), the reputation is all that it has to offer Readers.

While Flowers in the Attic is attached to controversy and many read the books because of the controversy (I remember many girls in Middle and High School with a copy in their hands), the book is actually better than the reputation it has been given.

At least the writing in the first book. The rest of Andrews's Dollanganger series takes a definite nose dive and foregoes quality, theme, and characterization to introduce plot points in an attempt to provoke the Reader and bring controversy. It almost becomes cartoonish or soap opera-like the way that the sexual themes and melodramatic plot points pile up and repeat themselves in the later books. Characters that were once interesting become caricatures and Cathy Dollanganger, the series’ main protagonist, almost hits Mary Sue proportions by the third or fourth book.

However, the first book in the series, Flowers in the Attic, balances the rest out as a well-written modern Gothic novel about child abuse, survival instincts, religious hypocrisy, and the lengths people go through to get money.




In the beginning, the Dollanganger Family seems like the perfect 1950’s dollhouse family. (A family joke has many people describe the fair-haired siblings Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory as “The Dresden Dolls.”) A father who is a well-to-do businessman, a mother who is very loving towards her husband and children, and four children who are bright and brimming with talent. Eldest son, Chris is a genius and budding medical doctor, middle daughter, Cathy is a future ballerina, while the twins, Carrie and Corey are talented prodigies in music and animal studies respectively.

Everything is perfect in their lives until their father, Christopher is killed in a car accident. The family is left destitute when their mother, Corrine, reveals that they have been living above their means and that she has no marketable or employable skills so she has no choice but to pack the kids to Virginia and live with her estranged parents.




When the Dollanganger Family arrives at Corrine’s childhood home, they are met by a very frosty stern grandmother who orders the children to live inside the third floor bedroom and gives several orders. The orders include that they can only go to the attic, they are to be never heard or seen by anyone, and that their dying grandfather is never to know that the children are in the house or even that they exist.

The reason for all these rules, the Grandmother (as the kids call her “The Grandmother.” There is no love lost in this family.), says is because their parents “lived in sin.”: Their father was their grandfather's half-brother and therefore their mother's half-uncle. Christopher and Corrine eloped, changed their last names from Foxworth to Dollanganger, and raised their children who were none the wiser. The overly religious grandmother keeps the children locked up partly because Corrine's father hasn't forgiven her and she doesn't want him to know any “unholy issue” came from their parent’s marriage. She also doesn't want the children of the same sex lying next to each other or seeing each other dressing for fear that the children will repeat the same pattern as their parent's.




Ironically, the barriers that The Grandmother puts around the children enable them to do the very thing that she was trying to prevent. Flowers in the Attic is a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy like Oedipus Rex in which the character's attempts to stop something plunge them right into the very thing they are trying to stop. The Grandmother is blinded by religious intolerance and her narrow view of sin that she keeps the children locked up for three years deprived of any outside stimulation. Her desire to keep the adolescent Chris and Cathy (who age from 15-18 and 12-15 respectively in their captivity) from any friends or peers their own age, right when their bodies are developing and their sexuality is beginning to be explored, proves to be a detriment. Cathy and Chris are going through biological changes and have heightened drives and no one else with which to explore them. Is it any wonder that two teenage siblings would explore these drives with each other when they are cut off from any other outside stimulation? The incest between the two siblings is less of an attempt at arousal than it becomes an attempt to survive in a claustrophobic environment. Which is more than the later books have. They sacrifice paragraphs that develop the characters that just happened to contain sexual themes for sexy paragraphs that are written solely to titillate the Reader and provide cheap thrills.




Flowers in the Attic is less about sex than it is about survival. Like the passages that describe incest between Chris and Cathy, everything they do is a means of surviving their three year captivity. The two older children act as parents to the younger children becoming better parents than the narcissistic Corrine and unloving Grandmother. When Corey and Carrie first complain that they are bored, Chris and Cathy create various games and activities such as putting on plays and drawing flowers and animals to create a paper garden. They soothe the younger ones’ fears and nurse them through illnesses (which Chris is able to diagnose symptoms because of old medical books left in the Attic). They stand up for Corey in front of their grandmother and mother when he becomes fatally ill. In some of the more heartbreaking moments after the Grandmother starves them for a week, Chris cuts himself and gives the twins his blood to drink. They show deep love and self-sacrifice more than the adults around them.




If Cathy and Chris show love and self-sacrifice then their mother and grandmother show the opposite. Corrine and her mother vary in their motives and means of abusive behavior, but both contribute to the children's deprivation. The Grandmother is practically a character from a Grim fairy tale. She is bound by her interpretation of the Bible and God's retribution over his forgiveness and love. She is hypocritical in her dealings with her daughter and grandchildren constantly taunting them with “God sees everything you do” paying little attention to the abuse that she inflicts.

She is also a master at manipulating the children with emotional abuse. There are a few times when Cathy and Chris manage to sneak out to the roof and in one passage make it as far as the yard, but they are so weakened by The Grandmother's cruel treatment that they don't even attempt to run away. (In fact they don't run away until they realize that their lives are in danger.)




The Grandmother's behavior doesn't surprise Cathy and Chris at all because she hates them from the moment that they walk into her mansion. It's their mother’s behavior that surprises them. A woman who was once very loving and affectionate and visits her children every day decreases her visits and then stops them altogether. Originally, Corrine is forced to reveal marks on her back to show that she too is a victim of her parent's abuse. She claims that she is saving money and attending night school classes so she can leave her parents. She also claims that she has to obey her father so she can win back his love. However, she also appears dressed in fancy clothes, gives them expensive toys (using money that could have funded their get away), and reports going on trips, attending dances, and being courted by handsome rich men. Naturally, the children become suspicious that their mother is less concerned about them than she is about the bling.




It is purposely left unclear whether Corrine was always a narcissistic selfish person and the children were blinded by their youthful naivety and belief that “Mommy and Daddy were always perfect” (Chris certainly favors this as being close to their mother and defending her when she isn't around. Cathy, more cynical and closer to her late father, doesn't agree) or Corrine became that way since moving back in with her parents and succumbing to their views. (The movies like the 1987 film and the 2015 miniseries show earlier scenes of her suspicions and vanity to make her antagonistic character more obvious from the word, “go.”)

But definitely as they are held captive, Corrine cares less and less about them and more about the financial gain she will receive. Corrine's longing for money becomes so obsessive that she commits unthinkable acts towards her children.




Once they realize that their lives are in danger, Cathy and Chris make plans to escape. Though the Dollanganger Children escape their captivity physically, the emotional scars remain. One thing the other books in the series show us is how the abuse stays with the Dollangangers as they continue to have health problems caused by their imprisonment and undernourishment, still retain post-trauma and other disorders, and later exhibit unhealthy behaviors towards significant others and children.




If the writing in the later books could have kept that emotion and retained the thematic elements of abuse, trauma, hypocrisy, and greed the Flowers in the Attic had, The Dollanganger Series could have been very compelling reading. Unfortunately, the others don't measure up and only the original reigns supreme.