Fear of Flying (novel)
Fear
of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica
Jong which became famously controversial
for its portrayal of female
sexuality and figured in the development of second-wave feminism.
The
novel is written in the first person: narrated by its protagonist, Isadora
Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a 29-year-old poet who has published two books of
poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, Isadora decides to indulge
her sexual fantasies with another man. Its tone may be considered
conversational or informal. The story's American narrator is struggling to find
her place in the world of academia, feminist scholarship, and in the literary
world as a whole. The narrator is a female author of erotic poetry, which she
publishes without fully realizing how much attention she will attract from both
critics and writers of alarming fan letters.
The
book resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilled marriages,[1]
and it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Summary
Isadora
Wing is a Jewish journalist from New York City's Upper West Side. We meet her
on a plane flight to Vienna for the first psychoanalyst's conference since
analysts were driven out during the Holocaust. She is surrounded by analysts,
several of them her own from over the years, and her husband Bennett (also an
analyst): "There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna
and I'd been treated by at least six of them" (page 5).[2] Her fear of flying, both literally and metaphorically
referring to a fear of freeing herself from the shackles of traditional male
companionship, she associates with recent articles about plane hijackings and
terrorist attacks. She also associates fear and loathing with Germany, her
destination, because she and her husband were stationed in Heidelberg and she
struggled both to fit in and to wrestle with the hatred and danger she felt
being a Jew in post-Holocaust Germany.
The
narrator occupies her mind with many questions, plans, mental rough drafts and
reminiscences as her journey unfolds, including the "zipless fuck," a
major motif in the story that haunts the narrator throughout.
Upon
arriving, Isadora meets English Langian analyst Adrian Goodlove. She is
immediately hooked. Despite his gruff attitude and dirty sandals, he seems to
provide what she desires but doesn't find in her own marriage - energy,
excitement, desire, danger. They begin a poorly-veiled secret affair, dancing
and kissing rather openly at conference events, staying out nights, spending
days by German pools. Adrian is wild and awakens things in Isadora she believed
to be lost in the everydayness of her marriage, despite the fact that he is a
rotten lay and often impotent.
"I
refuse to be impaled on a pin," Adrian said, unaware of the pun it
immediately brought to mind. "I refuse to be categorized. When you finally
do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an
antihero, a bastard or a saint. You won’t be able to categorize me." And
at that moment, I fell madly in love with him. His limp prick had penetrated where
a stiff one would never have reached.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
(1973), page 126
But
Isadora's desperation to feel alive and her developing feelings for Adrian lead
her to the toughest decision: to return home with Bennett, or to go to London
with Adrian. She agonizes over this decision. One night, Bennett finds Adrian
and Isadora in bed together and joins them, in an adventurous sexual act that
Bennett never acknowledges afterward.
Finally,
through an emotionally taxing and melodramatic letter that she never delivers
to Bennett because he once again walks in and interrupts her, Isadora decides
to leave with Adrian. The two of them drive through France, Germany, and Italy,
camping every night, drinking, and making love. Along the way, Isadora confides
in Adrian the stories of her past relationships and first marriage. She reveals
that she met her first husband, Brian, in college, where they connected over
their mutual love of literature and ability to walk for hours while quoting
poetry. This ended when they married, and became a “bourgeois” couple, not
seeing each other, not having sex, disconnecting. Brian, a certified genius,
began to fall into delusions, believing himself to be the second coming of
Christ. He became violent, raping Isadora and choking her close to death in one
mental break. He was repeatedly hospitalized and eventually moved to a facility
in Los Angeles where Brian blamed her for everything, and they finally divorce.
Eventually,
she decides to return home to Bennett. On a train journey to meet him in
London, she is approached by an attendant who sexually assaults her, which
propels her into her own psychological self-examination.
It
wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group - mother, daddy,
baby - that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck!
My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy
that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in
Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling wasn't
it. A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun
to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic
about strangers on trains.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
(1973), page 417
She
realizes that when she is not in control of her body, when she doesn't have
agency or autonomy, that it doesn't matter how much she's dreamed of a
situation, it will never be satisfying. When she returns home, she takes a
bath, waits for Bennett, and comes to accept her body, herself, and the unknown
future: “A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it” (p 424).
The
novel remains a feminist classic and the phrase "zipless fuck" has
seen a resurgence in popularity as third-wave feminism
authors and theorists continue to use it while reinterpreting their approach to
sexuality and to femininity. John
Updike's New
Yorker review is still a helpful starting
point for curious onlookers. He commented, "A sexual frankness that
belongs to, and hilariously extends the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy's Complaint."
The zipless fuck
It
was in this novel that Erica Jong coined the term "zipless fuck",
which soon entered the popular lexicon.[3] A "zipless fuck" is defined as a sexual encounter
for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment or any ulterior
motive, between two previously unacquainted persons.
The
zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no
power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not
"giving". No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a
wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The
zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.
And I have never had one.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
(1973)
Jong
goes on to explain that it is "zipless" because "when you came
together, zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath
like dandelion fluff. For the true ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary
that you never got to know the man very well."
Feminist influences then and now
Fear
of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual
Revolution of the 1970s, as associated with second-wave feminism. Finally it was acknowledged that desire and fantasy are a
good thing and not entirely condemnable in women, and Jong wanted to harness
that newfound respect for desire into a piece of art that brought the
intersections of sexual and nonsexual life together, something she felt was
missing in literature. “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was
not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are
sexual—and brought all those things together."[4] “What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human
being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed
in 1973.”[5] But she also points out the drawbacks of a sexually
liberated life, acknowledging that sexuality “is not the cure for every
restlessness.” Male critics who interpreted Isadora as being “promiscuous,”
were actually misinterpreting her acts - she has an active fantasy life but
doesn't in reality sleep with many men.
Jong
says that today, women are no longer shocked by the Isadora's sexuality and the
depiction of sex and fantasy as readers were when the book was first released.
Instead, she sees that book mirrors the lack of pleasure that many young women
experience in sexual interactions. She cites the TV show Girls
as an example of media that is depicting sexually liberated women but without
attention to female pleasure. Just like Isadora, the women on television and
alive today struggle to reconcile the empowerment of sexual freedom with the
disempowerment of sex without pleasure. However, she also sees growth in the
female population that live alone and “whose lives are full with friends,
travel, work, everything and who don’t feel that in some way they’re inferior
because they don’t have a man at their side” as being one extremely positive
result of the way sexual liberation has transformed over the decades.[5]
The
political battle over women's bodies today has also renewed the book's relevance
in Jong's mind, constituting a 40th anniversary redistribution of the book.
“All these states are introducing crazy anti-abortion rules...passing laws that
they know are unconstitutional, shutting down Planned Parenthood clinics, and
making it very hard...to get birth control.” She cites these types of political
moves as a regression from the progress set out by the Sexual Revolution. She
also still feels that female authors are “second-class citizens in the
publishing world,” as Jennifer
Weiner says in the introduction to the
40th anniversary edition: “it’s very hard, if you write about women and women’s
struggles, to be seen as important with a capital ‘I.’”[5]
Jewishness
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Jewishness
appears frequently throughout the book, although it may not stand out as the
most eye-catching theme because of how entrenched it is in Isadora’s experience
of the world. In particular, her Jewish heritage is invoked through her
constant awareness of the history of her people and the trials and tribulations
that the Jewish people have gone through not only in recent decades but over
the course of their long history. This is a theory that Freud, a frequently referenced figure throughout (and raised as a
Reform Jew
himself), explored in his work to understand the persecution of Jews. Freud
theorized that one of the things that makes Jews who they are, individually and
culturally, is a biologically passed down awareness of the Jewish past: “...Jewishness
is constituted by the biological inheritance of an archaic memory that Jewish
people are inexorably compelled to transmit to future generations, whether
consciously or unconsciously.”[6] Isadora reflects this in her references to the Holocaust, awareness of the boundaries on her and her family (on one
particular visit to her sister in Beirut), among other past traumas.
The
role of Isadora’s mother is also an interesting invocation of Jewish
stereotypes, in that she defies them in some ways and closely follows them in
others. Rather than subscribing to the stereotypical image of a Jewish
Mother as being overly excessive,
nurturing, and giving, Isadora’s mother is rather cold and distant. She does,
however, fit the mold of the Jewish Mother stereotype as a martyr and
constantly seeking to guilt her children - she tells Isadora repeatedly
throughout her childhood that Isadora is the entire reason that she is not a
famous artist, as she had to give up her artistic career when she became a
mother and could never return to her former glories or passion. This places a
distance between mother and daughter.
Character models
Jong
has denied that the novel is autobiographical but admits that it has
autobiographical elements.[7] However, an article in The
New Yorker recounts that Jong's sister,
Suzanna Daou (née Mann), identified herself at a 2008 conference as the
reluctant model for Isadora Wing, calling the book "an exposé of my life
when I was living in Lebanon".
Daou angrily denounced the book, linking its characters to people in her own
life and taking her sister to task for taking cruel liberties with them,
especially Daou's husband. In the book, Isadora Wing's sister Randy is married
to Pierre, who makes a pass at both Wing and her two other sisters. Jong
dismissed her sister's claim, saying instead that "every intelligent
family has an insane member".[8]
Film and radio adaptations
Many
attempts to adapt this property for Hollywood have been made, starting with Julia
Phillips, who fantasized that it would be
her debut as a director. The deal fell through and Erica Jong litigated,
unsuccessfully.[9] In her second novel,[10]
Jong created the character Britt Goldstein—easily identifiable as Julia
Phillips—a predatory and self-absorbed Hollywood producer devoid of both talent
and scruples.
In
May 2013 it was announced[11]
that a screenplay version by Piers Ashworth had been green-lighted by Blue-Sky
Media, with Laurie Collyer
directing.
References
· · Bowman, David
(June 14, 2003). "The
'Sex Woman'". Salon. Archived from the
original on July 6, 2007. Retrieved January
23, 2010.
·
cunytv75 (2013-10-21), One
to One: Erica Jong "Fear of Flying" 40th Anniversary, retrieved 2017-11-16
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