Fanny

...More seriously, how , ever, it seems always to go hand in hand with what might very well be described as historical chauvinism...

...Compared to the intelligent, spirited, and lustful heroine of Cleland's novel, Jong's Fanny comes off looking rather anemic...

...she is deaf to all nuance in the language and has no feeling for its rhythm...

...She probably believed people back then when they told her she had written a feminist novel...

...Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman was forever lecturing...

...Along the way, she has tried to create a feminist heroine who is something of a hybrid of Tom Jones and Fanny Hill...

...the didactic author explaining how he/she could have done the century better...

...She shouldn't have...

...Fanny is not...

...FANNY srica J ong / New American Library / $ 12.95 Joshua Gilder To the reader who might be seduced inside the covers of this book by the prettily revealed bit of garterclad leg pictured on the jacket: Resist temptation, you'll be a happier man for it...

...Her imaginative faculties, which hum along quite nicely when the focus is on sex and prostitution, come to a near standstill during Fanny's brief descents into the squalor of the London streets and Newgate prison...

...Jong declaims mightily-but unpersuasively-on the terrible plight • of women...

...Feminism...

...Maybe J ong is just a dumb blonde after all...

...ven in the hands of a skilled writer (e.g...

...But she has given up the promise of her beginnings for the comforts of being a Feminist Celebrity and not having to think...

...It's not surprising that Feminism is so blind to class...

...the family is sacrificed to maintain a standard of living...

...Now, apart from the absurd notion that Erica Jong could ever transcend anything, one can justly take issue with the premise that a "modern consciousness" (especially as she would define it) is necessarily the best consciousness...

...His Fanny is orphaned and left destitute as a young girl, and survives only because of a lucky combination of beauty and wiliness...

...They look positively incongruous and awkward dressed up in their antiquated habiliment...

...But the evidence presented in Fanny suggests that the fantasies of women are bland and uninteresting, their fears phantoms, their ambitions trivial, and their angers misdirected...

...How much more simple it is to buy wholesale the prepackaged thought of an ideology than to make up your own mind (as Isadora struggled so hard to do-with little success, to be sure- in Flying...

...Still there was a certain life to Flying, and underneath a lot of silliness, a healthy, endearing skepticism...

...It's true that in her first novel Jong didn't come across as a great talent (any mention of her second novel, or of her poetry, will for kindness' sake be omitted...

...Though the eighteenth century may have been guilty in our view of a rather unenlightened belief in the moral stigma of poverty, poverty was at least accessible to the eighteenthcentury imagination...

...And how can the author improve upon a past for which she has so little understanding and no real feeling, despite her pleas of undergraduate infatuation (the ultimate blame for this book apparently lies with some Barnard professor whose illconsidered pedagogical enthusiasm inspired young Erica with a love for eighteenthcentury literature...

...Cleland, by contrast, even within the confines of his pornographic genre, demonstrates a much greater awareness of the dependent and vulnerable position of women in society...

...Having in a rather haphazard way latched on to bits and pieces of the prevailing ideological debris (that peculiar precipitate of Marxism filtering through radical feminism and popularized Freudianism) she apparently feels well armed to do intellectual battle with history...

...But I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time...

...But, you may ask, what could be more fun than a salacious, Clelandesque romp through the eighteenth century with the naughty little girl of Fear of Flying...

...Our muddleheaded adul" teress from that earlier work has matured into an ardent feminist with serious literary pretensions...

...It's always nice to get in touch...

...Fear of Flying was better than that...

...the action is implausible, and, as it turns out, men are responsible for most of it...

...Fanny is Jong's attempt to write in the literary style of Fielding, Swift, Sterne, et al...

...Success has not taught Erica Jong modesty...

...fashion of contemporary cliche...

...Nor has it given her a realistic sense of her talents...

...The wife is sent out into the marketplace...

...Jong's most revealing flaw is her inability to deal in any substantive way with the subject of class, one of the more crucial elements in fictionally reimagining eighteenthcentury England (or even contemporary England for that matter...

...Having complained for so long about suburban oppression among the furs and cuisinarts, she is understandably dumbfounded when faced with real oppression...

...And after annexing the nineteenth century to his literary domain, he found himself at the end of the book at a complete loss as to what to do with it...

...Jong once said that Fear of Flying had enabled women to "get in touch with their fantasies, fears, ambitions, angers...

...Once the author ventures outside the boudoir, her descriptions lose any sense of immediacy (proving it sound advice to the neophyte to only write from experience) and take on the quality of historical texts...

...This, of course, has been a cruel choice for all the middle class, but the couple struggling conscientiously to raise a family with both parents working will not be quite so sanguine about it as those who can sit back and luxuriate in the royalties accrued from "sexy" bestsellers...

...But to Jong, the poor will always be "them...

...John Fowles) such literary imitation is probably doomed to failure, the mimetic impulse not being in itself sufficient to sustain a whole novel...

...Jong takes her through all the paces, studiously trying to create a feminist heroine, a female Tom Jones, but the tone of the novel is curiously passive and detached throughout: The erotic scenes aren't...

...Besides, all of Jong's ideas (literary as well as sexual/political) are cut after the Joshua Gilder is Associate Editor of Saturday Review...

...She may affect certain typographical and spelling idioms, figures of speech and such, but only the producers of "Centennial" or some other made for TV historical potboiler would ever mistake this for style...

...J ust as Doctorow has been forced consistently to look into the past to find a convincing milieu for his agitprop docudramas, Jong has had to leave the century altogether to spin her woeful tale of sexist tyranny...

...Jong simply has a tin ear...

...Thus she tells us in the afterword to her novel, "It may be objected by some that Fanny is not a typical eighteenthcentury woman-and I am well aware of this fact...

...Jong, for her part, assumes that we, in this liberated era, are so much wiser than those Enlightenment primitives...

...his readers, his characters, other people's characters...

...Undoubtedly there have been great improvements in some aspects of life over the centuries (one thinks immediately of computer games), but when discussing the life of the mind, the idea of progress is a much more questionable proposition, with subtle ups and downs for which one can't simply draw up a list of credits and debits (such as interior plumbing vs...

...it arose primarily as a rationale for the holding action of the uppermiddle classes in a deteriorating economy...

...Plenty, as it turns out...

...In many ways her consciousness is modern...