(Ms.)reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying
Barkan, Joanne
RECONSIDERATIONS (Ms.)reading Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying JOANNE BARKAN In 1973—the same year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion, the U.S. House of...
...And then a curious revelation started to dawn...
...I can’t experience the novel in the same way now: the surprise and thrill of recognition aren’t there to overshadow what irritates me about the writing...
...He’s out, but she gets the key to his room...
...Then, with only a few pages to go: “A year and a half later, I was starving myself to death...
...Fear of Flying has now sold more than eighteen million copies and is available in thirty languages...
...post-marriage love affairs and a romp of onenighters across Italy...
...This article also appeared in Italian in the September-October 2009 issue of Reset...
...If Bennett [her husband] and I got back together again, it would have to be under very different circumstances...
...Why do they still love her today...
...The restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up, to be fucked through every hole, the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses, for the smell of peonies in a penthouse on a June night…all the romantic nonsense you yearned for with half your heart and mocked bitterly with the other half...
...A girl like me, but better...
...RECONSIDERATIONS (Ms...
...In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny ping and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly...
...She’s not only survived the tale she’s telling and written it up as the novel we’re reading (a literary device that’s since worn thin), she’s also cracking jokes about her journey nonstop...
...Her heroine’s gestalt incorporates the themes and language of the early years of second-wave feminism, especially consciousnessraising groups...
...A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby...
...The book closes with her soaking in the bathtub, feeling contented, when her husband walks in...
...But no one I spoke with, including the two women who disliked the book, remembered anything about the plot except for the “zipless fuck”—the main character’s fantasy of the perfect sexual encounter which was effortless (“zippers fell away like rose petals”), intense (“Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue”), brief, one-off, preferably anonymous, and leaving no trace of remorse...
...A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men...
...This book would have benefited from a ruthless round of cutting...
...Somehow the idea of bearing his baby angers me...
...If I have a baby I want it to be all mine...
...Midway through the novel, the narrator reprises the couch adventure in lavish detail and then reports the analyst’s response as though it hadn’t come up before...
...To an epiphany that now seems unconvincing and to a disappointing conclusion...
...I’m no longer a member of the best audience for Fear of Flying although that audience still exists in other places, among other women...
...professors at Rice University, Radcliffe, UCLA, and the University of Wisconsin were teaching it in literature and sociology courses...
...Recently I asked a dozen or so women who (like me) had read Fear of Flying within a year or two of its publication how they felt about the novel at that time...
...I seem to know exactly when I ovulate...
...They fill in the story of Isadora’s wealthy, assimilated Jewish family (two parents and four daughters) in their immense, Upper-West-Side-of-Manhattan apartment...
...Jong’s book joined a roster of best-sellers that included Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), Anne Roiphe’s Up the Sandbox (1970), Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (1970) and Necessary Objects (1972), Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), and Marge Piercy’s Small Changes (1973...
...I identified with her...
...I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body...
...And if we did not, I knew I would survive...
...it caused a singular commotion at the time—for some, as a historic breakthrough in what women could write about and, perhaps more important, how they could say it...
...her teen years of guilty groping for sex while dreaming of becoming a famous writer...
...I found rereading Fear of Flying for the first time in thirty-five years excruciating: it was like being locked in a room with a manic talker who’s telling her life story in full-frontal detail but stopping every ninety seconds to groan about her “issues”: I can’t stop fantasizing about other men while I’m having sex with my husband...
...Rather than embark on a new phase in her life, isn’t she more likely to flip back into tortured ambivalence in a matter of days...
...reading Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying JOANNE BARKAN In 1973—the same year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion, the U.S...
...House of Representatives accepted its first female page, and AT&T settled a major lawsuit by agreeing to end pay discrimination against women—Holt, Rinehart and Winston published Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the mock memoir of a young woman’s quest for autonomy, adventure, and mind-altering sex...
...I can’t stop fantasizing…” By page 75 of this 425-page novel, I was scrawling in the margins: “All right already...
...Alone (the key word) in a shabby Parisian hotel after her lover takes off, Isadora freaks out...
...Jong makes the narrator’s compulsive venting worse by returning to the same events from the past again and again...
...On the last page, Isadora claims, “It was my fear that was missing” and “I knew for sure I wasn’t going to grovel,” but she’s gone straight to the hotel where her husband is staying in London, and she’s soaking in the tub of his room when he walks in...
...It goes like this: Twenty-nine-year-old Isadora Wing (who’s recently been on the reading circuit with her first book, a volume of erotic poetry) is traveling with her Chinese American psychiatrist husband to a convention of psychoanalysts in Vienna...
...Of course, Fear of Flying was part of a successful publishing trend: “the feminist novel”—popular realistic fiction by women about contemporary women’s lives...
...Here is Isadora on being a woman without children: It’s funny how in spite of my reluctance to get pregnant, I seem to live inside my own cunt...
...They never pass unnoticed...
...S]omehow the very hand that writes, having writ so boldly, erases the image of victim...
...rapid remarriage to a psychiatrist...
...The paperback (November 1974) sold three million copies within months and was number one on the charts...
...By mid1975, three book clubs had snapped up the novel...
...it was that simple...
...Fear of Flying was reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times (November 6, 1973) together with Jane Howard’s A Different Woman and by Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books (March 21, 1974) with Barbara Raskin’s Loose Ends and Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute...
...Completely unprepared for this, Isadora falls apart for a day but emerges from her panic with some of the confidence and strength she’s craved...
...Toward the end of the novel, we find: “At fourteen, when I had starved myself...
...My irritation was overwhelming my reading...
...Take, for example, what the heroine— Isadora Wing—has to say about marriage (all quotations from the New American Library edition, 2003): I was not against marriage...
...She heads to London and the hotel where she and her husband had planned to meet before flying back to New York...
...fifteen years of psychoanalysis with a half-dozen loopy practitioners...
...During the course of Isadora’s odyssey from Vienna, around Europe, and back to London, the author inserts lengthy flashbacks which account for at least half the novel...
...Love it or hate it, the book made history...
...What do I want more—adventure or security...
...Instead I’m just grateful to Jong and the other feminist authors who encouraged so many of us to get our own stories straight...
...Schrift put it...
...It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you...
...I have no doubt this is true...
...The author’s voice is breezy, mocking, and geared to exaggeration for comic effect...
...I feel as if I have been flayed alive, as if all my inner organs are open to the elements, as if the top of my head has blown off…” One sponge bath later (and six pages of musings on her past as she stands naked in front of a mirror), Isadora gets an old journal out of her suitcase, reads about her years in Heidelberg, and experiences a revelation: As I read the notebook, I began to be drawn into it as into a novel...
...She knows who will win in the end...
...The collapse of communism created another surge in celebrity and sales as the novel became available in former Soviet Republics and East European countries...
...But what about all those other longings which after a while marriage did nothing much to appease...
...The suspect quality of her transformation makes her future look less promising, and so the novel’s conclusion is more disappointing— or, as some of Jong’s critics in the 1970s wrote, a cop-out...
...The cause...
...Sadness and relief...
...The same goes for line editing...
...I am Isadora Wing,” they say...
...they’d found a novel whose female protagonist expressed what they were thinking and feeling about marriage, commitment, independence, sex...
...All that talk, and where does it lead...
...Why do graduate students in Belgrade, housewives in Hong Kong, and female business entrepreneurs in Tokyo identify with this upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorker with a kvetching habit...
...But Fear of Flying stood out...
...Joanne Barkan lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod, where she writes essays, stories for young readers, and verse...
...A few days later, I’ll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber yarmulke of the diaphragm...
...Haskell was right...
...What had I missed...
...The diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me...
...Why can’t I forget all of this and just focus on my writing...
...The narrator is indefatigable, indomitable, and she’s enjoying herself thoroughly (does she get carried away...
...The fact that Henry Miller called Fear of Flying “the feminine counterpart to my own Tropic of Cancer” and predicted that “this book will make literary history” (New York Times, September 7, 1974) didn’t account for the paperback’s success—Fear of Flying’s reputation had already been growing by word-ofmouth— but it certainly didn’t hurt...
...I went on reading and with each page I grew more philosophical...
...in Atlanta, Georgia (see Time, February 3, 1975, and Newsweek, May 5, 1975...
...Is it really better never to be born...
...Halfway along I was gritting my teeth too hard to find anything funny...
...I felt the book was in part responsible for my getting a divorce...
...Almost all of their answers were like these: “I was thrilled with her frankness and wildness...
...her right-out-ofcollege marriage to and divorce from a fellow student who has a schizophrenic breakdown...
...army base in Heidelberg, Germany, where she discovers her Jewish identity...
...Let him bear his own baby...
...and, when he’s drafted during the Vietnam War, their three years on a U.S...
...It was liberating and made me want to be free...
...Jong wants the reader to laugh at Isadora, which means laughing along with Jong and enjoying the ride...
...For others, it was trash...
...Yet if the novel is a cop-out from a feminist perspective, if Isadora’s consciousness hasn’t risen much by the end, why have millions of women found her story inspiring and liberating...
...I know conventional standards for how women should look and act are crap, but I feel compelled to conform...
...Once upon a time, Isadora’s issues were my issues, I identified with her, and I was buoyed by her story even if I didn’t think it was very well written...
...You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul...
...someone should have blue-penciled the cringeinducing phrases (for example, “seeing life as a fruitcake, including delicious plums and bad peanuts” or “[T]he wind…was sufficiently frigid to counteract the heat of the boiler—but not our heat...
...for others, as a particularly repugnant example of collapsing moral standards in America...
...I recalled a little more than that: a half-dozen incidents and my opinion of the writing (“There’s one wellwritten scene,“ I told friends, “a description of her standing alone in an outdoor Nazi amphitheater...
...Emotionally frustrated and sexually bored in her marriage, Isadora is tormented, on the one hand, by her yearning for adventure, sexual rapture, freedom, and creativity, and on the other hand, by her need for the security and protection of a husband...
...She doesn’t know, but in either case, she’s convinced that she’ll be fine...
...and women were discussing it in consciousnessraising groups around the country, including at the Y.W.C.A...
...For example, we learn at the beginning of Isadora’s tale that she was starving herself at age fourteen “in penance for having finger-fucked on my parents’ livingroom couch...
...Two and a half weeks later, he dumps her in Paris in order to join his children and his current girlfriend for a long-planned vacation in Brittany...
...The hardback edition (November 1973) reached the lower rungs of the best-seller list with reviews that ranged from rave to scathing...
...By 1977, Jong’s book had been translated into twelve languages and had sold six million copies...
...But I had no memory of the main plot...
...Fear of being a woman, as Dr...
...Will she stay with him or leave...
...After the Sturm und Drang that the narrator conjures up for 394 pages, after the endless back-and-forth (leave him, leave him not), Isadora’s metamorphosis is too sudden, too simple, and too thorough...
...The facts of Erica Jong’s biography for her first twenty-nine years match those of Isadora Wing’s life almost exactly (Jong was one of three sisters, Isadora is one of four), but the novel is clearly intended as a satire, a spoof of real events, and a hip tribute to the eighteenthcentury novel...
...For some women in the early 1970s, this was exhilarating...
...Relationships with men are unsatisfying, but I can’t survive without one...
...It may be a question of tone, of bravura masking insecurity, but Erica/ Isadora, siren-wit-poet, comes on strong, shrinking the shrinks with their own jargon, dominating her mise-en-scene as authoritatively as Mae West ever tyrannized a tacky saloon or Dietrich a smoky nightclub...
...I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable...
...Since then, many of the early feminist novels have acquired “classic of the genre” status, but none has become an international cultural phenomenon on the scale of Fear of Flying...
...She opts, at least temporarily, for adventure by taking off on a frenzied, buzzed-on-beer road trip through Western Europe in a sporty convertible with a “swinging” Jungian analyst whom she’s met at the convention...
...I stopped blaming myself...
...Voila...
...Among the original reviews of Fear of Flying, I found one—Molly Haskell’s in the Village Voice Literary Supplement (November 22, 1973)—that suggested an answer: [I]t’s hard to believe this dame is afraid of anything...
...In 2008, Jong told an interviewer that wherever she travels—Belgrade, Hong Kong, Tokyo— people still want her to know how completely they identify with the novel’s protagonist...
...After putting aside my impatience and reading the book again— randomly this time, back and forth from one section to another—I could appreciate how the idiosyncratic intensity of the narrator’s voice conveys energy and intrepidness even when Isadora is flat-out depressed, clinging to a man, or trembling with fear...
...Why didn’t she get a room of her own...
...I believed in it in fact...
...She’s sent to an analyst who, true to his training, admonishes her to “ackzept being a vohman...
Vol. 56 • October 2009 • No. 4
