Fear of Flying
Fear of Flying, first and best-known novel by American writer Erica Jong; it was published in 1973. It is a feminist tale of self-discovery that was groundbreaking and shocking for its frank depiction of female sexuality.
Fear of Flying is narrated by and tells the story of Isadora Wing, a young writer who, as the novel opens, is flying, despite her crippling fear of air travel, to Vienna for a conference of psychoanalysts with her second husband, Bennett Wing, a Freudian psychoanalyst who offers her safety and stability but a lack of emotional intimacy or interest. She muses about her life and her desires, including her fantasies of how liberating a sexual encounter with a stranger or an affair with no emotional commitment would feel. As they arrive at the hotel for the conference, Isadora meets Adrian Goodlove, an English psychoanalyst who seems to offer excitement and adventure, and Isadora and Adrian quickly begin an uninhibited affair, which Bennett at one point briefly and silently joins.
Isadora, after some emotional agonizing, decides to leave Bennett and travel back to England with Adrian. As they travel from campsite to campsite, Isadora tells Adrian, who turns out to have erectile dysfunction, the story of her adult life and past sexual relationships. When they reach France, Adrian tells her that he will now leave Isadora to return to his wife and children. Isadora makes her way alone back to London with the intention of returning to her husband, having learned, in the space of 24 hours of solitude, to know and respect her own mind.
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A flawed, articulate heroine, Isadora is unable to incorporate feminism fully in her life. Escape fantasies loom large in her imagination and are intimately bound up, for her, in being a woman. The novel is peppered with both graphically sexual flashbacks and didactic statements of feminism. While the novel portrays sexual infidelity as a form of autonomy, Isadora’s emotional dependence on the men in her life undercuts this message. Fear of Flying breaks many taboos, but the novel ultimately leaves the status of the institution of marriage intact. Its deep and frank exploration of the inner life, including sexual longing, of a woman protagonist, as well as this ambivalence, makes this a key text in the canon of second-wave feminist literature.