Fear of Flying: More Than a Feminist Novel :: Feminism Feminist Women Criticism

dismay of Flying More Than a Feminist Novel The fears of Isadora Her religion (Semi-Jewish), her love life (second husband, seventh analyst Bennett), her gender (a woman in America In the sixties), her career (Writer one book), sex (are women speculate to enjoy that?), her mother (Jude, an artist who danced naked in France), her sisters (all married, with at least two children apiece), her children (none), her name (Isadora White? Isadora Wing? Isadora White Stollerman Wing Goodlove?) and spry Isadora has a fear of truehearted. Some would say that Fear of Flying , by Erica Jong is merely a feminist novel. It is, but its more than that. Fear of Flying is a novel about a woman in search of her name and the source of her fears it is a novel about intragroup conflict. The main reference of the novel is Isadora, a woman in her early on thirties in the late sixties. What begins as a work colligate trip to Vienna with her analyst husband ends as a journey filled with personal revel ations. At the conference Isadora develops an infatuation which fuels her need to insure what is wrong with her. Traveling throughout Europe with a man who is not her husband she discovers her true self through her complete loss of security. in that lies the principal irony of Fear of Flying the journey that the main character takes in order to gain the traits that she sees in her heroines only leads her to find that they were abstruse within herself. Isadora is the charicature of irony itself. The opening chapter sets the tone for the entire novel, which is written standardized a conversation with ones analyst casual but intimate. Her odyssey, in fact, begins on a plane full of psychoanalysts. As she puts it shed been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. (p. 1) This is a great event of Isadoras outwardly nonchalant views of her own problems. Her own view of her life and her privileged monologue pull the reader into her literal and symbolic fear of flying and her lifelong struggle with them. From the beginning she shares with us thirteen years of compend and counting, yet it is the 336 pages in which we watch her slowly untangle her own conflicts that maneuver the readers the lesson which we were intended to learn. Isadora is an extremely intelligent character.