[In the following excerpt from her Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women (1979), Mickelson provides an analysis of Jong's characterizations and use of sexual language in Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, concluding that Jong implies male dominance and female helplessness.]

[Two] novels by Erica Jong—Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life—end with a kind of symbolic ritual baptism in celebration of the female body. In the first novel, Fear of Flying, the heroine, Isadora Wing, returns to her patient but dull husband after an unsuccessful attempt to find in Adrian Goodlove the perfect combination of friend and lover. Stripping off her clothes, she climbs into the claw-footed bathtub, immerses herself in water up to her neck and contemplates her body. "A nice body," she tells us. "Mine. I decided to keep it." It's a comforting picture which leaves the reader with a sense of well-being. At the end of the second novel, How to Save Your Own Life, Isadora, now husbandless but firmly clasped in the arms of her young lover, Josh, finally experiences orgasm with him. Paradoxically, she has up to this point been automatically responsive to her husband's mechanical embrace, but unable to achieve orgasm with Josh's more spontaneous and inspired lovemaking. In Joycean fashion, Isadora commemorates the momentous occasion by passing water.

True, this act is involuntary and not conscious as when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus make water together in front of Bloom's house at the end of Ulysses. Isadora is embarrassed, demonstrating that her flaunted lack of inhibition has not yet successfully embraced the debatable Joycean idea that the indecorous, the vulgar, the commonplace reveal the higher things. She has to be assured by her lover that he loves everything about her: her "shit," her "pee," her "farts," her "tight snatch," etc. The scene resembles the one between Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (Jong, like Oates, has read her Lawrence) in which Mellors tells Connie that he is glad that she shits and pisses: "I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss." More will be said about Jong's language and style in the discussion of How to Save Your Own Life.

Although Jong concentrates on woman's body, its hungers, its drives, more centrally the novels are the story of a dying marriage and a woman's odyssey to love. Both books pose the questions: what is it to be a woman? where lies salvation? In Fear of Flying, the sense of crisis is communicated by a quaking, picaresque Isadora who finally leaves her uncommunicative, joyless, psychiatrist husband for a Laingian psychologist, Adrian Goodlove. Adrian offers her the promise of sensual love (by squeezing her ass) and the promise of a life which he calls twentieth-century existentialism. This, he explains, means making no plans for the future, seizing the day, and feeling no guilt. As it turns out, neither promise has substance. Adrian is sensual in public where consummation is impossible, and impotent in private. He makes all the rules for the relationship while pretending there are none, and he does have plans of his own, which include going back to his wife and children and leaving Isadora. In one of the many good one-liner observations in the book, Isadora concludes that her fling with Adrian has been desperation masquerading as freedom.

Neither husband nor lover provides Isadora with a sense of her own identity or gives her any security. Ultimately, she has to, as all women must, try and fashion her own sense of destiny. In the course of her quest, we get good insights into how difficult this is for women in our society. Thomas Hardy observed of women in English Victorian society, "doing means marrying." Things haven't changed much since Hardy's day, according to Jong. The cruel jests aimed at unmarried women, found so frequently in fiction and comic strips, are still with us. Isadora fears being the butt of ridicule, or a "pariah," since a woman alone "is a reproach to the American way of life." Accustomed to being dependent first on father, then on husband, she is timid about losing dependency on some man. She dreads being alone. So she marries, and finds out that her loneliness is compounded.

In the late nineteenth-century novel and throughout twentieth-century novels, marriage is often the death of love. We are told in Fear of Flying that Isadora's first husband, Brian, is a good friend and lover until marriage. Then he turns into a man so completely devoted to work that he eventually breaks down. It must be said that it is difficult to be sympathetic to Isadora's early plaint about Brian's lack of virility, because of work pressures. After all, he is the one who works hard while she has time to pursue her studies and putter around the small apartment. But her confusion and unhappiness, stemming from Brian's growing madness until he is committed, are understandable. So is the story of her second marriage to a dour Chinese psychiatrist whose own life is one vast analysis, as Isadora puts it. She discovers that he punishes her with long silences which precipitate her into still greater isolation. Obstinately, despite the fact that Bennett, the husband, is no companion and insists on her dependence on him and his independence of her, Isadora clings to the idea that even a bad marriage is better than none. She demonstrates that although western woman's feet were never bound like the Chinese woman's, making the latter dependent on man for food, shelter, clothing, etc., her woman's mind has been crippled into accepting so-called inherent limitations. The author makes it clear that family, school, society have conditioned Isadora in her thinking. She is, for a while, a woman who conforms to the rigid and restraining role imposed on her, and defers to her husband's view of reality.

But despite the brain-washing, Isadora's mind persists in nagging her with questions: How can an intelligent woman fuse the physical and intellectual parts of her being into one healthy whole? How to achieve integration, exhorts Isadora? How to resolve the conflict between the creative woman and the wife? How to be feminine? What is being feminine? Is it more feminine to be a wife and mother than to be a writer?

It can be argued that some of the drama surrounding the heroine's dilemma is rubbed off by the presence of abundance: plenty of time to write, and enough money to pay analysts' fees or walk into Bloomingdale's and buy an expensive pair of shoes when she is feeling low. Certainly, there is a marked difference between Isadora and the working-class mother who is a wage earner/house-wife/mother, or the artist woman who tries to paint, sculpt or write while wrestling with laundry, bills, cooking, cleaning the toilet, and checking the temperature of a sick child. There is no evidence that Isadora performs any of the chores of domesticity outside of whipping up an airy soufflé now and then. But this is irrelevant. As Virginia Woolf points out gratefully: it was the money an Aunt left her which allowed her the freedom to write. The issue which the author poses is: how can woman find self-fulfillment in some creative work without accompanying feelings of guilt?—a universal problem which is just now receiving attention.

The other problem which plagues Isadora is one which more often revolves around men, and is generally found in male writing: marriage claustrophobia, the itch to escape marriage, the desire for the mate you can't have. John Updike's stories of marriage frequently deal with this theme; for example, "Museums and Women." Isadora, in her own words, itches for men, and particularly for some man who would be friend, lover, everything. In short, like Fellini's hero in 8 1/2, she fantasizes about her ideal, composite mate. In the meantime, she looks with delighted longing at men; tells us how much she loves their smells, their shapes, their genitals, and is collectively in love with all men, except her husband. If there is none of the repugnance for the male body found in Oates's fiction, there is, however, a hint of female chauvinism. Isadora may revel in fantasies about the male body's perfections even when there are none, as in the case of the unappetizing would-be music conductor Charlie, but she confides that while men's bodies are beautiful, their minds are befuddled.

In between, there are comments, as in Portnoy's Complaint, on the problems of being Jewish and having a Jewish mother, but without the self-righteousness which mars Roth's book. Isadora's mother is an intelligent, talented woman, frustrated in her aspirations to be a painter, and anxious for her daughter to fulfill her dreams for her. It's not an uncommon wish in disappointed women, as Lawrence demonstrates with Mrs. Morel (Sons and Lovers) and Hardy with Mrs. Yeobright (The Return of the Native). Both these last-mentioned women seek self-esteem. In their particular cases, it is through their sons. Isadora's mother is not a tragic figure in the sense that Mrs. Yeobright and Mrs. Morel are. The author's observations and sentiments about family and mother are tempered with banter and humor.

Isak Dinesen once remarked that what the modern novel needs is humor, and Fear of Flying has that much needed ingredient. There is the funny bit about Isadora's fear on the plane: if the plane should fall how would she face God after stamping her religion Unitarian. The satire on analysts going to the Vienna convention, accompanied by scowling children and wives padding around in space shoes, is one of the best passages in the book. This high-spirited satire is not diminished by her kind words on the value of analysis. For Isadora, analysis enabled her to get some neuroses out of the way, thus permitting her to write. There is also playful wit in Isadora's sexual fantasies, for example the "zipless fuck," about which so much has been written. The departure with Adrian is truly a comedy of errors, as she describes it.

Her eye for social observation is shrewd. The scatological digression on French, German, and other nations' toilets is an incisive as Colette's observations on primitive toilet facilities provided for actresses while on tour. Good, too, are her descriptions of Beirut: veiled ladies riding in the back of a Chevrolet or a Mercedes Benz; shepherds who smoke cigarettes and carry transistors while tending flocks. There is, however, more than a hint of ethnic prejudice in her descriptions of the red-capillaried faces of German women, with their heavy bodies made still more heavy by costumes of loden cloth. But this is balanced by her honest appraisal of the former Nazi official who gives her a job (during her stay in Germany), and her self-questioning: how would she have behaved during the Hitler era?

Fear of Flying shuttles backward and forward for 311 pages, giving us a woman in Isadora Wing who is part little girl, part female rogue, part troubled artist/wife/daughter and, more specifically, a woman who gets all kinds of advice from family and the men in her life. The family wants her "to settle down" and Bennett warns her that if she leaves him, she will mess up her life. Adrian counsels her that if she is going to have something interesting to write about, she must have experience—with him. It's very much like the advice given the ladies of the Russian court by Rasputin: if you want redemption, you must sin with me. All things considered, Adrian's advice proves to be correct. Isadora fares better than the Russian ladies. If there is no salvation with him, the Adrian experience at least provides Isadora with piquant and serious material for a book (as we learn in How to…), proving the wisdom of that statement by Anaïs Nin: make literature out of misery. Isadora returns to her husband after the Adrian fiasco, convinced that no matter what her reception by Bennett will be, she will survive. "Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn't essay, and it was always painful. But there wasn't any other choice except death."

These are brave words which promise that the woman we meet in Fear of Flying and who tells us: she never wants to age; wants to give birth to herself; wants a blazing sensual love and a blazing career; wants freedom and security—that this woman will find some solution to conflicting desires. To put it another way, Isadora Wing appears like some modern Persephone, who will continue to move out of the gloom of her marriage into the sunshine of a better relationship, and mature as woman and artist.

How to Save Your Own Life, sequel to Fear of Flying, begins with "I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day." A few pages later, Isadora confides that she had saved the thought of leaving her husband "like a sweet before bed-time, like a piece of bubble gum put on the childhood bed-post…." Some 300 pages later, the reader learns that the heroine is now leaving apartment and husband. The plot is stuck, like that bubble gum on the bedpost, with repetitions of what we have already learned in Fear of Flying. Briefly, Bennett is dull, lacks joy and makes love mechanically, yet Isadora is afraid to leave him, clinging to the myth of husband as protector and Daddy figure. She is convinced that compromise is a way of life. The further they drift apart, the more frenetic is their lovemaking. The only new ingredient of plot is Isadora's discovery of her husband's infidelity, and her jealousy and anger that he has played the role of saint while casting her in the role of villain. However, the reader has long foreseen that Isadora, like Hemingway's Nick Adams, has concluded that "it's not fun anymore." Unlike the Hemingway hero, she is unable to make an "end to something." Maybe that's the point of the novel—the difference between the way men and women go about dissolving a relationship. Where men are active, women are passive.

Granted this, there is nothing in the characterization of the bouncing, skipping, giggling, gutsy-thinking Isadora that makes her a classic example of the intelligent but passive woman, without the self-assurance to take responsibility for her own life. She knows how to seek help from friends, analysts, lovers, and how to compensate for any failure of feminine nerve with a range of consolations that include masturbation, sniffing cocaine, smoking joints, making love with a woman, drinking six gin and tonics plus wine at one sitting, participating in a sex orgy, reading mail in the nude, and taking pot shots at critics who write nasty reviews about her work. She's about as help-less as Moll Flanders.

Nor is her jealousy of Penny, with whom Bennett has had a love affair, entirely credible since she, herself, looks upon infidelity as a diversion in an unhappy marriage. Some effort is made to enlist the reader's sympathy by noting that Penny read Isadora's short stories with Bennett during post coitus, but this is not too convincing. Ultimately, Isadora is redeemed for us by her honesty. She gives a belated palm to Penny for the courage to have an affair with Bennett, leave the husband who saddled her with six pregnancies, get a degree, and start a new life for herself. However, Isadora's early references to Penny as goyish, dumb, possessing "washed-out shiksa eyes" are ethnic slurs which settle like a thin layer of sludge in otherwise humorous appraisals of people. Along with certain other disclosures of malice, they detract from the picture of Isadora as a warm, Jewish girl filled with gregarious good humor, animated by kind instincts, and in love with most people and the whole universe, despite her jealousy and other problems.

The central emphasis in the novel keeps shifting to Bennett, and there are no attempts to lighten the dark strokes with which his characterization is sketched. Although Jong's men are not the unsavory characters Oates portrays so often, Bennett comes close to being the villain in this domestic drama. Isadora rationalizes that he slept with Penny in order to get back at her for her writing, while at the same time he played the role of the forgiving husband. The accusation is legitimate, for even at the end, when a childish Isadora seeks sexual revenge against Bennett by embellishing on the number of lovers she has had, he keeps intoning piously that he is prepared to forgive her. The most valuable thing to come out of this exchange, for the heroine and the reader, is Isadora's realization that during the entire marriage she has been made to feel grateful to Bennett for letting her write. Not once has she asked herself if it were all right for Bennett to practice his vocation of psychology. After all, that was his job. Her writing, he made her see, was a self-indulgence, toward which he was prepared to be generous. Unfortunately, the problem of writer versus woman and the guilt feelings that the conflict engenders is not satisfactorily resolved in this novel, as we see in the relationship with Isadora's next love, Josh.

Not so evident here is the humor present in the first novel, Fear of Flying, which keeps the details of the disintegrating marriage from falling into self-pity, and makes of Isadora a kind of Thackerayan heroine whose "one eye brims with pity while the other watches the family spoons" (for Isadora, her writing). There is one amusing description of a skiing accident, a broken leg, and a ride to the hospital in which a drugged Isadora tries to urinate into a wadded kleenex and then tosses it out of the car window, while a morose Bennett frowns over his spoiled vacation. Typically, however, where an Oates heroine traces the downward curve of her marriage by the number of miscarriages she has had, Isadora (like a Hemingway hero) sees it in terms of accidents and physical scars. And just as rain is always a presentiment of trouble in Hemingway's stories, so we read that Bennett arrives at the ski lodge bearing with him the rain.

While continuing to unravel a marriage already reduced to a limp, tangled skein, the novel retains in crumpled form many of the themes, from creativity and femininity to the hunger for love, with which the author worked in the first novel. It also contains telling observations on the drawbacks of fame; Hollywood, which is filled with divorced men with hair transplants; bachelors who give Jacuzzi parties; the loving camaraderie between intelligent, talented women; the way other women, in the scramble for success, imitate the worst of men's vices; the pressures by husband and society for a woman to use her husband's name. About the latter, Isadora is not only chagrined but feels cheated and betrayed at giving her husband—neither a reader (except for his psychology books) nor a writer—immortality by placing his name on her books.

This is a legitimate complaint. Names are important to men, as Shakespeare points out in Othello: "Who steals my purse steals trash;' tis something, nothing; / … But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed." Of course Shakespeare is speaking of slander, but writers have always been concerned that their name "will not perish in the dust," as Southey writes. Why should women writers, or any woman, be deprived of her name, Isadora asks? Why indeed? In the case of Isadora, she is honest enough to confess that the fault lies not so much with society as with herself. She is so hungry for Bennett's approval that she gives him her work—and makes him famous.

If the heroine is chilled by her foolishness and her husband's lack of affection and care, particularly when she needs him, she is warmed by her many friendships with women. Where there are no developing and deepening relationships between women in Oates's fiction, Jong's second book emphasizes the value of women friends. The short description of the episode with Jeannie (a thinly-veiled portrait of Anne Sexton?) contains warmth and tenderness. It is Jeannie, a poet, who, at times, lives desperately on Valium and Stolichnaya vodka ("anything to oil the unconscious") who gives Isadora the push to break with husband: "Live or die … but for god's sake don't poison yourself with indecision." There is also lusty, 5′9″ Gretchen, who points out that Bennett has treated Isadora badly until fame made her for him the goose which laid the golden egg. In reply to Isadora's wonderment that her jealousy of Penny has improved their sex life, Gretchen replies: "jealousy makes the prick grow harder. And the cunt wetter." A tough woman!

Hope, another friend, twenty-two years older than Isadora, advises her to get rid of Jewish guilt, and helps her with the publishing of her poems. Then there is Holly, a plant lover, who offers her studio, herbal tea, and sympathy. Not least among this cast of women characters is Rosanna Howard, who provides a chauffeured Rolls Royce, champagne, caviar, and her musk-scented body. Isadora, her head filled with images of Missy and Colette, Violet and Vita, Gertrude and Alice, and her blood fired by expensive wines, reels off to bed with Rosanna. She discovers that her rakish joy in breaking a taboo, and her view of her act as a punitive measure against her mother ("I felt I had gone down on my mother"), do not compensate for her aversion to vaginal taste and smell. She invokes the indulgence of "Gentle Reader" and Lesbians everywhere for her distaste: "I tried, I put my best tongue forward…."

There are male friendships, too, but these are predominantly sexual, except for the one with eighty-seven-year-old Kurt (Henry Miller?), who is generally accompanied by his male nurse or two former Japanese wives. Isadora talks and makes love with two men, both conveniently named Jeffrey. These Belle du Jour diversions take place in the afternoon and Isadora is able to explain her absences to Bennett as "shopping in Bloomingdale's." Later, when she does take a token walk through the store, she notes the way some women buy, and rationalizes that the compulsive woman buyer is trying to compensate for a lack of love. It is not a very relevant or sage observation, since she herself does not look upon these afternoons of sexual love as fulfilling. Yet, obviously they give her an ego boost. Sauntering down the avenue, she is no fearful Oates heroine shrinking from the stares of men. On the contrary, she invites looks and boldly stares back with the smug assurance of sexual magnetism, and that men detect the aroma of the afternoon's lovemaking on her.

Any successful novel, as we have been told repeatedly, must deal with love in one form or another. Love must be the pervasive thread which binds the whole together in some form of tapestry. Isadora's Hollywood trip not only serves the purpose of tracing her increasing disillusionment with the unscrupulous woman producer Britt and her unhappy realization that no writer can control the quality of the movie made out of her/his work; it also brings love into her life—Josh. There is no question that describing Josh with his furry, warm, likeable face always gives Isadora pleasure. Despite the age difference of six years, which troubles Isadora only briefly, she decides to take her friend Jeannie's advice, be a fool, and give herself up to her passion for Josh.

The language of love here, as elsewhere in the author's writing, contains a sexual vocabulary in which "cunt," "cock" and "fuck" predominate, although there is also an ample sprinkling of "shit," "piss," "crap," "getting knocked up," etc. Language has always been the concern of American writers, from Hawthorne and Melville to Hemingway and to contemporary writers like Gould, Brautigan, Godwin, and Burroughs. They have attempted to find a language through which to convey the essential experience of love and of American life, while leaving the impress of personality on language. Jong chooses to write in what she feels is an earthy style. How to Save Your Own Life reveals that she is troubled by whether she has succeeded in finding the right words and voice. Through Isadora she asks: how should one write about sex? She admits that she is "plagued by the confusion between natural earthiness and licentiousness, the mistaking of openness and lack of pretense for a desire to titillate and shock."

Certainly, since women have been taught for centuries that they are not sexual beings and that only "bad" women like sex, we need frankness on the subject. But how to write about it?

This is not a new dilemma. It faced D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover at a time when sex was a forbidden subject both for men and women and censorship fettered all writers from treating it in an intelligent way. Lawrence, however, was determined to break through Victorian prudery. There is no doubt that he was using this last novel as a final way of ridding himself of sexual reservations resulting from the influence of early Chapel religion and a clinging to Oedipal love for his mother, which had haunted him all his life.

His purpose in Lady Chatterley's Lover was to structure a hero who would be earthy and, at the same time, well-read and filled with social concern. The man, Mellors, was to meet a titled lady suffering from emotional attrition; he would make her aware of the necessary value of the body's physical life. To accomplish this, Lawrence decided to have Mellors employ a special language of Midlands dialect and four-letter words during sexual scenes. At other times, Mellors would expound in perfect English on the horrors of industrialization and its effect on men and women. The shift from an educated man to one who speaks a slurring dialect interposed with "fuck," "cunt," "shit," etc. is unsuccessful. Connie's sister sums it up succinctly: "he was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! acting!"

We get the same impression of Jong's language, in which Isadora at one point is making literary references to John Keats and the next moment is sprinkling around the familiar cunts and cocks. We are to understand that education has not robbed Isadora of her essential earthiness and that she can use the language of warm, simple common woman or man, who accepts sex and the body as a natural part of life—unlike educated people who extol the mind, deny sex its rightful place in life, and are shocked by forthright language.

One serious argument against this line of reasoning is that representing the common man or woman in this way propagates a sentimental myth. Civilization long ago caught up with the simple human being who, at some time or other, expressed the physical part of his or her nature in natural, instinctive, and graceful ways. When today's dock worker, or mechanic, or farmer, or gas station attendant uses the language of "fuck," "cock," "cunt," it is as expletives or insults, regardless of their original sexual meaning. No writer to date has succeeded in semantically restoring the words. For those who grew up in poor areas, or lower middle-class neighborhoods, and heard this language every day from dull, uninteresting men and boys in their daily comments on sports, women, or the weather, it lost its shock value around the fifth grade.

I am not making the absurd claim that women don't talk this way now. I am saying that many women have utilized this means of expression as an assertion of their independence and freedom from former reticence about sex. Also, to many women writers from comfortable, middle-class homes, it may seem like a fresh, exciting, and original approach to sexual love.

But is it? As with all patterns of language, the writer after a while is imprisoned within a rigid enclosure of words in which, as in How to…, love is reduced to cunt and cock. We don't have a man and woman experiencing a warmly human relationship in which ultimately there is a sense of rebirth and a feeling of unity with the living universe (as that post-sexual love dialogue between Isadora and Josh would have us believe). There is only an impression of disembodied genitalia in which dripping cunt meets hard cock.

Witness the following descriptions: "She wanted this one, this copper-colored lover, this pink cock …" "Only his cock inside of her could give her peace." "His cock was bulging under the copper buttons of his jeans…." There is a lot of copper around here and we are constantly reminded that if Josh's member is bulging, Isadora's dripping. Together with the description of the ocean thundering outside the love chamber and the water sloshing in the water bed from the exertions of the two lovers, the reader is drenched with verbal and scenic descriptions.

A more serious criticism is that what we're really looking at is genitalia parodying physical and emotional experience. If the writer is trying to tell us that for the man, his male reality is his hard, erect penis, and that for the woman, the female reality is the wetness and slipperiness of her vagina, the reader has difficulty in accepting this. In Jong's emphasis on "cock," and on "cunt" as "a dark hole," we are only too conscious of the language of pornography in which women are not women but "hot slits," "gaping holes," and "fuck tubes."

The writer attempts to cope with the sexual scenes in various ways: she avoids the greyness of clinical language; she shifts narrative voice from first to third; she gives realistic details of Isadora's various positions during intercourse. In respect to the latter, though the reader is awed by Isadora's athletic agility, the overall impression of all this rapture is of a scene straight out of Playboy or a Mickey Spillane novel. We have a virile, masterful Josh demanding: do you want my sperm? And Isadora, clad in a filmy, black nightgown slit up the front and with pink ribbons which push up her breasts, confiding to the reader: "She needed him. She needed this man." Instead of a woman finding her own self-worth, language and scene crystallize in the kind of male fantasy found in girlie magazines.

In using this kind of sexual vocabulary, there is a sense of the writer beggared for expression and falling back on a vocabulary of male street usage. Woman needs a sexual vocabulary of her own—not one borrowed from men's street language. Such language is always self-limiting, because it is more geared to voicing frustrations than fulfillment (God is "a shout in the street," says Stephen Dedalus). Language needs to be precise, original. It should give a sense of independent, first-hand experience as response to the encounter. It should avoid filtering the experience through terms associated with male attitudes which are demeaning to women. By adopting the male language of sexuality, Jong is also fooling herself that she is preempting man's power. All she is preempting is the pose of sexual prowess.

I said at the beginning that both works by Jong end with some sort of water ritual, which is to be interpreted as a celebration of the female body. In Fear of Flying, Isadora's warm, appreciative, anatomical description of her body lying in scented, soapy water helps to do just that. The water bed in How to…, on which Isadora's love odyssey comes to a climax, is an ersatz symbol of baptism and a new life, not unlike the black nightgown that Isadora is wearing—"proof" of her womanhood. As for the question of salvation, Isadora sums it up in one phrase: "He had the cock." Freud would love it, especially since earlier Isadora has voiced the idea that women must have power.

The world of Fear of Flying and its sequel How to… offers us a heroine who appears to be far more intrepid and confident than any of Oates's women. Yet, ultimately, we see that Jong's Isadora Wing is as helpless as the most timid of Oates's women characters—in the common avowal that man has the power. True, Isadora's discovery comes out of sexual need and not fear, but her conclusion is basically the same as the one affirmed in book after book by Oates. Woman is helpless. Man is powerful.

Anne Z. Mickelson, "Erica Jong: Flying or Grounded," in her Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979, pp. 35-48.