[Greene is an American educator, editor, and critic. In the following excerpt from her Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (1991), she faults Jong for failing to challenge traditional patriarchal views of women and sexuality in Fear of Flying.]

Accustomed as I am to having to defend my interest in Fear of Flying, I'll state at the outset why I find it important. Sexual liberation was an essential partof the early women's movement, and Fear of Flying has been taken seriously, if not as "literature," as an expression of sexual liberation—most recently, by Susan Suleiman [in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, 1990] who describes it as "a significant gesture, both in terms of sexual politics and in terms of … sexual poetics," praises its "freshness and vitality" of language, and calls it a "fictional counterpart" to such books as Our Bodies, Our Selves (1973) and Shere Hite's Sexual Honesty, By Women for Women (1974), which similarly reclaim female bodies and sexuality for females. I confess to having liked the novel when it first appeared, though it does not bear up to rereading and I don't finally share Suleiman's enthusiasm. But as the only instance of feminist metafiction I know of to sell ten million copies, it was important as a vehicle for the dissemination of feminist ideas and for the controversy it sparked, and it deserves attention as a cultural document.

Disappointed by the women of the past—in history, literature, and her family—Isadora is left to chart her own way. Turning "to our uncertain heroines for help," she encounters only "spinsters or suicides":

Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett…. And the rest—the women writers, the women painters—most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontes, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers … Flannery O'Connor … Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth…. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance?

"So the search for the impossible man went on", she laments, implying that the failure of her literary foremothers is responsible for her dependence on men. She sees an even more direct connection between the failure of her mother and her dependence on men: "So I learned about women from men". Like other contemporary women novelists, Jong writes to fill the gap between the fiction of the past and women's experience in the present.

Jong implies that she is telling "the other side of the story":

A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession.

Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.

And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story.

Recalling the Wife of Bath's claim that if women wrote, the stories would be different, Jong implies that she is "the female Chaucer," the "lusty lady" with "juice and love and talent too."

Like other women protagonists, Isadora seeks escape in an affair, and as in other contemporary versions of the "two-suitor convention," the husband represents the oppressive patriarchy and the lover represents liberation; for Adrian—whom she picks up at a psychiatrists' convention in Vienna, which she is attending with her husband, Bennett Wing—is Laingian, bearded, English, and sexy, and promises "spontaneity, existentialism, living in the present," against the dull security of Bennett. Adrian proposes that they have an "odyssey"—"'you'll discover yourself'"—and urges Isadora "'to go down into [herself] and salvage [her] own life'" to "find patterns in [her] past." As they drive through Germany and France, Isadora tells him "everything": "What was this crazy itinerary anyway if not a trip back into my past?"; "we … picked up the threads of these old patterns of behavior as we made our way through the labyrinth of Old Europe."

But the best Isadora can come up with is that she keeps being attracted to men who are poor risks—which is not very original but at least explains her attraction to this jerk, who is not only married but impotent; and though she senses that she is repeating this pattern with Adrian, she does not examine this too closely. Nor does she examine anything else too closely; her recounting of her past has no bearing on her present; it is merely episodic, merely there. So, too, is the structure of the novel, which, in its alternation of episodes set in the past with episodes set in the present, might provide a vehicle for plumbing the past, but does not; for Isadora's past has as little to do with her present problems—with her boredom in her marriage and fear of leaving it—as the labyrinth of old Europe has to do with the labyrinth of herself: Europe also is merely there, an exotic backdrop.

Adrian promises Isadora that she will discover her strengths and learn to "stand on [her] own two feet"; and he becomes, "perversely, an instrument of [her] freedom" when he drops her in Paris, without warning, to return to his wife. He tells Isadora he's "'not here to rescue [her],'" and she accepts this, drawing the moral that "I wasn't Adrian's child, and it wasn't his business to rescue me. I was nobody's baby now. Liberated. Utterly free. It was the most terrifying sensation I'd ever known in my life. Like teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon and hoping you'd learn to fly before you hit bottom."

She finds her "wings" by surviving a night alone in a hotel room in Paris. Talking herself through a panic, trying to get hold of her fear, she rehearses, again, the names of women of the past:

Me: Think of Simone de Beauvoir!

Me: I love her endurance, but her books are full of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre.

Me: Think of Doris Lessing!

Me: Anna Wulf can't come unless she's in love….

Me: Think of Sylvia Plath!

Me: Dead….

Me: Well—think of Colette.

Me: A good example. But she's one of the very few.

Me: Well, why not try to be like her?

Me: I'm trying….

Me: Then why are you so afraid of being alone?

Me: We're going around in circles.

But it is her own writing, not theirs, that pulls her out of this tailspin, as she realizes, reading through her journals, how much she has changed. That night, she "assigns herself dreams as a sort of cure," and these dreams, which include "a book with her name on the cover," instruct her that she would not "be a romantic heroine" but that she would "survive": "I would go home and write about Adrian instead. I would keep him by giving him up."

The "book with her name on the cover," the book she will write, is the novel we have just read, and Fear of Flying ends with the protagonist ready to begin. Isadora has presumably learned "to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past," to plumb "inner space…. My writing is the submarine or spaceship which takes me to the unknown worlds within my head … a new vehicle, designed to delve a little deeper (or fly a little higher)." Whereas once she had difficulty admitting that she was "a woman writer"—

I didn't want to risk being called all the things women writers … are called…. No "lady writer" subjects for me…. I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were "trivial" and "feminine"—while the subjects I knew nothing of were "profound" and "masculine"….

—presumably now she has the courage to tell "the other side," in authentic female voice, and Fear of Flying is the fruit of those lessons.

Isadora shows evidence of change when, at the end of the novel, on her way back to Bennett in London, she has the chance of a "zipless fuck" with a "stranger on a train"; though such a prospect once fueled her sexual fantasies, she now finds the idea "revolting." She realizes that it was wrong to want "to lose [her]self in a man, to cease to be [herself], to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings." By learning to take her writing seriously, she has, supposedly, grown wings of her own. Flight is a recurrent image in women's writing,… and is often a metaphor for women's writing, signifying what Grace Stewart calls the desire to escape "the polarity between woman and artist"; and since in French voler means not only "to fly," but "to steal," it has further associations with "stealing the language"—a connection stressed by Suleiman, who sees Jong as accomplishing both feats.

But Isadora's ending suggests that her "wings" are still Bennett's—Bennett Wing's—since she has followed her husband to London, let herself into his room, and ends up soaking in his bathtub, contemplating her options:

Perhaps I had only come to take a bath. Perhaps I would leave before Bennett returned. Or perhaps we'd go home together and work things out. Or perhaps we'd go home together and separate. It was not clear how it would end.

At which point, the novel ends:

But whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I'd go on working. Surviving meant being born over and over….

.…

I hummed and rinsed my hair. As I was soaping it again, Bennett walked in.

Notwithstanding Isadora's assertion of open-ended possibilities and her insistence that she is free to leave, strong probabilities are suggested by the force of her past, which the novel does nothing to exorcise, and by her situation in the present—she is naked in her husband's bathtub. Isadora may have outgrown her desire for zipless fucks, but she has not overcome her need of Bennett. Besides, we know from the sequel, How to Save Your Own Life (perhaps the most embarrassing novel written in recent decades by a woman with literary pretensions), that she does not leave Bennett until she has another man lined up to take his place.

The blurb on my paperback copy of the book proclaims Fear of Flying "a dazzlingly uninhibited novel that exposes a woman's most intimate sexual feelings," and besides the reviewers who praised it for telling it like it is from the female sexual viewpoint, we have Jong's testimony to the numerous women readers who share her fantasy of the zipless fuck. But women's "most intimate sexual feelings" sound depressingly familiar: cunt, cock, prick, ass, tits, fuck, fuckable, blowing and being blown. These do not break new ground.

There have been various attempts to defend Jong's use of male sexual vocabulary, most notably by Suleiman, who claims that it is a way of "filching" the language from men, "a parody of language of tough-guy narrator / heroes of Miller or Mailer," a "reversal of roles and of language, in which the docile … silent, objectified woman suddenly usurps both the pornographer's language and his way of looking at the opposite sex." But even granting this as Jong's purpose, to reverse the terms is not to challenge the terms. The problem with this sexual vocabulary is that it inscribes a power struggle in which women have been "had"; to wield it is not to steal the language or demonstrate "authenticity," but to reveal a more insidious form of alienation. The challenge facing women who write about desire is to articulate new terms for sexuality that will transform the old power struggle and change "the rules of the old game"—as Drabble does in The Waterfall.

Jong confuses liberation with sexual liberation and confuses sexual liberation with the freedom to act and talk like a man, but the bold language that so impressed readers masks a conventionality, a failure to imagine otherwise. Isadora is right—she does "talk a good game"—and there are wonderfully quotable bits in Fear of Flying, which I've filched throughout chapters 1 and 2, but they are suspiciously excerptable, on the surface, as is the feminism of the novel. The novel does not, finally, challenge "the old story" at the level of plot, language, or meaning. When Isadora is falling for Adrian, she senses the presence of a "hackneyed plot," "the vocabulary of popular love songs, the cliches of the worst Hollywood movies. My heart skipped a beat. I got misty…. He was my sunshine"; and Fear of Flying is itself caught in the hackneyed, for Isadora resists one set of cliches to succumb to another and is left going "in circles," "round in circles," on a "merry-go-round," a "constant round."

Thus the ending of How to Save Your Own Life comes as no surprise:

It was no good. All her feminism, all her independence, all her fame had come to this, this helplessness, this need. She needed him. She needed this man. When he entered her, when his hot cock slid into her, she was moaning something about that, about surrender.

"A stiff prick?" On the basis of Jong's fiction, "their obsession" would seem to be "our obsession."

Gayle Greene, "Old Stories," in her Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 86-102.