[Reardon is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, she describes how Fear of Flying "demonstrates the 'coming of age' of its author, the development of her style," suggesting that the novel functions as "a distinctively female idiom."]

Initial critical reaction to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying sold the book but did little to establish its considerable literary value. Particularly cutting, and more often than not, hostile, were the women who linked Jong's work to the tradition of Austen, Eliot, and the Brontes in their reviews and found the novel wanting. Ironically, the feminist critics were both negative and positive. For some, the book was trivial and did not state the case; others responded like Carol Tavris who said: "Jong has captured perfectly the dilemmas of the modern woman, the ironies of liberation and independence" [Psychology Today 8, 1975]. And still other reviewers joined Jane Crain in an unforgiving dismissal: "Taken one by one, no feminist novel really rewards critical scrutiny—they are all too steeped in ideology to pay the elementary respect to human complexity that good fiction demands" [Commentary, December, 1974]. With considerably more generosity, men tended to review the book as a good popular novel, a cut above Diary of a Mad Housewife, with the welcome addition of considerably more humor. Though Paul Theroux [New Statesman, 19 April 1974] and the anonymous TLS reviewer [Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 1974] were denigrating as well as negative and Alfred Kazin disregarded the work, Henry Miller praised it as "a female Tropic of Cancer" [New York Times, 20 August 1974]. To be sure, there were references to poor characterization, lack of irony or distance in the narration, but, on balance, John Updike's "… feels like a winner. It has class, and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her souffle rises with a poet's afflatus" [The New Yorker, 17 December 1973] seemed to be the prevailing male judgement.

Neither the reviewers nor readers read Fear of Flying within the context of Erica Jong's earlier statements about poetry and fiction nor did they treat the novel as a logical development of the themes and style of her poetry. More significantly, no critic pursued Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's passing observation that the novel was "sensitive to the ambiguities of growing up intelligently female these days," [The New York Times, 6 November 1973] or examined the novel within the literary tradition of the bildungsroman. Quite literally, Fear of Flying is the tale of Erica Jong's thinly disguised autobiographical heroine, Isadora Wing, on her journey from immaturity to maturity. As such, the plot follows the standard formula of the educational novel outlined by Jerome Buckley in Season of Youth in which a sequence of incidents involves a sensitive youth who leaves a provincial and constrained life in a small town, journeys to a cosmopolitan city, and begins his or her real education. After a series of initiating experiences, at least two love affairs, and a number of moral encounters, the character rearranges her/his values and pursues a career in earnest, leaving adolescence behind.

The pattern, at least in its essential aspects, parallels Fear of Flying. That Isadora Wing is a sensitive character is made abundantly clear in her relationships and in her engagement with literature. Her parents, especially Isadora's mother, are portrayed as understanding and curiously disapproving as they encourage and discourage their gifted daughter. Fascinated by her desire to write and simultaneously hostile because she, unlike her sisters, rejects the role of motherhood, her family becomes increasingly antagonistic. Consequently, she leaves the repressive atmosphere of home by many routes—marriage, trips to Europe, analysis by at least six different psychiatrists, and, ultimately, by an affair with Adrian. When she does at last come of age, she returns "home" to her husband Bennett on her own terms, convinced of the "wisdom of her choice" of housewife as artist.

Isadora Wing, a character who is lost both literally and psychologically throughout most of the novel, finds herself on its final page. The circuitous routes always lead back. Familiar landmarks of the past—hotels, cafes, and trains—orient her to the present. The loss of contact with actual time frees her to listen to an inner rhythm, a resolute private timing which encompasses the twenty-eight-day time sequence of the novel. She finally comes to know where she is and what time it is as she resolves her fears—of flying, of driving, of "the man under the bed," of submitting her work to a publisher—and she comes of age. "I was determined to take my fate in my own hands. I meant that I was going to stop being a schoolgirl," she says at the end of the novel. And one can assume she speaks with the authority of the author's voice.

The imagery of Fear of Flying supports the various stages of the heroines's coming of age and reveals the author's growing confidence in her own fictional voice. Illustrating the progress of Isadora Wing's "growing up female," Erica Jong uses the journey of Alice and Dante through fantasy and dream into a "wonderland" and an "inferno" from which her heroine eventually emerges with a clearer perception of herself. She refuses to be the perpetual child or the symbol of pure love. The rejection of Alice and Beatrice coincides, therefore, with Isadora's rejection of male definitions. Having exhausted the image of physical journey from place to place, Erica Jong finally employs the image of menstruation to convey the inward journey into her own womanhood.

Using Lewis Carroll and Dante to define the male image of woman as little girl and idealized lover is accomplished by Erica Jong with considerable panache. That Isadora ricochets between the two images is apparent throughout the novel. Furthermore, using the seemingly disparate authors unifies the journey motif employed extensively throughout the work—actual movement from America to Europe as well as movement in time from youth to maturity and, finally, the psychological movement toward self-understanding. Physical transport from place to place underpins the plot and supports the chapters which delineate earlier travels. Within the framework of the longer journey from New York to Vienna, and to London, another important journey is undertaken. Isadora and Adrian leave "the Congress of Dreams" together, circle through Europe, and ultimately part company in Paris. In the context of these two major journeys, Isadora relates all other past trips, excursions, and travels which have in some way or other contributed to the present, including travel from New York to California and four different journeys from New York to Europe.

The recalled journeys, which interrupt the overall movement of the plot, serve to disorientate the reader as the narrative shifts from continent to continent as well as from present to past. However, the imposing pattern is always circular. Conversation spins round and round. "We seem to be talking in circles," Isadora says to Adrian as she has said to Bennett and Brian years earlier. Words echo words as the car "goes around in circles, dodging traffic." Similarly, dreams, nightmarish or benign, repeat Isadora's endless experiences with all the analysts in her life. The same story told and retold until she finally rejects analysis in the person of Dr. Kolner:

Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn't I listen to myself for once? And to other women? I talk to them. They tell me about themselves—and a damned lot of them feel exactly the way I do—even if it doesn't get the Good Housekeeping Seal of the American Psychoanalytic.

With this first note of freedom, struck early in the novel, Isadora moves away from the analyst's couch into the labyrinth of Europe. From the phantasmal "dream of a zipless fuck" to the "dreams of Nazis and plane crashes" entire scenes assume the "swift compression of a dream." Dreams serve to confuse reality with unreality, actual occurrences with visionary happenings.

To a heightened degree, Alice, the prototypical child, exhibits this same sense of confusion in wonderland. Within the framework of her adventures, reality and fantasy, sense and nonsense, sanity and insanity are juxtaposed to create a dream-like world. Erica Jong's repeated references to Carroll's work clearly link Alice to Isadora. Because of their repetitiousness, Isadora describes her conversations with Adrian "like quotes from Through the Looking-Glass." In Wonderland, the Red Queen explains to Alice: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" Similarly, in the mirrored discotheque, Isadora and Adrian find themselves "lost in a series of mirrored boxes and partitions which opened into each other … I felt I had been transported to some looking-glass world where, like the Red Queen, I would run and run and only wind up going backward." In addition to the patterns of vertiginous motion, and to distorted patterns of size and shape, familiar characters also transfer from Wonderland to Fear of Flying. Adrian's grin is a continual reminder of the Cheshire cat. When Alice asks the cat, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?" the cat replies, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." Adrian, "smirking his beautiful smirk with his pipe tucked between his curling pink lips," tells Isadora, "you have to go down into yourself and salvage your own life."

Both Isadora and Alice live in a fantasy world which is more congenial to them than is reality. However, for Isadora, residence in wonderland is impossible to maintain. When the fantasy "of the zipless fuck," which Isadora pursues throughout the novel, becomes a reality, she realizes the disparity between eight-year-old naivety and twenty-nine-year-old delusion. She calls herself, "Isadora in Wonderland, the eternal naif." The fantasy "instead of turning me on,… revolted me! Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all?" Isadora rejects one fantasy after another as Alice, weary of the Queen's tricks, seizes the table cloth and upsets her illusory dinner party. But most importantly, Isadora outgrows the role of "Isadora Wing, clown, crybaby, fool," and opts for a life that will satisfy her rather than repeatedly seeking some fantasy lover who will disappoint her.

However, all the aspects of her journey are not as felicitous as Alice's adventures in wonderland. Isadora, because she is "bloody Jewish … mediocre at other things, but at suffering you're always superb," must descend to the depths of Dante's hell in order to cleanse herself of yet another illusion—another masculine image of woman. Early in the novel, she assumes the Beatrice role by idealizing her various love-relationships, "Dante and Beatrice … Me and Adrian?" She also links Brian and herself to the well known lovers, "What if he were Dante and I Beatrice?" She would be able to guide him through the hell of his madness. However, ultimately Isadora must identify both with the pilgrim Dante and some of the sinners he encounters on his way. She is the incontinent Francesca, "The book of my body was open and the second circle of Hell wasn't far off"; and Adrian, of course, is Paola. As the Dantean lovers are whirled and buffeted through the murky air by a great whirlwind, so Isadora and Adrian are seen in various degrees of intoxication, moving through the purple mists of the "Congress of Dreams" and motoring in endless circles through Europe. However, Isadora's journey like Dante's is ever downward. When Adrian and Isadora venture into the bizarre, mirrored, and stroboscopic world of the discotheque, Isadora renames it "The Seventh Circle." Once inside they become lost in the maze of mirrors and with mounting panic they look for familiar faces in the crowd of strangers, "all the other damned souls." Isadora's relationship with her first husband establishes still more persistent links with the damned souls in the lowest depths of hell. Brian tells her, "… you're in hell and I'm in hell and we're all in hell," and calls her Judas when she consents to his hospitalization. He reminds her: "Didn't I know that I would go the the Seventh Circle—the circle of the traitors? Didn't I know mine was the lowest crime in Dante's book? Didn't I know I was already in hell?" The analogy is strengthened when Isadora experiences guilt, not for betraying him, but for surviving his madness "as if I were Dante and he were Ugolino and I would return from Hell and relate his story."

To complete his arduous journey through the triple world of the Divine Comedy Dante required the assistance of three guides—Virgil, Statius, and finally Beatrice—symbolic representations of reason, repentance, and love. Isadora's three lovers assume comparable roles on her journey to self-understanding. Brian, whose powerful mind is condemned to madness, is the antithesis of reason, but his "verbal pyrotechnics" and his way of looking at the world "through a poet's eyes" influence Isadora's desire to write. Her second husband Bennett withdraws into his guilt and silence until "he made his life resemble death. And his death was my death too." From Bennett, Isadora learns solitude and silence and proceeds to listen to the inner voice urging her to write. The heroine's third serious lover, Adrian, becomes an "idealized lover." Like Beatrice, he is passionately loved but never possessed, "that was part of what made him so beautiful. I would write about him, talk about him, remember him, but never have him. The unattainable man." He is the guide who ultimately shows Isadora the way to self-understanding, the way to salvage her life, hit rock bottom, and climb back up again.

After Adrian leaves her in Paris, she describes the terrifying experience of being alone "like teetering on the edge of the canyon and hoping you'd learn to fly before you hit bottom." Yet, it is into this abyss that psychologically and emotionally she descends. After experiencing a period of numbness and fear, she looks into the mirror to reaffirm her physical identity. The reflection of her body assures her that she is still very much herself. She searches for her notebooks and begins to read the entries which record her past four years of married life with Bennett: "I am going to figure out how I got here … And where the hell was I going next?" Considering that question further, she realizes that running away from Bennett was the first step in reclaiming what she had surrendered long ago—to her parents, to Brian, to Bennett and only recently to Adrian—namely, her soul.

As Dante is instructed to wash the film of hell off his face in the morning's dew before he enters purgatory, Isadora washes herself before leaving her hotel room. She describes her trip from Paris to London as "purgatorial." The fog and cloud-cover veiling the island of England, leaving only the white cliffs of Dover visible, create the mixture of light and darkness which surrounds Dante's purgatorial mountain. Isadora enters through the custom gates like Dante passing through the gates of purgatory. The purifying bath of the last scene completes the rites of passage. Isadora has fulfilled her promise to return made earlier to Adrian. "Back where?" he questions. And she replies: "To Paradise," which, in the context of the novel, is a return to Bennett; however, now it is on her own terms.

The journeys form repetitious circular images, lending a vertiginousness and confusion appropriate to the immaturity of the heroine. Counterpointing the actual journey of Isadora—not in the traditional mode of the youthful hero from country to city but from New York to the twin capitols of the world, Paris and London—is the fantasy adventure of Alice and the pilgrimage of Dante, "mid-way this life" from sin to grace. The unusual blending of imagery from Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Dante's Divine Comedy reinforces the "novel of youth" and suggests as well a reappraisal of values, a purgation resulting from a process of painful soul-searching.

But these literary conventions as well as Isadora's previous twenty-eight years must be examined, evaluated, and ultimately rejected as part of what she considers the male definition. The novel of journey, the image of woman as child and icon must give way to the author's own feminine perceptions. Isadora angrily states: "I learned about women from men, I saw them through the eyes of male writers. Of course, I didn't think of them as male writers. I thought of them as writers, as authorities, as gods who knew and were to be trusted completely." Within the tradition and yet apart from it, Erica Jong uses the image of woman as child—the eternal Alice—and woman as idealized lover—the eternal Beatrice—only to reject both roles and "survive."

Indeed, the novel accomplishes more than that. It portrays not only the end of the journey but the journey itself on Erica Jong's own terms; namely, the awareness "of the fact of being female and going beyond it." In a paraphrase of her fictional heroine's words, Erica Jong has stated the case in "The Artist as Housewife / The Housewife as Artist":

The reason a woman has greater problems becoming an artist is because she has greater problems becoming a self. She can't believe in her existence past thirty. She can't believe her own voice. She can't see herself as a grown-up human being. She can't leave the room without a big wooden pass.

              [Here Comes, and Other Poems]

In a literary tradition where the standard of excellence is synonymous with male, the writer who is also a woman distrusts her own voice, undervalues her own experience and never really achieves a sense of self. According to Erica Jong, coming to terms with her own body, therefore, is the first corrective step for a creative woman to take, and Fear of Flying demonstrates precisely how this is accomplished. The result boldly stated by Isadora Wing is a literary work which is the antithesis of all those books throughout all of history which "were written with sperm, not menstrual blood."

However, the precedent for a "feminist style" had been established by a number of talented women poets before Erica Jong published Fruits and Vegetables. Discovery of the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath "came as a revelation," she said, because for the first time in her reading of literature, poetry ceased to be exclusively a "masculine noun." These contemporary women poets had come to terms with themselves as women, and "wrote about their bodies and never attempted to conceal the fact that they were women." They were attuned to the special rhythm which dominated their lives from menarche to menopause, and they were fearless in tapping "a kind of hidden power." In short, they expressed themselves in their own diction. Their images and symbols were chiefly drawn from the reality of daily experience rather than from the existing literary tradition.

Sylvia Plath charted new ground as she became more and more "attuned to her body harp." The casual and continued references to the interaction of her psychological and physical states and the relationship of both to her ability to write at certain times found in both Letters Home and some of her early poetry clearly indicate the extent to which Plath was preoccupied with the menstrual cycle. The specific symbols which became the texture of her poetry; the ocean, the moon, pregnancy and sterility revealed her deepest feelings about life and death. More often than not these feelings were expressed in the language of blood.

In later poems like "The Munich Mannequins" menstruation becomes an image of repeated bankruptcy:

       Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
       Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
       Where the yew trees blow like hydras,
       The tree of life and the tree of life
       Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.

And she concludes, "The blood flood is the flood of love. / The absolute sacrifice." Furthermore, birth, "There is no miracle more cruel than this," and the flow of blood in the afterbirth symbolized the ultimate creative act of poetry. Menstruation, signalling the failure to conceive, symbolized sterility. Because Plath was writing in her own terms about her own experiences, she opened the way for Erica Jong to explore with a surer sense the uncharted areas of female experience.

But Sylvia Plath was not alone in her efforts to create a more personal idiom in her poetry. In quite another style Anne Sexton adopts a valuable coarseness, a rude incapacity to be delicate in many of her confessional poems. Consider for a moment the titles, "In Celebration of my Uterus," and "Menstruation at Forty," poems belying their apparent flippancy and expressing, instead, a subjective and interior experience of time in relationship to the menstrual cycle, "That red disease … / year after year."

Rather than reject the experience of bodily pain, of hospitalization, of surgery and blood flow, Sexton utilizes all aspects of her physical and psychological states. In a poem on her childhood called "Those Times …" she contrasts the isolation of the child of six with the image of her future womanhood:

       I did not know the woman I would be
       nor that blood would bloom in me
       each month like an exotic flower.

And in the poem "The Break," the life of the roses in her hospital room is symbolically vitalized by blood:

       … My one dozen roses are dead.
       They have ceased to menstruate. They hang
       there like little dried up blood clots.

In "Song for a Red Nightgown" she reinforces the connection between the lunar cycle and the menses:

       surely this nightgown girl,
       this awesome flyer, has not seen
       how the moon floats through her
       and in between.

Anne Sexton is eminently qualified to draw upon personal knowledge of her physical and mental states and to translate that knowledge into viable poetry. Notwithstanding the masculine opprobrium directed toward some of her poems, she remains true to her own words, "I cannot promise very much. / I give you the images I know."

These are some of the women writers, therefore, who have explored "the fact of being female and go beyond it, but never deny it." Following their example, Erica Jong boldly incorporates certain private and female symbols, thought unmentionable in the past, into the artistic texture of her work. There is a noticeable evolution from the oral and sensual imagery of her first book of poems, Fruits and Vegetables, to the search for a genuine understanding of woman's role in the second volume, Half-Lives. However, the third book, Loveroot, states the case most explicitly. For in virtually all of these poems she is both iconoclastic about the traditional subject matter of poetry and sure about the necessity of woman's survival as both person and writer within the perimeters of feminine experience. More to the point, Erica Jong demonstrates in these poems that even the subject matter of a poem written by a woman can be, and indeed, must be different:

I think women poets have to insist on their right to write like women. Where their experience of the world is different, women writers ought to reflect that difference. They ought to feel a complete freedom about subject matter. But most important, our definition of femininity has to change. As long as femininity is associated with ruffles and flourishes and a lack of directness and honesty, women artists will feel a deep sense of ambivalence about their own femaleness.

  ["The Artist as Housewife / The Housewife as Artist"]

In the volume, Half-Lives, Erica Jong states the dilemma of the woman poet with uncompromising severity. "The Send-Off," a poem written to friends after she has sent her first book to the printer, poetically expresses the fear which was later to haunt Isadora Wing; the loneliness and half-life of the woman artist who is reminded month after month of the barrenness of her womb by the menstrual flow, the symbol of the non-event:

        The book gone to the printer to die
        and the flat-bellied author
        disguised as me
        is sick of the anger of being a woman
        and sick of the hungers
        and sick of the confessional poem of the padded bra
        and the confessional poem of the tampax
        and the bad-girl poets
        who menstruate black ink.
 
        I am one!
        Born from my father's head
        disguised as a daughter
        angry at spoons and pots
        with a half-life of men behind me
        and a half-life of me ahead
        with holes in my shoes
        and holes in my husbands
        and only the monthly flow of ink to keep me sane
        and only sex to keep me pure.
 
        I want to write about something other than women!
        I want to write about something other than men!
        I want stars in my open hand
        and a house round as a pumpkin
        and children's faces forming in the roots of trees.
        Instead
        I read my fortune in the bloodstains on the sheet.
                   (Singing the Monthly Blues)

The meaning is fairly obvious. The creation of the poem or novel is symbolized by the menses while the failure to conceive a child is visibly demonstrated by the discharge of the unfertilized egg, a pattern which imposes itself with idiotic, irrational punctuality on a woman's consciousness every twenty-eight days from menarche to menopause. In still another poem from the same volume, the polarity of the role of mother vs. artist is expressed in the imagery of exotic flowers:

        I imagine the inside
        of my womb to be
        the color of poppies
        and bougainvillea
        (though I've never seen it).
        But I fear the barnacle
        which might latch on
        and not let go
        and I fear the monster
        who might grow
        and bite the flowers
        and make them swell and bleed.
 
        So I keep my womb empty
        and full of possibility.
 
        Each month
        the blood sheets down
        like good red rain.
 
        I am the gardener.
        Nothing grows without me.

"Hook images," used earlier by Sylvia Plath to describe the demands of her two children on time and creative energy, appear in the poem. However, Erica Jong rejects "the barnacles which might latch on" and interprets the menstrual flow as a validation of her art and a symbol of its potency. As the last line suggests, she insists upon the right to make the final determination.

Despite the deliberateness and forcefulness of Erica Jong's poetry, it is to the novel Fear of Flying we must turn for a more subjective exploration of the multiple problems of "growing up female" and for more daring stylistic techniques of expressing the feminine experience. In addition to creating the sexually fanciful Isadora Wing, Erica Jong devised a subtle sequence of time to enclose the action of the novel. The Pan-Am flight to Vienna, the ten-day Congress at the Academy of Psychiatry, the two-and-a-half week motor trip through Italy, Germany and France, the climax in Paris and the short one-day trip to London is a little less than a month although the alternating chapters span the childhood, early education, university career, first marriage and almost five years of the second marriage of Isadora Wing. The elements of time present and time past merge into the climactic now by linking the climax—the end of the affair with Adrian—with the menstrual cycle.

The twenty-eight days of the novel chart the various biochemical changes, the physical experiences of ovulation and flow as well as the psychological movementsof relaxation and tension which explain, at least in part, Isadora Wing's actions. In addition to the journey to a "wonderland" of sensuality and sexuality, to an "inferno" of guilt and eventual repentance, she must journey inward to define herself as a woman and to understand to what extent every woman is "tied to that body beat" month by month. Isadora's attraction to Adrian at the beginning of the Congress is directly associated with ovulation. She says:

I seem to be involved with all the changes of my body. They never pass unnoticed. I seem to know exactly when I ovulate. In the second week of the cycle, I feel a tiny ping and then a sort of tingling ache in my lower belly. A few days later I'll often find a tiny spot of blood in the rubber yarmulke of the diaphragm. A bright red smear, the only visible trace of the egg that might have become a baby. I feel a wave of sadness then which is almost indescribable. Sadness and relief.

Isadora's observation describes the emotional tension which pervades the ten-day period of the Congress. Being physically and sexually attracted to Adrian, she is also melancholy at the thought of betraying her husband Bennett. She reels emotionally from lover to husband until the last session of the Congress is over. At that point she impulsively decides to tour Europe with Adrian.

After two and a half weeks of careening through Europe in Adrian's Triumph, the beer-drinking twosome reach Paris and part because Adrian has arranged to join his wife and children in Cherbourg that very evening. Having lost a sense of time as well as her heart, Isadora describes the situation:

The enormity of his betrayal leaves me speech-less. Here I am—drunk, unwashed, not even knowing what day it is—and he's keeping track of an appointment he made over a month ago.

Alone and still dazed by his desertion, Isadora is able "to gather my terror in my two hands and possess it." Overcoming her fear of strange rooms, her fear of "the man under the bed," she finally falls asleep and awakens the next morning to discover her menstrual period has begun. In the release of tension, signalled by the physical flow, she prepares to leave the hotel. The narrative is momentarily halted by Isadora's recollection of her first period and the subsequent case of anorexia she experienced at fourteen when she almost starved herself to death and stopped menstruating for a year and a half because someone told her that "if I had babies, I'd never be an artist."

Now, twenty-nine years old and secure in the adult knowledge that menstruation cancels out the fear of pregnancy, she shampoos her hair, packs, and goes out into the sunny streets of Paris in search of a drug store and a cup of cappuccino. In her own words, she is being given another chance. Anxiety over a possible pregnancy is dispelled. While her affair with Adrian has thrown her back on her own limited resources, there have been few consequences. Isadora concludes: "In a sense it was sad—but it was also a new beginning." After the overnight journey from Paris to London, Isadora gains admission to her husband's hotel room, and the bathtub scene concludes the novel. The purification by water is certainly appropriate to the Dantean journey; however, a more subtle meaning can be attached to the bath; namely the Jewish rite of mikvah, the ceremonial cleansing required of all orthodox women after the menstrual period before sexual relations can be resumed. The twenty-eight days of the novel are over; a new cycle begins.

It is impossible to read Fear of Flying and not recognize that more than any woman writer before her, Erica Jong is fully attuned to her own body. As a result, her prose as well as her poetry is vigorous and sensual and at one with the inner rhythms which she understands so well. In the complete physicality of language and image, she insists again and again that "one's body is intimately related to one's writing."

Perceiving the coming of age of the artist in the totality of female experience, she has structured a novel on one of the most personal experiences of female physiology, the menstrual cycle, and has achieved a correlation of subject matter and form which is both artistic and universal. Indeed, Erica Jong has done more than that, she has reached the sensibilities of her reading audience with a brave and brash voice and attempted in the words of Virginia Woolf, "to measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body." She is a writer who understands that a woman's perception of coming of age is:

      Every month,
      the reminder of emptiness
      so that you are tuned
      to your body harp,
      strung out on the harpsichord
      of all your nerves
      and hammered bloody blue
      as the crushed fingers
      of the woman pianist
      beaten by her jealous lover.
 
      Who was she?
      Someone I invented
      for this poem,
      someone I imagined …
 
      Never mind,
      she is me, you—
 
      Tied to that bodybeat,
      fainting on that rack of blood,
      moving to that metronome—
      empty, empty, empty.
 
      No use.
      The blood is thicker
      than the roots of trees,
      more persistent than my poetry,
      more baroque than her bruised music.
      It guilds the sky above the Virgin's head.
      It turns the lilies white.
 
      Try to run:
      the blood still follows you.
      Swear off children,
      seek a quiet room
      to practice your preludes and fugues.
      Under the piano,
      the blood accumulates:
      eventually it floats you both away.
 
      Give in.
      Babies cry and music is your life.
      Darling, you were born to bleed
      or rock.
      And the heart breaks
      either way.
                                 [Loveroot]

To date, Fear of Flying is the most compelling statement of "growing up female in America: What a liability!" In the 311 pages of Isadora's journey from youth to maturity all the old idols fall and a woman novelist has had the courage to assert her freedom and liberation from the masculine ideal on her own terms. Isadora is neither Alice nor Beatrice, inspiration nor guide. She even rejects the most irresistible myth of all—motherhood—and dares the vagaries of print. The arduous journey from childhood, replete with the fantasies and dreams of youth and the search for the "wrong things in love," the borrowed wings which "never stayed on when I needed them," leads ultimately to the conclusion, "I really needed to grow my own." Isadora Icarus:

Isadora White Stollerman Wing … B.A., M.A., Phi Beta Kappa. Isadora Wing, promising younger poet, Isadora Wing, promising younger sufferer. Isadora Wing, feminist and would-be liberated woman. Isadora Wing, clown, crybaby, fool. Isadora Wing, wit, scholar, ex-wife of Jesus Christ. Isadora Wing, with her fear of flying, Isadora Wing, slightly overweight sexpot with a bad case of astigmatism of the mind's eye. Isadora Wing, with her unfillable cunt and holes in her head and her heart. Isadora Wing of the hunger-thump. Isadora Wing whose mother wanted her to fly. Isadora Wing whose mother grounded her. Isadora Wing, professional patient, seeker of saviors, sensuality, certainty. Isadora Wing, fighter of windmills, professional mourner, failed adventuress …

Isadora Wing comes of age.

At this point it is difficult to assess the importance of the work of Erica Jong. Having been praised by John Updike and Henry Miller and dismissed by Alfred Kazin as a "Sexual Show-Off," she is as she has so cogently stated, "Exhibit A." However, a strong case can be made for her ability to crystallize the dilemma of the woman writer and communicate that anguish in a brutally forceful way. And an even stronger case can be made for her artistic forging of a new and bold image of the "Housewife as Artist." If "woman writer" ceases to be a polite but negative label, it will be due in great measure to the efforts of Erica Jong.

Joan Reardon, "'Fear of Flying': Developing the Feminist Novel," in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, May-June, 1978, pp. 306-20.