Fear of Flying

by Erica Jong

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Summary

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Fear of Flying is the story of a woman’s search for herself. On the surface it takes place during and after a psychoanalytic convention in Vienna, Austria, but since it is a record of the meanderings of Isadora’s mind, readers are led back and forth in her life, to and through her childhood, her first marriage and its breakup, and her relationships between her two marriages.

The story begins on the airplane to Vienna, where Isadora is accompanying her husband to the conference. The conference itself is to be a welcoming-home of psychoanalysis to the city from which Sigmund Freud fled before the Nazis in 1938. Isadora herself has a responsibility, since she has been assigned by a magazine called Voyeur to write an article on the conference. However, for all intents and purposes she is the traditional wife, going along for the ride.

The ride is the first problem. The book’s title explains it: Isadora has a phobia about flying. Nevertheless, she grits her teeth and flies, concentrating mentally in her belief that she is in this way helping keep the plane aloft. In the same way, she handles her other fear of flying as well, flying being a metaphor for taking off and taking charge of her own life. Terrified, she takes off anyway on whatever adventures present themselves, trying to learn thereby who she is and what she is after.

A large part of Isadora’s musings and wonderings are sexual. She fantasizes about faceless, anonymous sexual encounters with strangers, and the book is extremely graphic, both in language and content, as she describes her imaginary, and later real, adventures in detail. No sooner do Isadora and Bennett arrive at the conference than she meets the man who will be the focus of her sexual thoughts and actions, another analyst named Adrian Goodlove. The two are instantly attracted to each other, and the rest of the story becomes a three-way tension as Isadora struggles between giving way to her attraction and attempting to remain true to her husband.

Adrian’s attraction is not merely sexual, however. He represents freedom for Isadora—not merely freedom from the bonds of marriage, but also a supposedly existential life free of any bounds or restrictions whatsoever. Adrian urges Isadora to give it all up, to experience living just for the moment, and ultimately, by the end of the conference, she gives in to him, leaving her husband to travel around Europe in a drunken and sensual blur, until finally Adrian dumps her in Paris, belying all his claims of irresponsibility and existential living to meet up with his wife and children for a prearranged vacation.

All along, Isadora questions the value of this lifestyle, but, bullied by Adrian into thinking she needs to “fly,” she follows him. Now, betrayed, she returns to London and finds Bennett’s hotel room, in which she washes away all the grime, both physical and spiritual, of the past weeks. As the book ends, she has no idea what she will do next, or even whether she will stay in the room until her husband returns. All she knows is that she has lost her fear. By goading her into tossing away all her security and facing her fear of “flying,” Adrian has indeed helped her to find herself. By throwing her lot in with a man who would ultimately abandon her and make her stand on her own feet, she finds out who she is.

Mixed into this linear plot are flashbacks to Isadora’s childhood and her almost comically troubled relationship with her mother, a woman for whom the...

(This entire section contains 774 words.)

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worst insult was to be called “ordinary,” a woman who gave up a career as an artist in order to marry and have children, and who therefore worked out her ambitions on her children. Isadora’s memories also include her sisters, each of whom constantly chides her for not joining them in their state of domestic non-bliss as settled wives and mothers. Her first husband is also part of the musings, a fellow student who, after they were married, had a breakdown and came to believe he was Jesus Christ.

The story, the events of the present, are intertwined with the musings about the past, which serve both to cue in the reader to Isadora’s background and to integrate her present search with the restraints and blocks of her past. Through the flashbacks, she and the reader see what has caused her fear of flying, her fear of stepping out into the world and claiming her own identity apart from that of the man beside her.

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