Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Zipless is Fearless

     

FEAR OF FLYING is a feminist classic that is not recommended for the prudish mind. This exploration of feminine identity explicitly describes the misadventures taken by her protagonist, Isadora Wing, to own her brand of liberation and sexuality. The terms and setting for this novel may be dated, but the themes offer plenty of insights that are still relevant to women of this generation.

“Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.” 

Told in the first person, Isadora Wing narrates her family life, misadventures, and reflections with much wit and honesty that for generations believed as scandalous coming from a woman. She is a published poet raised and bred in a middle-class family from New York. Isadora is probably one of the most anti-heroine you’ll ever encounter. She is compulsive, volatile, susceptible, and acutely irritating at most times.

"They screamed at me, but I couldn't hear. I was reading. I was writing. I was safe."

On a trip to Vienna to attend a psychoanalytic congress with her psychiatrist husband, Isadora meets a reckless analyst who seems to be the embodiment of all her sultry sexual fantasies. He seduced Isadora to leave her husband for an existential journey across Europe, which turned out as a re-evaluation of her outlook and unvoiced desires in life. 

"What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart."

Since Isadora irritates her readers, Erica Jong gained respect as a true feminist writer. While Isadora pursues her desire for the ultimate “zipless fuck”, Jong showed her readers that a woman can feel and do what she wants in any context, even in sex. During Isadora’s plummet to self-abasement, Jong told us that we can also be our own hero if we so choose. It is safe to conclude then that when we lose our fears, we can gain our freedom.

"Freedom is full of fear. But fear isn't the worst thing we face. Paralysis is."

Book details:

Title:  Fear of Flying
Author:  Erica Jong

Publisher:  Open Road

Publication:  October 18, 2011

Genre:  Fiction

Rating:   ★★★

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F2F32, moderated by the lovely Marie Ricana,
at Titania Wine Cellar, Makati. 
Photo courtesy of Monique.