Erica Jong's Fear of Flying tells the story of 29-year-old poet Isadora Wing, who is bored in a bourgeois marriage. She dreams of a sexual encounter with a stranger, and when she travels with her husband to Vienna and meets the attractive Adrian Goodlove, she indulges in this fantasy. At the time of the book's release in 1973, women were not supposed to fantasize about sex, and Jong wrote the book to give voice to women who were trapped in the same way as Isadora. Sexuality is important both metaphorically and thematically in the novel, and it is through Isadora's quest for a more fulfilling experience that she discovers herself, her insecurities, and how to deal with them. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayErica Jong states in the foreword to the 2008 edition of the book that she wrote Fear of Flying to "say the truth about women, whatever it costs.” me” (foreword, viii), and one of the truths she wanted to say was that women also fantasize about sex, and that this is something that should be accepted in society. His goal with the novel was "to open a woman's head and show everything that goes on inside" (foreword, ix). Jong says no one before her had done this. She also writes that "it remained for a woman to expose female fantasy with as much frankness" as John Updike and Philip Roth who had "dared to take literature into the confines of the bedroom" (foreword, ix). This is also mentioned by the main character, Isadora, in the novel. She explains that until women began writing books, only one side of the history of sex was told and comments that "throughout history, books have been written with sperm, not sperm." menstrual blood” (27). Here, Jong clearly expresses one of his main intentions with the novel, through his main character. One of the reasons Erica Jong is still talked about today is because she was one of the first novelists to introduce the concept of casual sex with a stranger. , without any conditions. Jong called this "zipless fucking" in Fear of Flying, and it's the term many associate the novel with. When Isadora describes her fantasy of fucking without zippers, she explains that "when you come together, zippers fall like rose petals, underwear flies away in one fell swoop like dandelion fluff." (14) One of the criteria for such a meeting is that the people involved do not know each other. For this reason, in this situation “there is no power play” (14), which makes it “the purest thing there is” (14). The storyline largely revolves around Isadora's quest for this experience, and it is Adrian Goodlove who is meant to become Isadora's big sexual encounter in the story. Instead, the opposite happens and she ends up getting to know the unsympathetic man that Adrian is, and on top of that, she barely has sex with him. However, her affair with Adrian is largely what pushes Isadora to learn more about herself and what she really wants, and is a driving force for the novel and Isadora's development. Although Fear of Flying may seem like a book simply about a woman's quest for sex and love. passion on the surface, there is more than what Jong wanted to convey. Sex is a very important factor in the novel, not necessarily because it is meant to be a pornographic narrative describing only a woman's thirst for sex. This is not a novel aboutsex in this sense, but sex is used to represent the battles of women in the 70s and before. The feminist movement was not a fight for gender equality, although that was included in it, but in Fear of Flying, gender represents the struggle. Isadora's internal struggle for sexual satisfaction is meant to help show how what was considered acceptable among men is unthinkable in terms of women. But the novel also directly addresses other feminist issues of the time. He comments and criticizes what society considers the role of women. The novel appeared in the midst of the second wave of feminism in the United States, and Jong attempts to express many of the issues that American women faced at the time and which led to feminist activity. Isadora, like many other women in the sixties, rejected what Betty Friedan, an important writer and feminist of second-wave feminism, called "the feminine mystique" in her 1963 nonfiction book of the same title . She explains that women were led to believe that only with a husband and dependent children could they have a true identity. The novel's protagonist goes against this expectation of only being a wife and mother, by having a job and refusing to have children. Isadora married twice, but never felt the need to become a mother. This is explained in particular by the fact that the child would then belong in part to the man who made her pregnant. The world she lives in is dominated by men, and she refuses to become pregnant for this reason, as well as because becoming a mother would prevent her from writing, and she sees her diaphragm as "a barrier between my womb and men . » (52) Jong here tries to convey the feeling that many women had at the time when the women's movement broke out in the sixties. Many refused to have children because they were terrified of ending up like their mothers, housewives in unhappy marriages. Many young girls have seen how their mothers ended and view motherhood as a trap from which there is no escape. Isadora gives voice to these women in her novel by asking: “Actually, what did it mean to be a woman? If it meant what Randy was or what my mother was, then I didn't want it. If that meant seething with resentment and lecturing on the joys of procreation, then I didn't want it. It's better to be an intellectual nun than that. (53) But then Isadora also decides that being nun isn't much better, because they had "no juice" (53). She has a thirst for sex which prevents her from completely detaching herself from men. When she runs with Adrian, drunk on champagne and infatuation, she fantasizes about their marriage and comments: "No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I imagined myself becoming attached to another." » (86) It is because of her boring marriage to Bennett that she desires Adrian, but she would not dream of divorcing Bennett for sexual reasons. Indeed, Isadora, like many others, desires the security and stability that a respected husband provides. “I just couldn't imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost like a dog without a master; rootless, faceless, indefinite. (86) Isadora would rather be in an unhappy marriage than live as a single woman in this era. She observes that "there is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone" (11) and that she could barely survive financially, and on top of that, she would be constantly harassed by everyone around her at subject of her “absence of husband, absence of children”. his selfishness in short. (11) In other words,according to Isadora and many other women, it was better to depend on a man than to be independent in a man's world. Without a man, she feels she has no viable identity. As mentioned, Isadora knew that she, like most other women, would never truly be able to be as financially secure on her own as she would be if she were married: "Damn smart, I thought about what men had made life so intolerable for single women that most of them would happily accept even a bad marriage. Almost everything had to be an improvement over struggling to make a living in a low-paying job and battling unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to land the more attractive ones. (87)She criticizes this reality while taking part in it. One of the reasons she marries and stays with Bennett is because he encourages her to write instead of leaving her behind. According to society, she was doing something wrong and selfish by wanting to write instead of giving birth. Isadorasa's sister Randy often makes it a subject of controversy, telling her to "stop writing and have a baby", because she "will find it so much more fulfilling than writing..." (49) She doesn't understand why anyone would want to live outside. what is the convention. Sex is an important part of the book because it is very important to the protagonist. Isadora mentions sex in many situations and a lot of her problems revolve around that. When describing Bennett, her current husband, she highlights his "long slender fingers, his hairless balls, a lovely swivel on his hips when he fucked" (35), and she also mentions that she "fell in love with Bennett in part because it had the cleanest balls I have ever tasted. (33) Although she may be exaggerating here for the sake of wit, her sexual attraction to Bennett was an important part of why she fell in love with him, showing that sexuality is obviously a very important part of life of the protagonist. As mentioned before, Isadora has no desire to have children, so it is the desire and the sexual act itself that is so important to her when it comes to sex. Isadora says that her husband is turned on by Adrian's pursuit and rhetorically asks herself and the reader, "what doesn't end up fucking?" (33) Sex seems to sum up a lot of things for Isadora. In the last part of the book, while in bed with Adrian, who cannot have sex with her, she questions the inability of men to get an erection in general: "Besides, The older you get, the clearer it becomes. became that men were fundamentally terrified of women. Some secretly, others openly. What's more poignant than a liberated woman face to face with a limp cock? All of history's biggest problems pale in comparison to these two quintessential objects: the eternal woman and the eternal lame asshole. (97) As shown here, Isadora often seems to draw parallels between sex and life in general. But at the same time, she criticized Freud for doing the same thing earlier in the novel. She comments that Freud assumes that women want a "stiff cock" (27) because men want them. “A big problem,” Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession. » (27) She also reflects on the fact that only men wrote books and that, therefore, "there was only one side of the story" (27). But at the same time, Isadora's life and problems revolve around sex and, in a way, she confirms what she criticizes Freud for assuming. The protagonist often appears to be a woman, 1995.