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| Home | Erica Live! | Erica's Events | Erica Jong | Erica's Works | Fear of Family The thoughts of audience members were turning gently to the prospect of cookies and coffee following the opening panel at the March 28 conference "Fear of Flying: Can a Feminist Classic Be an American Classic?" Then a questioner arose from the floor and introduced herself as Suzanna Mann Daou, Erica Jong's older sister. "I love Erica very much, and I forgive her," she started ominously, "but I have wanted to say this for many years." Fear of Flying (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), she charged, was full of prejudice toward Arabs, especially her husband's Maronite Catholic family in Beirut, depicted in a chapter called "Arabs & Other Animals." Erica's novel had caused her endless pain. Somehow, instead of bringing it up in person, or at the Mann family Seder, she had contained that pain for 35 years until she could announce it publicly at a large celebration of Jong at Columbia University. Ah, sisterhood. Although the title of the chapter in question would not now be acceptable in a satirical novel, it is not at all about Arabs as a group; rather, the Lebanese brother-in-law of the heroine, Isadora Wing, makes a pass at her at a family reunion, and she discovers that he has also made passes at her other sisters."He's just a bit horny," says one tolerantly, "because [his wife] Randy spends her entire life in an advanced state of pregnancy." (In the novel, Randy has nine children; in real life, Daou had six.) In another scene, Randy tells Isadora, "I won't have you putting me and my husband and my children in your filthy writing do you hear me? I'll kill you if you mention me in any way at all." Jong did not reply to her sister's remarks at the meeting, held to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the publication of her book; when the coffee break was announced, Daou left. The confrontation was a bit of a bombshell, and there was a lively buzz around the coffee urns, but it was also a reminder of how much controversy and wrath can still be stirred up by a novel that created a sensation when it first appeared in the midst of the women's movement of the 1970s. Several speakers recalled their indelible memories of the paperback edition: its naked woman behind an unzipped jacket, its blurb from John Updike, and its Rabelaisian, adventurous, trying-to-be-liberated poet-heroine. At the conference, academics, novelists, and journalists including Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Margo Jefferson, Min Jin Lee, Nancy K. Miller, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Aoibheann Sweeney, and Rebecca Traister revisited Jong's best seller to analyze its place in 20th-century American writing and its influence on younger generations. A graduate of Barnard, and an A.B.D. in 18th-century English literature from Columbia, Jong began her literary career as a poet, but it was Fear of Flying that made her famous, and that novel, as the critic Lisa Marie Hogeland has said in Feminism and Its Fictions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), "more than any other novel of the decade, made its mark as a novel about sexuality," especially female sexuality. Yet at the same time that Fear of Flying spoke to women's larger concerns about coming of age in a new era, it also spoke to men. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt noted with considerable surprise in The New York Times after the book was published, "I can't remember ever before feeling quite so free to identify my own feelings with those of a female protagonist which would suggest that Isadora Wing is really more of a person than a woman." Indeed. In an interview in Playboy, Jong commented that "men and women do face similar problems, like those Isadora faced: the difficulty of separating oneself from one's family, of achieving a sense of adulthood; the dilemma of wanting to be sexually free and yet grounded in a safe, secure relationship." So how does Fear of Flying stand up as literature today? In my view, very well. Although she may not have known it, Jong was writing in a long tradition of American female novelists who used the semiautobiographical form of the Kunstlerroman (artist's novel) both to tell the story of their generation, and to redeem women's fiction from its demeaning associations with sentimentality, domesticity, and self-sacrifice. In novels from Mary Virginia Terhune's Alone (1853) and Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855) to Mary Hunter Austin's A Woman of Genius (1912), Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), writers described the struggles of gifted women with their families, with their societies, and with themselves. By the time Jong was ready to move from poetry to fiction, most of those books were lost or forgotten; she was keenly aware of the most recent examples, including Plath, but she was determined not to let her heroine "crawl back to her husband," or "get killed in a car crash," or "have a baby" (as she told another colleague and me in 1975) all the conventional endings in fiction for intelligent women who aspire to be artists. Above all, Isadora would refuse to kill herself. Fear of Flying is also a picaresque novel that comments on the male tradition of adventure, sexual conquest, and life-for-art's-sake. Named for the modern dancer Isadora Duncan and for Zelda Fitzgerald, the novelist wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Zelda Wing is told in childhood by her mother, a frustrated artist, that she must choose between creativity or maternity. Later, as an adult, Isadora reflects on the history of female writers, those "timid in their lives and only brave in their art," or "severe, suicidal, strange." With few female role models, she obsessively reads The New Yorker, her "shrine since childhood," and also tries to write novels with male narrators. "No 'lady writers' subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights and jungle safaris. Only, I didn't know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). 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.'" At last, Isadora determines to overcome her fear and "fly" which, to Jong, means embracing sexuality, independence, creativity, honesty, and passion. With a Laingian therapist named Adrian Goodlove, Isadora sets off on a passionate odyssey around Europe, inspired as much by James Joyce, Henry Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov as by Colette or Anaοs Nin. When they get to Paris, she sees a women's-liberation sign scrawled under a highway bridge: "Femmes! Liberons Nous!" There Adrian dumps her; but Isadora is determined: "Whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I'd go on working." Jong has certainly gone on working; after eight novels, two volumes of memoirs, collections of poetry, and more, she is now finishing a sequel to Fear of Flying in which Isadora is 60. Although she had hoped 35 years ago to write novels about men as well as women, Jong's career, post-Isadora, has turned out to be centered on women's stories and addressed to female readers. And like other second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s, she has seen her work dismissed as unserious and bourgeois by younger radical feminists, lesbians, and poststructuralist critics. It is interesting that speakers at last month's conference stressed the contemporary relevance of Fear of Flying. The older among them showed that Fear of Flying is still in the American consciousness, noting how the book was cited in recent headlines on Eliot Spitzer's zipper problem. Younger speakers commented that their patronizing view of Jong's era of feminism and her novel as both dated more about their mothers than themselves has been shaken up by the news media's treatment of Hillary Clinton and other feminist issues in the election. Maybe, they seemed to say, we're not so postfeminist after all. Fear of Flying is about "the birth of an artist," said Min Jin Lee. Rebecca Traister, who writes a feminist blog for Salon, was impressed by a story of a woman who dares to aim for the top and lives to tell her tale. I think Jong's most important accomplishment has been telling her tale without succumbing to the anxieties and pressures of embarrassing, offending, shocking, or alienating her family. Historically, for female writers, family has trumped writing, while male writers have insisted that family life was their material. Fitzgerald, who fictionalized his wife and marriage in his novels, even tried to stop Zelda from writing about herself and their marriage in her own book, and many contemporary male novelists are notorious for writing about their parents, wives, and siblings. But in her recent memoir, Seducing the Demon (Tarcher, 2006), Jong asks, "Does Writing Trump Family?" She gives a qualified "yes," and in doing so, risks scenes like the one at Columbia. She has also encouraged her own daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, to put writing first. In the 21st century, women shouldn't need to ask permission to fly. Elaine Showalter is an emerita professor of English at Princeton University. Her book A Jury of Her Peers: A Literary History of American Women Writers 1650-2000 will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2009. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 32, Page B5
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