Many of Isadora’s allusions emphasize her feeling of powerlessness. She refers to psychodynamic therapy as “some sort of Catch-22” (27), an allusion to Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, whose title became synonymous with lose-lose situations. Isadora goes to therapy for years, and when the analyst cannot help her, he tells her she needs to see another analyst for more treatment. Either way, she pays; either way, she suffers. It is never the analyst’s fault but always blamed on the analysand (the patient). She can’t win. In fact, the entire state of womanhood can be summed up as another catch-22: If Isadora chooses wife- and motherhood, she loses her independence; if she chooses to be an artist, she loses the stability marriage can provide and the social power that accompanies the conventional choice. She is powerless to make a satisfying choice because there isn’t one. 

In another allusion, she compares herself to “Gulliver among the Yahoos” (102), referencing the titular hero of Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels, surrounded and horrified by grotesque humanoid hedonists. Like Gulliver, she feels alien and powerless. At another point, she wonders “whether [Bennett] enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to [her] Eliza Dolittle” (160). Here, Isadora references the 1964 film My Fair Lady adapted from the 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, itself based on the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which a misogynistic sculptor creates a perfect woman with whom he falls in love. The allusion suggests that Bennett loves the idea of molding Isadora into his ideal woman rather than accepting her as she is. After she has sex with Bennett in front of Adrian, she compares herself to Pandora, “the woman who had brought about [men’s] fall” in Greek myth (199). Powerless Pandora was curious about the contents of the box Zeus gave to her, knowing she would open it, and she is henceforth blamed for releasing all evils into the world. Never mind that Bennett and Adrian have sought to manipulate Isadora, just as Zeus weaponized Pandora to punish Prometheus; she’s been their pawn, and yet she’s blamed, evidence of The Prevalence of Sexist Double Standards.

Likewise, when Adrian asks her for stories and she obliges to prevent his leaving her, she feels “like Scheherazade, amusing [her] king” (242), alluding to the One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Arabic folktales united by a framing device in which a cruel king marries a succession of virgins, beheading each one on their wedding night. One of these brides, Scheherazade, forestalls her death by telling stories to entertain the king, beginning a new story each night and always leaving it unfinished until the next night, thus forcing the king to postpone her execution to hear each story’s conclusion. Unlike this king, Adrian won’t kill Isadora for failing to keep his interest, but the risk of his abandonment feels like death to Isadora (which utterly negates the allure of the freedom a life with him seemed to promise). She even compares herself to the Judeo-Christian Eve when she references Eden in her description of Brian’s “seduction” and her subsequent guilt. Finally, she alludes to Freud’s Oedipus complex, itself an allusion to the Greek myth of Oedipus, a king who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Of Brian and Charlie, she laments, “if only I could have combined them! Why do I always wind up with two men who would make one great man? Is that somehow the secret of my Oedipal problem?” (310). Her “Oedipal problem” implies an unconscious desire to sleep with her father. Her question suggests that this socially unacceptable desire has given rise to another: the desire for two men at once because only when combined can they satisfy her. This desire, for two men at once, is socially unacceptable because women are expected to be faithful, as Isadora repeatedly points out. Isadora is powerless to resist her Oedipal urges, and yet they are unacceptable to her society.

Isadora’s dynamism becomes obvious in this section, as she struggles to define Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy. At one point, she tells Adrian, “It’s just that I want to really feel close to someone, united with someone, whole for once. I want to really love someone” (344). At this point in the novel, she equates wholeness with romantic union, implying that she does not yet feel whole in herself. When Adrian asks why she believes love fixes everything, she says, “Maybe it doesn’t […], but I want it. I want to feel whole” (344). She longs for an end to the fragmentation she has felt for so long, both within herself and in her relationships with men, and her new willingness to confront Adrian on his nonsensical ideas suggests that she does feel more complete in herself than she did in the early chapters. When Adrian accuses her of getting angry because she cannot control him, she retorts, “I just happen to have somewhat higher standards of what I want than you do. I see through your game […]. You said it about me […] and now I’ll say it back to you. It’s all desperation and depression masquerading as freedom […]. Even this trip is pathetic” (359). Isadora now sees that the freedom Adrian promised her is illusory. Adrian seems not to experience guilt, which suggests that he doesn’t care enough about anyone else to feel guilty for hurting them. This isn’t freedom, at least not the kind Isadora wants. 

She now recognizes that Adrian is not the avatar of unbridled desire she imagined him to be: “The man under the bed can never be the man over the bed […]. They’re mutually exclusive. Once the man comes up from under he’s no longer the man you desired” (361). The “man under the bed” is an imaginary man, an object of fantasy who can exist only at a distance. Once he enters Isadora’s real, daily life, he reveals himself to be something other than the fantasy. Again, the discomfort this thought causes prompts her to switch from first-person to second, verbally distancing herself from the harsh, disappointing reality. She realizes that reality can never live up to fantasy. In another catch-22, she recognizes that she cannot sexually desire men and yet remain free of their sexist expectations. To lessen The Pervasiveness of Internalized Misogyny, she must engage in deep introspection alongside social criticism, understanding that the roots of her dissatisfaction with herself lie not in her own faults but in a patriarchal and sexist culture.