59 pages • 1-hour read
Fear of Flying
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Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, gender discrimination, mental illness, substance use, death, cursing, rape, graphic violence, and cursing.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Pandora’s Box or My Two Mothers”
Isadora says that she loves and hates her mother, Jude, with such vehemence that it’s difficult for her to recognize the actual woman. They need each other, and the intensity of this feeling makes them want to “strangle each other with love” (201). Jude taught Isadora that to be “ordinary” is the worst possible fault. As a teen, Isadora yearned to be ordinary just as Jude longed for the unusual. Isadora wishes Jude could have channeled her anger into a successful artistic career rather than her fashion and decorating choices. Nevertheless, Isadora recognizes that her mother criticizes anyone who enjoys their work or reaches a certain level of success, and she actually prefers money and prizes over originality. Jude has no concern for the “humble doing of the thing” and espouses a belief that life is nasty and short, and the desire for money and power is universal. Thus, Isadora feels she could never please her mother: not by becoming an artist or rejecting an artist’s life, nor by rebelling against or fulfilling her mother’s ideals.
On the other hand, Isadora says, she has another mother: one who is soft, nurturing, and affectionate, who believed Isadora was a great writer at age eight, who was so much fun, who never yelled. Isadora owes her whole self to this mother. She says, “Surely no girl could have a more devoted mother, a mother more interested in her becoming a whole person, in becoming, if she wished, an artist” (211). Yet Jude infuriates Isadora, and Isadora wonders if sex is the reason why; Jude believes in free love, but she told Isadora to withhold sex from boys to retain her value, that she should deny the boys who chase her. So Isadora became terrified of sex and its power and wondered why Jude didn’t teach her how to be a woman. She learned about women by reading about them in books authored by men, and she trusted those books, even when their representation of women suggested female inferiority to men. These male writers argued that women cannot be artists, that they are irrational earth mothers with deficient superegos who lament their “incomplete[ness]” as a result of their missing penis. She recalls working hard in school, giving her first-hand job to a boy, then doing penance by masturbating and refusing to eat. She recalls the ineptitude of her first analyst and her realization that, for talented women, life is a trap and conflict-free femaleness is impossible.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Freud’s House”
Adrian drops Isadora and Bennett off without a word. That afternoon, Isadora and Bennett go to Freud’s house, feeling a “comfortable solidarity” that Adrian would call boring. Isadora thinks that he just doesn’t understand how two people can support each other. Isadora tells herself she’ll never see Adrian again. After lunch, she and Bennett attend a seminar on the psychology of artists. The speaker argues that artists are uniformly dependent, childlike, and narcissistic; they have a massive desire to be mothered and seek mother-figures everywhere. Unable to find the ideal mother, they seek compensation through creation of art and fame. Bennett squeezes her hand throughout, and she thinks of how she longs to return to “Daddy” and simultaneously wants to be free. The speaker also describes the “unsuitable ‘love object’” upon whom an artist will fixate, who will become “a deity of sorts” in the artist’s eyes (227). A fresh, strong sexual infatuation is the closest an adult can come to the passion small children feel for the parent of the opposite sex.
Next, Isadora and Bennett go to a meeting chaired by Adrian, and she becomes so upset that she escapes to the hallway, where she runs into her analyst from Heidelberg, Dr. Happe. She recalls how, during that time, she had such trouble writing letters because she never felt she got the tone right. Dr. Happe taught her to stop hating herself, and he pointed out that giving up writing and having a baby wasn’t a real solution to her artistic problems. Now, he says she’s a poet and asks why she expects her life to be uncomplicated and why she can never forgive herself. He tells her that her feelings of guilt prevent her from enjoying anything she does. On the final morning of the conference, Adrian asks Isadora to leave with him, and though she’s tempted, she declines. Later, however, she runs through the streets to get to him, determined to be courageous and chase her passion. He drives her to her hotel to get her things, but she spends so long writing a letter to Bennett that Bennett gets back. She feels she’s never loved him more, and she wishes he’d beg her to stay. He doesn’t.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Existentialism Reconsidered”
Life with Adrian means Isadora lives by his rules: no talk about the future. He likes to change the rules to suit himself, just like Randy did with Isadora when they were younger. Adrian and Isadora are often drunk, and she wonders if she’s secretly in love with death. She is alternately depressed and elated, hating herself for running off with Adrian and worried about the future. They zigzag all over the continent and finally, to Paris. She begins to see him with greater clarity, to see that he is part of a pattern in her life, though he thinks he is uncategorizable. He can never maintain an erection in private but is wildly aroused in public. Adrian asks Isadora to tell him about her first husband.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Madman”
Brian is an actual genius. He’s also had numerous “psychotic breakdowns,” but no one told Isadora that until much later. She fell in love with his brilliance and his ability to talk to anyone about anything. Brian was entertaining, always moving and talking quickly; he was an original. They were each other’s first official sexual encounter, though she had to seduce him (which she then felt guilty about). They dated for four years, and they were happy. They were never bored, and Isadora loved Brian’s eccentricity. Then he began to fear that Isadora would leave him, and he insisted that they get married or break up; so she married him, though she didn’t really want to. He got a job in a marketing research firm, and she started grad school. They began to see each other very little and feel unhappy, and then things got worse. Brian stopped wanting sex, and Isadora began to fantasize about “zipless fucks.” She didn’t have an affair because she “was a good girl of the fifties” (265). This is also why she believed rape wasn’t real, because she was taught that “rape” only happens when a woman consents at the last second.
Isadora’s marriage was unhappy. She became disillusioned with grad school, too, when she learned that she wouldn’t get to study literature—which she loved—but literary criticism. She began to withdraw. She told one professor that she wanted to be a writer, not a professor, and he accused her of complaining and chasing “fun” instead of doing the “work.” Meanwhile, Brian stopped sleeping entirely, and he became fixated on Christ’s Second Coming; then he started thinking that he was the Second Coming. One day, he was supposed to meet with a client, but he missed the appointment. When he called, he claimed he’d been in hell. When she eventually locates him, he is manic. She got him back to the apartment and he “fucked [her] like a machine” (276), refusing to stop though she repeatedly asked.
After he raped her, she fell asleep and woke up to a disturbing illustration he’d taped to the mirror and a huge mess he’d made of her thesis notes and books. When she confronted him, he choked her. She’s not sure what made him release her, but he did, and she hid in the hall closet. When she finally found a doctor to come over, Brian was carted off to a psychiatric facility. For eight months, he was in and out of hospitals, and he accused Isadora of being a traitor. She realized how much happier she felt without him, and this caused more guilt. When the insurance money ran out for his care, his parents said they’d pay for private care if Isadora let them take Brian home to California. She felt she had no choice—they couldn’t afford his treatment—and she traveled with Brian, so distracted by his agitation that she forgot her fear of flying. He became cruel, eventually telling Isadora that he wouldn’t care if she died.
Isadora reflects on her relationship with her father. They are very alike, but they struggle to communicate effectively. She has memories of him from her childhood, but nothing that accounts for this difficulty. Every now and then, an experience triggers a new memory, and she wonders how many such memories remain locked away in her mind. She compares her writing to a vehicle that will help her access these. Ultimately, Isadora feels intense guilt for choosing herself over Brian, failing to live up to her ideal woman.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
The complex symbolism of flying is revealed in this section. Isadora’s fear of flying—the source of the novel’s title—stems from a perceived loss of control: As a passenger, she is at the mercy of the environment, the weather, and the pilot’s expertise. Her irrational belief that only her concentration keeps the plane in the air gives her the illusion of control. However, whenever she talks about “flying” in the figurative sense, it becomes associated with freedom, something she strongly desires. This contradiction parallels the novel’s exploration of Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy. Isadora seeks a balance between the competing values of stability and autonomy. If she never gets on a plane, she’s stuck at home, but if she figuratively flies away from relationships, she risks everything that makes her feel grounded and secure. When she runs away from Bennett and toward Adrian, she says, “No scared housewife, I. I was flying” (236). In this moment, she feels independent, brave, and capable; later, however, she’ll regret the decision because it costs her the stability her marriage provided. When she’s with Adrian in Europe, she drinks heavily to avoid her intense feelings of guilt, “Like getting drunk on a plane to ease your fear of flying. You still believe you’re going to die whenever the sound of the engines changes, but you don’t care anymore. You almost like the idea” (246). This simile highlights the powerlessness she feels on planes, the powerlessness she feels when she’s with Adrian and must live by his rules, a mere replacement for Bennett’s. Isadora says that Brian gave her an ultimatum because “[h]e was afraid [she’d] fly away” (263). He forced her to choose between losing him (gaining independence at the cost of stability) and legally binding herself to him (gaining stability but losing independence). Isadora’s fear of flying represents her most significant internal conflict: between the twin, conflicting, desires for stability and freedom.
Isadora’s sense of fragmentation as a woman is evidence of The Prevalence of Sexist Double Standards. While she still claims that being a woman “mean[s] being split into two irreconcilable halves” (218), she also clearly recalls and relates some of Brian’s last words to her: “You’re not part of me anymore […]. You used to be part of me” (285). Brian used these words to instill guilt in Isadora in an attempt to control her, correctly assuming that she had internalized the sexist societal belief that a woman is incomplete without a man. No man in the novel feels similarly incomplete without Isadora. The intense culpability Isadora felt in choosing herself over Brian—even if it killed her—suggests her sense of loss after their split, even though she also felt happier without him. Isadora’s character arc throughout the novel turns on her slow recognition that she need not be “part of” any man—she is complete in herself, just as Adrian and Bennett are complete in themselves. Only after she has made this realization can she and Bennett attempt to rekindle their marriage as equals.
Isadora’s guilt for failing to live up to the image of an ideal woman who is “capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation” (291) suggests that the purpose of this impossible ideal is to curtail Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy. The idea that a single man is a “bachelor” while a single woman is a pariah, or that a mother must devote her life to her children while their father pursues a career, forces women into a circumscribed role within the nuclear family. The Pervasiveness of Internalized Misogyny, visible in Isadora’s constant self-criticism, means that women effectively police the boundaries of acceptable feminine behavior for themselves. As Isadora herself notes, “You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty” (179). A woman doesn’t need to be kept in line by male authority if she can monitor and suppress her own “anti-social” desires through the development of guilt. So, Isadora feels herself to be “torn apart” or “halve[d]” by her competing wishes for security and independence, and then she is halved again when she is separated from Brian. She’s told the only way to feel “whole” or “complete” is to marry, but marriage renders her “half” and tells her it’s her fault if the marriage ends, even if her husband tries to kill her.
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