Fear of Flying

“But what about all those other longings which after a while marriage did nothing much to appease? The restlessness, the hunger […] the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses, for the smell of peonies in a penthouse on a June night, for the light at the end of the pier in Gatsby…Not those things really […] but what those things evoked.”

Isadora expresses her frustration with marriage, especially because it feels like the only viable option for a woman who doesn’t want to become a social outsider. She wants romance and passion, even alluding to Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), who yearned for everything promised by the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s pier. This description highlights Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy by suggesting the ways in which Isadora’s craving for independence is presented to her as unnatural in a woman.

“I closed it gently. No Nora-slamming the door routine to undercut the effect.”

Isadora alludes to Nora Helmer, the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House (1879), who rejects her husband after she realizes that he does not love her as she loves him. The play ends when Nora bangs the door of their flat closed after choosing herself over him. When Isadora fires her analyst for being a misogynist, she intentionally closes the door softly, demonstrating her self-control and refusing to confirm his accusation that she is aggressive and angry, evidence of The Pervasiveness of Internalized Misogyny.