Fear of Flying

Isadora is a 29-year-old twice married woman, torn between her desire for excitement and freedom, and her desire for security and love. Her full name is Isadora Zelda White Wing: Isadora after the dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan; Zelda after Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald; White, the “bleached” form of Weiss; and Bennett’s last name, Wing, alluding to her fear of flying and her desire for the freedom implied by flight. Isadora Duncan was a famous dancer and choreographer who was unconventional, passionate, and principled, as well as committed to independent artistic expression and disdainful of rules, and Zelda Fitzgerald was the famously unconventional and rebellious wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Thus, Isadora claims, “With a name like Isadora Zelda it was clear what I was supposed to choose: everything my mother had been offered and had passed up” (56). Her name feels like a hint or a promise that she is meant to do the things her mother couldn’t, and it also represents the high standard or ideal her mother expects her to reach. 

She is angry about the lies society tells women about marriage—namely, that it solves all problems and gives them purpose—as well as confused about what it actually means to be a woman. Her mother taught her that a woman cannot be both a mother and an artist and frequently expressed resentment of Isadora and her sisters for having thwarted her artistic ambitions by existing. Isadora recognizes that the female artists she most admires are brave in their art, not their lives, or they spend their entire artistic careers focused on what they lack: motherhood. Isadora longs to have a child in a theoretical way, so long as the child is a girl, takes her last name, and embodies all the empowering qualities that Isadora thinks she lacks. Complicating matters is the fact that Isadora has been undergoing psychodynamic therapy for 13 years and feels no healthier or less fearful than before. She married Brian, who raped and tried to kill her during a psychotic episode, but she has internalized guilt for her decision to commit him and free herself. She says, “In a sense, I was a traitor. It had come down to a choice between me or him, and I chose me. My guilt about this haunts me still” (290).

For most of the novel, Isadora experiences guilty whenever she prioritizes her own wishes over a man’s, bored in her marriage to steady but dull Bennett, disempowered and resentful when she considers how society curtails her choices as a woman, and desirous of passion and freedom from others’ expectations. She says, “I couldn’t make sense of all the contradictions I felt. At times I was defiant and thought I had every right to snatch whatever pleasure was offered to me for the duration of my short time on earth. Why shouldn’t I be happy and hedonistic? What was wrong with it?” (173). At other times, Isadora is overwhelmed by guilt for embracing “happ[iness] and hedonis[m],” especially when it comes to her affair with Adrian. Her harsh inner critic stems from the gap between her self-image and her image of the ideal woman, gleaned from societal messaging. To her, this supreme woman “is a vehicle, a vessel, with no needs or desires of her own. When her husband beats her, she understands him. When he is sick, she nurses him […]. She is capable of absolutely everything except self-preservation. And secretly, I am always ashamed of myself for not being her” (291). That this ideal woman is an impossibility does not deter Isadora from blaming herself for failing to be her.

The more aware Isadora becomes of sexual double-standards, the more her guilt eases. She stops idealizing Adrian when she learns that he has planned, all along, to return to his safe life with his family: the very thing he charges her not to do. For a long time, she associated him with freedom, but when he says he’ll return to his wife and children, she realizes that—despite his apparent sexual freedom and part-time liberation from traditional family life—“fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom” (357). She abandons her long-time fantasy of the “zipless fuck,” especially after she rejects the opportunity to have one on her way from Paris (and Adrian) to London (and Bennett). She realizes that she’s nursed a “disproportionate sense of guilt” (339), and that she previously “looked for the wrong things in love. I wanted to lose myself in a man, to cease to be me, to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings. Isadora Icarus, I considered calling myself” (413). She no longer wishes to “lose” herself or to become one with a partner; she realizes that she is whole and complete on her own. Thus, she is a dynamic and round protagonist whose view of the world and her place in it changes dramatically.