Fear of Flying

Isadora references several fairy tales, especially early in the text, and always in contrast with the reality of women’s lives, which are demonstrably unfairytale-like. Such stories teach women that marriage is the goal, that it will solve all a woman’s problems, just as the princes they eventually marry save Snow White, Aurora, and Cinderella from evil. A woman alone lives “As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away ‘from all this.’ All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?” (17). The single woman might be quite happy and fulfilled by living alone, but fairy tales have told her that she can’t be those things without a man. Even when they do marry, like the other military wives in Heidelberg, they seem to “[wander] about in housecoats and hair rollers, always awaiting that Cinderella evening for which it will be worthwhile to comb out their curls. It never comes” (81). Fairy tales are a motif that represent the broken promises society makes to women about marriage, promises that direct and circumscribe Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy.

Further, Isadora is shocked by the contrast between the Nazi amphitheater she finds and the fairy tale forest that surrounds it.