59 pages • 1-hour read
Fear of Flying
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, rape, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, and mental illness.
The Pervasiveness of Internalized Misogyny
Throughout the text, Isadora is consistently critical of herself. This is not constructive self-criticism but, rather, something akin to insults and even bullying. She would never say about someone else the things she thinks of herself. Isadora criticizes herself for being disloyal to men and for her perceived lack of artistic skill, and she finds fault with almost all her choices. Her harsh inner critic voices the societal misogyny that she has internalized over a lifetime of spent within the patriarchy.
Isadora condemns everything about herself, from her character and intelligence to her talent and body. When she thinks of Adrian while having sex with Bennett, she calls herself a “fraud,” saying that what she was doing was “far, far worse than fucking another man within [her] husband’s sight” (48). Committed to an impossible ideal of romantic fidelity, she polices her own imagination. Isadora also feels “responsible, in a way” for her mother’s frustrated artistic ambitions, though Jude made the choice to have children instead of pursuing her art (54). Further, though Isadora was class poet and won writing prizes in college, she becomes “convinced that nothing she was writing [as an adult] was good enough to send anywhere” (157). She recognizes that others’ work is often lackluster, but she is certain, for no apparent reason, that her “own must be much, much worse” (157). Taught to measure herself against impossible standards, she remains convinced throughout most of the novel that nothing she does is good enough.
When she and Bennett argue, his silence “makes the voices inside [her] head accuse [her] more violently than any outside voices ever could” (143). Isadora is aware that she is far harder on herself than she would be on anyone else, and she directly connects this experience to her womanhood. She recognizes that guilt and self-doubt are the tools patriarchy uses to oppress women: “You don’t have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty […]. Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture” (179). What’s more, she says, “All women think they’re ugly, even pretty women” (182). Isadora recognizes not only that she is unfairly judgmental of herself, but also that all women share this trait—an ingrained cultural habit that empowers men at the expense of women.
Isadora’s experience demonstrates that women’s harsh inner critics are informed by men and their expectations of women, even as these expectations are often passed down from mother to daughter, as is the case for Isodora and her mother. She talks about wanting to be a “good girl of the fifties” (265), and being a “good girl” included things like not having sex. At the same time, she also didn’t completely understand what sex was, and she feared that, by manually stimulating a high school boyfriend, she had become pregnant, leading her to internalize a sense of “badness.” Her lack of sexual education was supplemented by actual misinformation such as when Isadora was taught that “[t]here is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute” (266). Such a stance makes women responsible for men’s bad behavior.
Patriarchy teaches Isodora to deny her own desires and scorn pleasure, both in sex and in everything else she does. When she tells her professor that she wants to be a writer and finds graduate school unsatisfying, he scornfully asks, “What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun” (269). His feedback suggests that her desire for satisfaction is infantile, that she should put prioritize “work” over “fun.” She applies this same ideology to her romantic life, thinking of marriage in terms of work and obligation and imagining that pleasure and desire can be found only outside this framework. She goes on to have two marriages, neither of which is “fun,” internalizing the blame when Brian tries to kill her and when Bennett freezes her out. Both tell her what a “weak” traitor she is, emphasizing how responsible men are for women’s harsh inner critics.
Ultimately, as Isadora learns to think of herself as “whole” rather than only a fragmented part, she recognizes the patriarchal origins of her insecurity: “women [have been] living under the shadow of [men’s] assumptions [for centuries, so] they no longer know what they want and can never make up their minds […]. And men, of course, compound the problem by mocking them for their indecisiveness and blaming it on biology” (377). Men created the problem for which they eventually blame women, and then women internalize these perceived shortcomings, consolidating them into the harsh inner critic.
Female Desire and the Pursuit of Autonomy
In her position as both a psychoanalytic patient and the wife of a psychoanalyst, Isadora embodies the position of women in a patriarchal culture that pathologizes female desire. Because patriarchy expects female desire to operate as a subsidiary to the desires of men, Isadora feels guilty whenever what she wants does not align with what a man wants. Her quest for the “zipless fuck”—a self-invented term signifying mutually satisfying sex without any emotional entanglements or expectations—is perpetually thwarted by her sense that, in the real world, sex for women is inextricable from notions of duty and obligation. Psychoanalysis, with its foundational literature written almost exclusively by men, promises to liberate patients from the inscrutable whims of the unexamined psyche, but in the novel it simply becomes modernity’s answer to the religious moralism of the past. Where the medieval church ascribed women’s autonomous desires to the influence of Satan, psychoanalysis ascribes the same desires to unresolved oedipal feelings, penis envy, and other dubious pathologies. As Isadora’s desires threaten her psychoanalyst husband’s sense of security, he tells her repeatedly that she doesn’t really want what she wants, that it’s only her pathology talking.
Isadora doesn’t know what she wants most in a relationship, making it nearly impossible to figure out how to get it. She didn’t feel a need to marry, but when Brian gave her an ultimatum, she acquiesced. Isadora says that a woman alone is presumed to have been rejected or found wanting, “And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone” (17). Thus, she learns that she ought not desire independence; it is dependence on a husband and partner that will prevent her miserable solitude. Then, when the marriage begins to founder and Brian stops wanting sex, she internalizes the guilt for his disinterest and “began to hate [her]self, to feel ugly, unloved, bodily odiferous—all the classic symptoms of the unfucked wife; [she] began to have fantasies of zipless fucks” (264). Isadora never pursues this desire, however, because she’s been taught to be faithful to her husband, like “a good girl of the fifties” (265). Autonomy and gratifying sexual encounters with men are held up as the domain of unloved, unacceptable women. Isadora begins to have these fantasies again as her marriage to Bennett deteriorates. She claims, “The marriage was my failure. If I had loved him enough, I would have cured his sadness instead of being engulfed by it and longing to escape from it” (187). She holds herself responsible for his abnegation of emotion, for his failure to accept mutual responsibility in their relationship, and she believes her desire for the “zipless fuck” is proof of her failure. However, though the “zipless fuck” is characterized by a lack of emotion, when Isadora is presented with an opportunity to have one with Adrian Goodlove, she doesn’t do it. Instead, she falls in love with him.
Isadora has been taught that marriage would bring her every happiness—including children—but both her marriages have been unhappy, for different reasons, and she doesn’t want children. Instead of the fulfillment that society promises, Isadora fears that if she had a baby, she “would be trapped for good. The hostage of my own feelings and my own child […]. But maybe I was already a hostage. The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears […]. What did it mean to be a woman, anyway?” (68). She feels she’ll be trapped no matter what choice she makes. Having a child with Bennett would be tantamount to chaining herself to him, to the responsibilities of motherhood rather than her fantasies of self-actualization and pleasure. Then she worries that her fantasies will entrap her and presage a different kind of unhappiness. More than anything, she fears a loss of autonomy, or what passes for it; so, while it may be too late to avoid the pitfalls of romantic relationships, she can still choose relative freedom. She even says that the “rubber yarmulke of the […] diaphragm has become a kind of fetish for me. A holy object, a barrier between my womb and men” (67). She conceives of her method of birth control as an object that confers a kind of divine protection on her, something that allows her to preserve some vestige of herself and her desire to be an artist.
Isadora’s desire, oscillating between Bennett and Adrian, is problematized by something worse: a feeling that neither can give her what she truly wants. She feels like half of something, when she wants to feel whole. She wants autonomy and the fulfillment of her desires, but she recognizes that relationships between men and women are not set up to support women’s empowerment. Regarding Bennett, she says, “How I longed to come back home to Daddy! But how I also longed to be free!” (226). She desires the safety and security Bennett offers, but she feels that this security is incompatible with freedom. She describes the “sudden mad impulse to get [her] bags and get away from both of them” (174), but she has no experience that would allow her to predict what that kind of independence might look like.
Isadora is torn between wanting to be an artist and wanting to be a mother—desires that she believes are mutually exclusive. She dreams of having a little girl: a “wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl with no scars on the brain or the psyche. […] A little girl who was neither bitchy nor mealymouthed because she didn’t hate her mother or herself” (65). The child she dreams of is a blank canvas through which to realize her own longing for autonomy. This dream, however, creates another bind for her: She feels that if she embraces motherhood, she’ll have to give up writing; if she embraces writing, then she’ll never escape her own internalized desire to have a child: “If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity […] or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness” (217). She cannot even know whether the desire to have a child is her own or simply part of the social “catechism” to which she often refers. It isn’t until Isadora learns that she is already complete, that her existence is not characterized by lack and her value isn’t determined by her relationship or domestic status, that she is able to consider a return to Bennett, though not a return to her former, guilt-ridden self.
The Prevalence of Sexist Double Standards
One of the major social factors that makes it so difficult for Isadora to figure out what she really wants, to make decisions and stick with them, is the prevalence of sexist double standards that favor men, giving them more choice and agency in their lives, and disfavor women, making certain choices unappealing (labeling them as “unnatural” or “selfish” or “unfeminine”), so that women choose the more socially acceptable option.
Men can choose to be single without harming their reputation, choose not to have children without damaging their character, and choose to make decisions that benefit themselves without guilt or fear of judgment. Isadora says that “[i]t is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man […]. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of [male] abandonment, not choice” (17). In fact, she argues that men have made life “intolerable for single women” so that most women choose even a bad marriage over remaining unattached (110).
Isadora’s choice not to have children is similarly regarded as aberrant. Isadora’s “friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her […] selfishness […] is a reproach to the American way of life” (17). She even feels she must apologize to her readers for her choice to produce poems rather than babies. Isadora internalizes a feeling of guilt for this choice and for any others in which she tries to please herself rather than men. Brian literally rapes Isadora and tries to strangle her. And yet, he feels like the victim when he says, “If you loved me—if you knew the goddamned meaning of sacrifice […], you wouldn’t give me this shit about your life!” (287). Rather than reject Brian’s faulty logic and projection of his selfishness onto her, Isadora “felt [she] deserved to lose [her] life” at his hands because she had chosen herself over him (390). Isadora highlights these double standards when she says, “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man” (179). The behavior of men in Isadora’s life illustrates how thoroughly patriarchal society inculcates guilt in women and absolves men of it.
Not only are men free of guilt, but they also lack the strength to assess, reflect on, and question themselves—tasks that women are constantly expected to perform. After the night Bennett and Isadora had sex in front of Adrian, she is appalled by the men’s inability to face what happened. She says, “Confronted with a real incident in their own lives, they couldn’t even discuss it. It was fine to be an analytic voyeur and dissect someone else’s homosexual longings, someone else’s Oedipal triangle, someone else’s adultery, but face to face with their own, they were speechless” (199). Perhaps they feel that not discussing what happened will make it unreal, but their hypocrisy is laid bare: Isadora must verbalize and confront every single action she takes and feeling she has, but they incapable of doing the same. Moreover, they blame her for what happened, even though Bennett chose to show up at Adrian’s hotel and initiate sex, and Adrian decided to watch and even touch Bennett during the encounter. They are absolved of responsibility, and she becomes “[t]he woman who had brought about their fall. Pandora and her evil box” (199).
These double standards—the curtailing of female choice while men enjoy opportunity and the instilling of female guilt while men are permitted relatively free reign for their desires—render an independent woman undesirable and a childless woman defective. No wonder Isadora says, so early in the text, “Growing up female in America. What a liability!” (14). Isadora’s femaleness has been turned into a burden by the men who benefit from her sacrifice, flexibility, attention, and the use of her body for their pleasure. At the root of dynamic are the sexual double standards that embolden Brian, Charlie, Bennett, and Adrian, rendering their influence on Isadora so very similar even as they themselves are very different.
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