Desire and Fantasy in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying

This chapter reexamines the central voyeuristic fantasy that animates Erica Jong's 1973 novel Fear of Flying. At the time of its release, Fear of Flying, with its unabashed presentations of the female body, and indeed all bodies, was widely considered controversial and risqué. It argue that these representations of the body are directly tied to the novel's attempts to mediate the flow of desire between fantasies of fulfillment and the difficult realities of human relations. The main character and narrator of the novel, Isadora Wing, embodies both culturally inscribed fears regarding the limits of bodily self-control and sexual desire, and also the possibility of getting outside these limits. For this reason, Fear of Flying is perhaps the most famous of the consciousness-raising novels of second-wave feminism—texts that were defined by a “utopian project of total social transformation” and often by explorations of alternatives to traditional thinking about happiness, desire, sexual relations, and propriety.