Fear of Flying: More than a Feminist Novel Isadora's fears: her religion (semi-Jewish), her love life (second husband, seventh analyst; Bennett), her gender (a woman in America! In the sixties!), her career (writer: a book), sex (should women appreciate it?), her mother (Jude, an artist who danced naked in France), her sisters (all married, with at least two children each), her children (none), her name (Isadora White? Isadora Wing? Isadora White Stollerman Wing Goodlove?) and flying; Isadora is afraid of flying. Some would say that Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong, is simply a feminist novel. It is, but it is more than that. Fear of Flying is a novel about a woman searching for her name and the source of her fears; it is a novel about internal conflict. The protagonist of the novel is Isadora, a woman in her thirties in the late sixties. What begins as a business trip to Vienna with her analyst husband ends as a journey full of personal revelations. At the conference Isadora develops an infatuation that fuels his need to find out "what's wrong" with her. Traveling around Europe with a man who is not her husband, she discovers her true identity through complete loss of security. Herein lies the main irony of Fear of Flying; the journey the protagonist undertakes to acquire the traits she sees in her heroines only leads her to discover that they were hidden within her. Isadora is the very caricature of irony. The opening chapter sets the tone for the entire novel, written as a conversation with one's analyst: casual but intimate. His odyssey, in fact, begins on a plane full of psychoanalysts. As she puts it: she had been "looked after by at least six of them. And she had married a seventh." (p. 1) This is a great example of Isadora's seemingly nonchalant view of her own problems. His outlook on his life and his internal monologue draws the reader into his literal and symbolic fear of flying and his lifelong struggle with them. From the beginning she shares with us thirteen years of analysis and counting, but it's the 336 pages in which we see her slowly untangle her conflicts that show readers the lesson we were meant to learn. Isadora is an extremely intelligent character.