Fear of Flying

Author: Erica Jong

What Happens: Erica Jong, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband, writes about the marital discontent of Isadora Wing, a neurotic poet married to her psychoanalyst second husband. At a European psychoanalysis conference, Wing meets the subtly named Adrian Goodlove, and with him she takes a hippie-style vacation from her marriage, camping and fornicating all across Europe. In the process Jong--or Wing, the lines blur a bit--introduces the invaluable concept of the Zipless Fuck, the fantasy of the lover so compelling and perfect that all real-world obstacles simply melt away.

Censorship History: Fear of Flying has been banned far and wide, in Italy, South Africa, and right here at home.

The lasting controversy had to do with public funding of the arts. Jong received a $5,000 from the NEA to write Fear of Flying, and, as required, stated on page 1 that she had received this funding. On the very next page she introduced the world to the Zipless Fuck. This outraged people such as Jesse Helms, that champion of the oppression known as taste, who participated in public debates over Fear of Flying without actually having read the book. The debates grew to encompass the furor surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe's photography and works such as Serrano's Piss Christ, and eventually resulted in the decision that the United States would no longer fund individual artists.

One reader notes that Amazon still censors certain words, requiring discussion of this book to include phrases such as "the zipless fudge." But "zipless fuck" is right there in the Key Phrases, so no matter how grateful I am for the image of zipless fudge, I'm not sure what she's talking about.

Value as Erotica: Fear or Flying has a reputation for being wildly erotic. And sure, it talks about sex (or perhaps around sex) plenty. But if you're looking for an actual sex scene, there's not much in the way of explicit description--there's much more discussion of what doesn't happen. Isadora's husband can go for hours, but draws the line at oral sex; she runs off with her lover, who turns out to be mostly impotent; the three of them have one night together--but if that just made you think FINALLY! then you're still in for disappointment. It's very much the R-rated, cut-to-the-morning-after version of the scene.

Maybe Jong's language is what's supposed to be erotic. Maybe 30 years ago it was really hot to encounter a woman talking this way. There's a certain locker-room swagger to the way Isadora throws around words like cunt and fuck, but for contemporary readers whatever shock value the words might have had is long gone.

And, finally, apart from the basic idea of leaving your husband to go tooling around Europe with your new lover, there's nothing really erotic about the story, unless you have a fetish for neurotic, overprivileged, self-involved women who are hung up on Freudian analysis. Whininess is not hot. Not in women, not in men, not ever.

Value as Feminism: This is one of the sacred texts of the 1970s women's movement. It was a big deal, I guess, for Jong to use language that only male authors had used previously. I've seen recent press describe her as "the original bad girl" (somewhere, in whatever afterlife you believe in, Eve is getting tetchy). To be sure, there's merit and honesty in her recognition of the contradictions inherent in modern womanhood.

And yet, you know, for me, this book encapsulates everything wrong with second-wave feminism. It's whiny, it's solipsistic, it takes Freud seriously, and it makes the tacit assumption that empowerment begins and ends with the self-actualization of a woman who already has quite a lot of power. The heroine never stops to wonder if perhaps her privilege and her obsession with self are themselves to blame for her lack of fulfillment.

Now, don't get me wrong: we needed second-wave feminism, and perhaps need it still, but it has some serious shortcomings. Among them are narcissism and whininess--which I think are directly due to a Steinem-style assumption that women are the perpetual victims of society and of the men in their lives. More pernicious, and ultimately more damaging, is the notion that fulfillment comes from gratifying every personal whim, regardless of its impact on others. How can that count as feminine fulfillment? It doesn't even register as human fulfillment. It's fundamentally childish: the exaltation of appetite, the inability to see beyond the bounds of self.

So we might as well get into this:

Value as Literature: I'm not a huge fan of how all this self-gratification translates into literature. Feminist literary theorists suggested that women could--some said should--write according to their own separate aesthetic, ignoring such supposedly oppressive, phallocentric conceits as clarity and grammar. (These concepts didn't really come to prominence until the 1980s, but they'd been brewing at least since the beginning of the century; some say the Nora chapter of Ulysses is an example of écriture feminine, although I have trouble reconciling the ideas of Joyce and laxness.) Suffice to say that, one way and another, ideas of individual liberation have resulted in quite a lot of lazy writing.

Henry Miller--no stranger to censorship himself--championed Fear of Flying, and said in a letter that the book had a "natural, free flow. Just the contrary of Hemingway's studied prose which so many Americans consider 'good writing.'" Now, certainly Hemingway can get far too mannered. But is it wrong to expect a certain amount of discipline from an artist? Isn't that discipline--which boils down, after all, to exercising aesthetic choice--exactly what separates good art from bad?

There is little such discipline here. In fact, if your bookstore had a Lazy Writing section, you'd probably spot Fear of Flying on the shelf (right there next to On the Road and Angels and Demons). It's at least 50 pages too long. It's that dreaded beast, an autobiographical first-person novel. It's contradictory. It ends on the sort of cliffhanger that indicates the author couldn't solve the main conflict and opted to weasel out instead. It's in love with its own cleverness, brimming with parenthetical asides and the sort of feeble puns ("whoreoscopes," "my hysterical history") that give wordplay a bad name.

Is it antifeminist of me to get on Jong/Wing's case for whininess? That's an interesting question. You could point at literature's long history of neurotic male characters trying to make up their minds--from Hamlet to the protagonist in Notes from Underground--and argue that female characters are due for their turn on the couch. Fair point.

But the problem here is that Fear of Flying begins and ends with the couch. There's nothing more at stake. Hamlet's decision will reshape the kingdom, and he knows it; the process of deciding involves consideration not just of what he will do but of what it means to be human, what it means to die, what it means to face a decision like this. Isadora's decision is going to affect what she thinks about when she masturbates for the next few years, and it will affect her petulant analyst husband, and that's pretty much it. It's not a reflection on what it means to be human; it's just a reflection on what it means to be her--to be affluent and educated and still unsatisfied--and after a while it acquires the tedium of listening to a shrink's taped conversations with a hypochondriac.

Now, isn't there a case to be made for exploring an individual situation in such a way that it becomes universal? Of course. That's all literature ever is, or needs to be. The question is whether Fear of Flying actually makes the leap to universality. The concept of the Z.F. comes the closest. Are we willing to grant the book universality based on that concept alone? For me, it's not enough. I suspect that, when the book came out, the feelings it described were much like those of many women in the affluent chattering class that, coincidentally, happens to establish critical reaction to books. They saw themselves, and assumed the experience was universal. But it's not--not by a long shot.

So the real problem is that this is whininess and indecision without a larger purpose. Women are due for their Hamlet, no question, but should we settle for Isadora Wing? In terms of scale, scope, obsession, and would-be shock value, this is much closer to Portnoy's Complaint. Jong's real subject is Erica Jong, just as Philip Roth's is Philip Roth. That comparison would probably piss off Erica Jong and Philip Roth equally. But so be it.

What Else: There is nothing as simultaneously flattering and dismaying as the light of hope that leaps into a man's eyes when he finds out where you're from. I doubt the reputation American women enjoy in Italy is entirely due to the heroic philandering of Isadora Wing (or Erica Jong, acting as Isadora Wing). Based on my recent months in Tuscany, I'm guessing that the reputation has been well fortified by the hordes of sorority girls who file into the Florence airport wearing velour sweatpants with PINK emblazoned across the butts, chattering about Italy's lack of a drinking age.

Perhaps whole armies of American women, inspired by Fear of Flying, have been descending on Italy, demanding sexual awakenings? If American tourists demand sex the same way they demand other things ("HI! I'M LOOKING! FOR THE GIGOLOS! EXCUSE ME! HI! THE GIGOLOS?"), then oh, a brilliant comedy is waiting to be written.

The Handmaid's Tale

Author: Margaret Atwood

First Published: 1986

In a Nutshell: Atwood creates a future dystopia in which the United States has just become an oppressive fundamentalist dictatorship, the Republic of Gilead. Women are no longer allowed to read, work, or hold property; rather, they are property, assigned to men, and their sole purpose is to reproduce. Our guide through this world is Offred, the handmaid to a high-ranking Commander in the regime. (Offred is not her real name; the handmaids' names depend on their Commanders' names. Atwood never reveals Offred's real name--which, of course, makes it that much easier for the reader to substitute her own.) Despite extensive reeducation she remembers her life before, and pines for escape.

Censorhip History: It's always ironic when people try to censor a book that is, ultimately, about the futility of such efforts. Almost every character here finds a tiny or not-so-tiny way to defy the oppressive system, just as almost every interested 10-year-old finds a way to read what's on the school library's age-restricted shelf.

What's here to raise hackles? Well, the sexual content, of course. It's hardly the sort of sex you encounter in Valley of the Horses, but it is sex, and it takes place in a world defined by sex. Or, rather, defined by the renunciation of sex for purposes other than procreation. So it doesn't paint the most attractive picture of the Abstinence-Only movement, or of the loudmouth extremists who like to wave their Bibles around while they denounce other people's choices. (Not that Abstinence-Only deserves a flattering portrait.) A major character is a lesbian, and not in any way that might lead kids to think lesbianism is a sinful choice--she's a total badass, the one you want to be. (Not that lesbianism is a sinful choice.)There's also some incidental use of the f-word. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In Atwood's future, Texas is an independent republic again. You'd think that might have won some points with Texans. Not so: The San Antonio public schools considered banning The Handmaid's Tale on the grounds that it contained graphic sexual content and was offensive to Christians. One would-be censor, in what could be a verbatim line from the reeducation center's Aunt Lydia, claimed, "I have a responsibility to the country and our community to speak up for the values that will strengthen our society." (In an open letter, Atwood responded wryly, "It's encouraging to know the written word is still taken so seriously.") Texas isn't the only case--Handmaid is high on the ALA's list of most censored books--but it's one of the most recent.

Is it just the sex? There's far more graphic sexual content out there, and some of it is in classrooms too. I think the real problem is closer to what Atwood describes: women's liberation makes certain people very, very uncomfortable.

Fundamentally, this is a book about power--the forms it takes, how we wield it, who suffers under it. It explores the essentially benevolent motivations of the people who have created the new regime. If you care about government or civil rights, this is a great read; it's a glimpse inside what Paul Johnson calls a utopian dictatorship. And if you care about women's rights, you must read this, no question. (Atwood's status in the historically male-dominated genre of literary sci-fi has to count as another victory for feminism.)

That said, it's not really a book for kids. No one below high school is likely to grasp the real horror of the government's imposition into women's lives and bodies (though here's a blogger who read Handmaid at 12 and thereby gained her first real feminist awareness). It may take a serious relationship or two before you understand how awful it is for Offred to be torn from her husband and daughter or for the Commander's Wife to watch the Commander's forced procreation with Offred. It may take several years of earning your own living before you feel in your gut the utter betrayal of having the rules changed to take all that away from you. I first read Handmaid in high school, read it next as the Taliban was blowing up statues, and just read it again; different parts have hit home each time. As Clifton Fadiman points out, "When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before, you see more in you than there was before." But none of that is an excuse for censorship.

Real-World Correspondences: Of course, any story about the future is really a story about the present. In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood takes numerous social trends of the 1980s and extends them to their logical and chilling conclusions. But she also works within the known world so well that it's not hard to glimpse the borders of Gilead as you walk down your street.

The Reagan era was not a happy time for reproductive rights. Nor was it a particularly promising time for women, period. There were rumblings about the dropping U.S. birth rate (though in fact it remained at replacement level. As Susan Faludi documents in Backlash, many religious and political ideologues, unhappy about the recent gains of the women's movement, exhorted women to remember their sacred duty of motherhood. (The embittered Commander's Wife, a former televangelist, is a clear nod to figures such as Beverly LaHaye and Tammy Faye Bakker; she seems to have realized too late that achieving her goals would require her to stop working.) Women's newfound sexual freedom and abortion rights were particular sticking points. By the decade's end, "fetal rights" activism was responsible for several forced cesarians and at least one pregnant woman's being shackled to her hospital bed.

Of course, the fetal rights folks--who sometimes referred to women as "incubators"--knew the value of nomenclature. That preoccupation carries into Handmaid's Tale. Like much U.S. culture in the 1980s, the Republic of Gilead is a triumph of marketing. Extensive market research has gone into the definition of roles, the design of uniforms, the naming of events.

Atwood also explores the Reagan-era nuclear nightmare: part of the reason the birth rate is so low is that the rate of birth defects has skyrocketed. Toxic waste from industrial pollution and a series of nuclear accidents has contaminated nearly everyone. Other people have fallen prey to that other Reagan-era nightmare, AIDS, or a drug-resistant strain of syphilis. Atwood understands the decade's neuroses so thoroughly it's a wonder she doesn't also create some surprisingly lethal side effect of wearing shoulder pads.

If the women's uniforms--voluminous, shapeless, all-concealing, with mandatory hats and veils--remind you of chador, that's no accident. Atwood drew a great deal of inspiration from a 1978 trip to Afghanistan. Some details also, clearly, come from the Holocaust: the new regime is purged of blacks and Jews, and the handmaids all receive identifying tattoos. In fact, when people argued that the book should be censored because of the horrible inhumanity it depicts, Atwood pointed out that it doesn't show anything that hasn't actually happened.

Just think about that for a second.

Eerily Prescient Bits: The coup that leads to the creation of the Republic of Gilead is initially blamed on "Islamic fascists" so the new government has a scapegoat as well as an excuse for suspending the Constitution. And the new government creates some "National Homeland" something-or-others, which hits a bit too close for comfort.

Atwood also accurately foresaw the dominance of paying by electronic debit rather than cash; in Gilead, this allows the government to freeze all women's assets. I still occasionally get a what-if chill when I reach for my debit card.

What Else: I can't believe I just posted a link to Beverly LaHaye's site. From an anti-censorship blog, at that. I feel filthy.

And Perhaps You'd Like to Pair That With: Backlash, for a sobering look at the real-life trends behind the made-up world; The Kite Runner, for an example of life under the Taliban; Brave New World and 1984, for other classic fictional dystopias.

Carrie

First Published: 1974

Author: Stephen King

Censorship History: If you Google "Carrie censorship," most of the hits are for Sister Carrie. Which is ironic, given that Carrie was in the top 100 challenged books for 1990-2000, and Sister Carrie didn't even crack the list. The censors, evidently, have bigger, dirtier fish to fry these days.

What's more curious, to me, is that most of the links for this Carrie lead to the same piece of text:

Considered "trash" that is especially harmful for "younger girls."
Challenged by Clark High School library, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1975. Placed on special closed shelf in Union High School library, Vergennes, Vermont, 1978.

That's it? You do get the odd note about parents requesting a blanket ban on all Stephen King books (he has three or four in the top 100, quite a respectable showing), and one columnist describes his books as being on an age-restricted shelf at her school's library (which actually seems like a great strategy for getting younger kids to read). If you search for "Ban Stephen King" you get lots of hits about his public stance against banning video games. But there's very little about any actual censorship of Carrie. One must conclude that either the would-be censors are keeping their efforts very, very quiet--which might not be a bad strategy if you're up against a fiction behemoth like Stephen King--or that the reports of Carrie's censorship are greatly exaggerated.

One can, at least, find an article in which King discusses censorship: "Run, don't walk, to the first library or bookstore you can find and read what they are trying to keep out of your eyes because that is exactly what you need to know." Amen.

In any case, Carrie is the sort of thing every high school student should read; if they did, high school might be a kinder place. The book's real power comes not so much from King's gift for horror as from his utter empathy for his title character. No one who reads this should ever again be able to dismiss a misfit with an easy conscience. King is relentless in finding not just the overt cruelty of Chris, the Queen Bee, but also the more passive cruelty of the good girls who go along with the group--the ones who are, in essence, just following orders.

What Happens: At 16, Carrie White, the class misfit, starts her first period in the shower in front of her entire gym class. The other girls mock her cruelly. She has no idea what is happening. It emerges that her mother is a religious fanatic who believes menarche is God's punishment to girls who harbor sinful thoughts. Mrs. White also beats Carrie regularly and locks her in a closet. Carrie, however, is not quite defenseless. She is discovering a mysterious ability to move things with her mind, and she begins to train this ability to protect herself from her mother.

Sue Snell, one of the girls from the gym class, regrets her role in teasing Carrie, and persuades her boyfriend to take Carrie to the senior prom as a way of helping Carrie come out of her shell. For a few blissful hours Carrie transcends her misery. The other students accept her. She is beautiful.

Then--in what is one of the best-known episodes in Stephen King's vast canon--Chris, the gym class ringleader, douses Carrie in pig blood. Carrie's vengeance is swift and only half voluntary. She dies, but not before taking out several hundred others.

And How About That Death Scene: Plenty of writers attempt to take you inside a character's head at the moment of death. Few do it in a way you suspect you will remember at your own death: Tolstoy in War and Peace; Toni Morrison in Sula; A.S. Byatt in Still Life; a handful of others. I'm going to have to add Carrie White's death to that short list.

A Confession: I was something of a Sue Snell in high school, only without the boyfriend and the sex and the good looks. I was a very good student and by most standards a good kid; I didn't sneak out or drink or even try one of Kris Nielsen's cigarettes; I didn't trust my body enough to wear anything close to revealing (although there were some really regrettable tie-dyed leggings around 1990); I had a mind, but I was just beginning to discover that it was my own.

I was the butt of a few jokes. But I was also privy to a few jokes on students even lower in the pecking order. To my eternal shame, I did nothing to stop them; sometimes I went along with them. There are a few regrets I don't suppose you ever get over. That's one for me. Reading Carrie opened that old wound as if it had never healed. There's a twenty-some year gap between Carrie's prom and mine, but that whole kill-or-be-killed world is apparently a constant, and oh, boy, does King nail it. If he nails the reader in the process, well, that's the point, isn't it?

What Else: If you want to get a look of carefully restrained pity from your librarian, check out Carrie and Sister Carrie on the same day, as though you think they're related, along the lines of Gone with the Wind and The Wind Done Gone.

Carrie was King's breakthrough. He was inspired by a couple of girls who went to his high school, miserable outcasts of an instantly recognizable type. He describes the whole process quite movingly in On Writing (another one that should be required reading for high school students). Anyone who thinks of King as a sort of pulpy genre author is in for a fantastic surprise, because his style here is quite inventive, and not in the self-conscious, faintly desperate way you associate with first novels. This is flat-out good.

Trivia: Carrie was made into a notoriously bad musical, some say the worst flop of all time, in 1988. (Gee, I can't tell why it flopped.)

There's also a film version by Brian DePalma I hear is pretty good, and another film called The Rage: Carrie 2 that sounds pretty pointless and awful, what with Carrie dying in the first one.

FIRE CHIEF: Remember? Remember the horror?
SUE (trembling): Yes! Yes, I remember! Oh, the memory is so horrible!

Etc. There are times when the best compliment you can pay to a story is to let it end where it's supposed to end.