Fear of Flying - Annotated copy.
UNIQUE ANNOTATED EDITION
“WOMEN WANTED THE RIGHT TO DEFINE OURSELVES. WE STILL DO!"
Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. New York...: Holt..., (1973).
A unique and definitive copy of Jong’s foundational work, prepared as a scrapbook comprised of pages
from two first editions affixed to larger leaves replete with manuscript notes by Jong. With additional
material - photographs, dust-jackets, copies of manuscript and typescript leaves, relevant clips, and more
- interleaved as well as present in a separate folder. Jong worked off and on for months on this project,
layering marginal notes and commentary in different inks throughout the book.
Highlights include a short essay on voice (see below), and her the definition of a novel; identities of the
dedicatees and mentions of familial and professional influences throughout; inspirations for the
characters, events, and settings of the novel; running commentary on the evolution of the book through its
many drafts, including sources of quotations and allusions, and notes on structure and themes; themes
such as marriage, Second Wave feminism, sexual language, sex symbols, family, female independence;
anti-Semitism and Jong’s "Jewishness"; and the "zipless fuck" (which she repeatedly describes as a
"fantasy" and on page 15 adds, "note my ignored confession?": "And I have never had one." In more than
one aside she comments on the title: "And yes, I was really afraid to fly. Book tours cured me later."
Early on this this copy Jong writes of the origin of the voice of this book, identifying a crucial difficulty
for female American novelists at the time:
I worked on the book that would become Fear of Flying throughout my twenties. It’s amazing to
me now that I first thought to tell the story in the voice of the character who became "the
madman" - the first husband who has a schizophrenic breakdown.
This draft of the novel I didn’t know would become Fear of Flying was a mad poet who goes off
to kill his doppelganger. When I showed it to the editor - Aaron Asher - who published my first 2
books of poetry at Holt, he said, -"Why are you writing in the voice of a male madman? Why
not write a novel in the voice of your poems? That’s a new voice - that’s fresh." I didn’t realize I
was writing in a male voice because all the novels we read as "important" were written in a male
voice. I had to discover the female voice through my poetry.
I realize now that I discovered so much through my poetry. It as fresh from the unconscious. It
got me to the voice of the novel.
Every novel has started for me with the search for voice"
Another issue is thrown into relief by the fact that numerous quotations throughout are predominantly
male-authored - Keats, Fellini, Browning - that she agrees with Updike’s assessment analogizing her
with Chaucer, Salinger, and Roth - and that the lengthy epigram to chapter three, in which female
orgasm is revealed as superfluous, "a sort of pleasure-prize like a prize that comes with a box of cereal,"
is by a woman: Madeline Gray, from The Normal Woman. Of this 1967 quotation Jong writes, "...this
quote...shows how much [Fear of Flying] was needed. I wanted to change ‘The Normal Woman.’"
That said, she does pay tribute to Sylvia Plath, whose "fierceness opened a certain fierceness in me! I
think she gave women poets the right to reveal ANGER!," reveals that Anne Sexton "later became a
friend and mentor," and that she still reads Edna O’Brien.
She reflects 40 years after publication,
"I wanted to evoke the spirit of the time - the mad housewife novels, 2nd Wave feminism, etc. The
novel is of its time. I was trying to evoke a young woman’s quest for freedom. I thought the
sexuality was only a small part of it- but it was stressed above everything by critics. Now the
book can be better seen for what it really is: the search for self, for independence, for adulthood. I
think people
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