Fear of Flying: More Than a Feminist Novel
The fears of Isadora: Her religion (Semi-Jewish), her love life (second husband, seventh analyst; Bennett), her gender (a woman in America! In the sixties!), her career (Writer: one book), sex (are women supposed to enjoy that?), her mother (Jude, an artist who danced naked in France), her sisters (all married, with at least two children apiece), her children (none), her name (Isadora White? Isadora Wing? Isadora White Stollerman Wing Goodlove?) and flying; Isadora has a fear of flying.
Some would say that Fear of Flying , by Erica Jong is merely a feminist novel. It is, but it's more than that. Fear of Flying is a novel about a woman in search of her name and the source of her fears; it is a novel about inner conflict. The main character of the novel is Isadora, a woman in her early thirties in the late sixties. What begins as a work related trip to Vienna with her analyst husband ends as a journey filled with personal revelations. At the conference Isadora develops an infatuation which fuels her need to discover "what is wrong" with her. Traveling throughout Europe with a man who is not her husband she discovers her true self through her complete loss of security. Therein lies the principal irony of Fear of Flying; the journey that the main character takes in order to gain the traits that she sees in her heroines only leads her to find that they were hidden within herself. Isadora is the charicature of irony itself.
The opening chapter sets the tone for the entire novel, which is written like a conversation with one's analyst: casual but intimate. Her odyssey, in fact, begins on a plane full of psychoanalysts. As she puts it: she'd been "treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh." (p. 1) This is a great example of Isadora's outwardly nonchalant views of her own problems. Her own view of her life and her inner monologue pull the reader into her literal and symbolic fear of flying and her lifelong struggle with them. From the beginning she shares with us thirteen years of analysis and counting, yet it is the 336 pages in which we watch her slowly untangle her own conflicts that show the readers the lesson which we were intended to learn.
Isadora is an extremely intelligent character.
The Things They Carried Women and their Role in The Things They Carried Within the book The Thing’s They Carried, the stories of the male soldiers and their dealings with the Vietnam War. However, he also delves into the stories of the women and how they affected the soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. While the men dealt with the horrors of war, the women were right at their side, just not in as much of a public view as the male soldiers. O’Brien uses women such as Martha, Linda and Kathleen in The Things They Carried to punctuate how vital remembrance and recompense was to him and other soldiers in Vietnam.
The protagonist of the story is Ellen. Ellen is thirty-two years old, with limp blond hair and a plain face and whose eyes oozed sympathy. She is also a fifth-grade teacher who has recently left her job after having experienced the embarrassment of a public fight with her partner Roy in front of her colleagues. From the beginning of the story she is frightened, anxious, with head down and shoulders slumped, indicating she has a lot of pain and suffering kept inside her. Doctors have described her as anemic and depressive and she knows that that life she has led so far has contributed for that diagnosis. The protagonist is a dynamic character because although she starts as a person who keeps all her emotions to herself, in the end, she explodes and releases her frustration on Mr. Lercher, the passenger who tried to kill everyone on the airplane. Her change in attitude can be observed when the narrator describes, “ All she knew was that she’d had enough, enough of Roy and this big, drunken testosterone-addled bully and the miserable, crimpled life that awaited her at her mother’s, and she came up out of her seat as if she’d been launched…”
The creature was created with the intention of goodness and purity but because of this, he wasn’t equipped to deal with the rejection of his creator. After Victor Frankenstein’s death, Robert Walton walks in to see the creature standing over his friend’s lifeless body.
Runner’ is ‘Fear always wins’. The reader knows this through the characters thoughts and actions toward Hassan's rape, The Taliban and Farzana's beating.
At the outset there is no suspicion or doubt in chapter 1 of the novel; it looks like a plain, one-dimensional love novel. However, as we read further, the element of mystery grows and is developed in Book 2 and Book 3.
...er introduction is the main reason why the foreshadowing is necessary for the reader. Therefore, this extract sets the tone for the rest of the book, a constant suspense on what will happen to Lennie and Curley's wife.
Starting the book is about the most painful thing (almost as painful as a head on collision with a semi on the highway.) Never the less once the characters become more apparent, and a type of plot is reveled, things get more interesting. It doesn’t take to long to get into the book, and learn something interesting about the characters. All of them have something in common which is a brilliant way to bring all of them together. Addie is the mother of the Bundren family and wife to Anse. She is on her deathbed, and the characters all revolve around this each reacting in a different way. Darl is the most level headed about the situation (at first), Jewel is more horse, Dewey is rather devastated, Anus is rather insensitive, and so on.
Over time that mindset shifts, she still does not fully love her appearance but comes to realize being raped was not her fault. For instance, after school when Melinda is in the bathroom hiding from “The Marthas”, she says, “I hide in the bathroom until I know Heather’s bus has left. The salt in my tears feels good when it stings my lips. I wash my face in the sink until there is nothing left of it, no eyes, no nose, no mouth. A slick nothing” (45). Melinda feels like she is nothing, she wishes she would just disappear. This displays how Melinda is unable to accept her appearance while looking in a mirror. Secondly, while in Mr. Freeman’s art room, Melinda comes to conclusion, “IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding. Andy Evans raped me in August when I was drunk and too young to know what was happening. It wasn't my fault. He hurt me” (198). Even though this quote does not directly relate to mirrors, it shows Melinda’s growth. She went from blaming everything on herself, to putting the blame on the person who deserves it, Andy Evans. This displays the start of Melinda’s journey to healing. Finally, when Andy tried to rape Melinda again in her closet, she states, “I hit the wood against the poster, and the mirror under it, again”...“I reach in and wrap my fingers around a triangle of glass. I hold it to Andy Evans’s neck. He
Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind, a classic that gives insight into the Confederate lifestyle before and after the Civil War, is known as one of the greatest American novels ever written. The story centers around a former Southern belle named Scarlett O’Hara who grows up in the heart of Georgia on her plantation named Tara. Scarlett doesn’t care about anything or anyone except for her lover, Ashley Wilkes, and finds herself heartbroken when he marries his plain Jane cousin, Melanie Hamilton. As the Yankees get closer and closer to her beloved home, destroying everything she’s ever known and forcing her to flee to Atlanta, Scarlett finds herself forced to fight for what she loves. Though
In chapter 15 from Thomas C. Fosters’ How to Read Literature Like A Professor, flight is discussed to represent multiple forms of freedom and escape, or possible failure and downfall. Throughout J. D. Salingers’ novel, The Catcher and the Rye, Holden often finds himself wondering where the ducks in the Central Park pond have flown off to due to the water freezing over. On the other hand, the ducks are symbolic of Holden are his interest in the ducks an example of Foster’s ideas that flight represents a desire to be free.
In Song of Solomon, a novel by Toni Morrison, flight is used as a literal and metaphorical symbol of escape. Each individual character that chooses to fly in the novel is “flying” away from a hardship or a seemingly impossible situation. However, by choosing to escape, one is also deliberately choosing to abandon family and community members. The first reference to this idea is found in the novel’s epigraph: “The fathers may soar/ And the children may know their names,” which introduces the idea that while flight can be an escape, it can also be harmful to those left behind. However, while the male characters who achieve flight do so by abandoning their female partners and family, the female characters master flight without abandoning those they love. Throughout the novel, human flight is accepted as a natural occurrence, while those who doubt human flight, such as Milkman, are viewed as abnormal and are isolated from the community. It is only when Milkman begins to believe in flight as a natural occurrence that he is welcomed back into the community and sheds his feelings of isolation.
The creature from Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein" displays many different human qualities. Some of these qualities include: the creature's ability to learn, his capability to feel pain, his desire to be accepted, and his need for affection and sympathy. The need for affection and sympathy is something which the creature is unable to attain. This unrequited desire to be accepted causes the creature to be the victim of the novel. The creature is never given affection by human society because of his physical deformities, Dr. Frankenstein's denial to create him a mate, and the creature's violent behaviour.
Isadora Duncan who was born in the late 1870’s in San Francisco, was raised alongside three siblings by her mother alone. This may possibly be what led her to become in her own time what we today would considered to be a feminist. She fought against the many restrictions placed on women in her personal life as well as in her form of dance. Because she was such a feminist, Isadora Duncan was strongly opposed to marriage. For this reason both of her children were born out of wedlock, each with a different father. Duncan unfortunately lived a life filled with tragedy. Both of her children died alongside their nanny when a car that thy three were seated in, rolled into a river. Grief-stricken by the death of her children, Isadora’s dancing career was temporarily put on hold until she finally opened up a dance school. She later met a Russian man whom she fell in love with and married in order to be able to bring him to the United States. When she arrived in the United States with her new husband, she was unwelcome because of the fear that the Americans had for the Soviet Union at the time. Angrily, she left the United States vowing to never return again. Subsequently, her husband, who was not well mentally, loft her and eventually he committed suicide. Isadora Duncan’s life came to an end in a fittingly tragic manner when her scarf became entangled in the wheels of a car in which she was riding pulling her out the window of the car and strangling her as she was dragged down the street to her death.
	Isadora started school at the age of five. In the late nineteenth century, students were expected to sit still during school, memorizing and reciting their lessons. To Isadora this was "irritating and meaningless." She hated school. She said later in her autobiography that her real education came on the nights when Isadora and her siblings would dance to her mother's music and learn about what they were interested in -- literature and music.
The snake has long been used as a symbol of sly subtlety. A serpent’s presence has been characterized by cunning cynicism dating as far back as biblical times, when the snake persuaded Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of Eden’s garden. Even the phrase “snake in the grass” expresses latency. Shakespeare uses this treacherous reptile in Macbeth to convey the same evil. In his poetic prose, Shakespeare may not speak of a character’s malevolence directly; rather, he alludes to it through serpentine imagery. Macbeth contains four separate images of this type. What is their purpose, and what do they signify? A deep undercurrent of meaning flows beneath each image.