Erica Jong | Biography

Erica Jong, American poet and novelist, was born in 1942 in New York City where she grew up on the Upper West Side. Like the protagonist of her novels, Isadora Wing, she attended the High School of Music and Art, Barnard College, and the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and married and divorced a psychiatrist husband of Chinese descent. She taught English at the City College of New York before traveling in Germany, and lived in Heidelberg where she taught at the University of Maryland's Overseas Division. Her first book of poems, Fruits & Vegetables, was published in 1971, and two years later she won the Alice Faye di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America as well as a writing fellowship from the Creative Artists Program Service for her second book of poetry, Half-Lives. Poems in this collection were also awarded the Bess Hokin Prize given by Poetry magazine. In the spring of 1973, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in the fall of that year her controversial first novel, Fear of Flying, was published. Her third poetry collection, Loveroot, was published in 1975, and her most recent work, How to Save Your Own Life, appeared in 1977.

Jong's most successful subject is the predicament of the female poet in America, and her most persistent method is the redefinition of female stereotypes through the inversion of time-honored myths of human sexuality. Her blunt descriptions of sexual encounters, often phrased in the most blatantly prurient language, have alternately drawn praise and criticism from feminists and moralists. Jong's attitude toward human sexuality is, however, less clear-cut than that of many of her critics. Her most erotic scenes are parodies of contemporary pornography, her liberated woman, openly thwarted and unfulfilled.

Jong's first novel, Fear of Flying, revolves around themes of feminism and guilt, creativity and sex. In it Isadora Zelda White Stoller Wing, twice-married Barnard graduate in search of an identity, leaves her husband at a Vienna psychiatrists' convention to seek the perfect sexual encounter. This ideal of sexuality in which zippers fall away "like rose petals" and underwear blows off in one breath "like dandelion fluff," an experience free of the guilt and remorse created by ties of affection and intimacy is, as Isadora soon finds, a delightful fraud. Leaving her husband, she takes up with the "beautiful," but half-impotent, Adrian Goodlove, who hypocritically exhorts Isadora to cast off her marital ties while secretly maintaining his own. After traveling with this new lover through various Continental roadside encampments for two weeks, Isadora finds his promised "liberation" to be simply a new style of confinement.

No "shy, shrinking schizoid," Isadora Wing is a streamlined, modernized version of that classically brittle literary recluse, the female poet. As poet, Isadora not only directly encounters those themes of childbirth, sexual drive, and biological need carefully sidestepped by more traditional women poets, but, as woman, she delights in all of the taboos of womanhood, masturbating, and copulating with an abandon that has alarmed rigorous moralists. Jong describes the traditional "curse" of menstruation in terms of purgation and cycles of rebirth, attacks the tendency of women to seek definition in terms of male-female relationships, conceives of penis envy in terms of misunderstood womb envy, depicts her female heroine as naturally polygamous, and pictures at least one "helpless, hopeless male" coyly staving off his lover's lust-filled advances with a feigned headache. Yet, the author is clearly aware that the freedom her heroine seeks is not to be found in the simple exchange of male and female roles. For all her sexual calisthenics, Isadora's long-sought freedom is a sham. Unveiling her passions, she is dominated by them, and torn between her erotic sensuality and her distaste for traditional female roles, she is doomed to the unfulfilled love affairs and self-defined voids that she most fears. Within the gently mocking humor of the novel, Isadora's quest for self is at once heroic and pathetic, for in seeking to redefine classical male-oriented concepts of women, she becomes more deeply identified with them. She becomes, in Jonathan Rabon's terms, "a monster ... botheringly close to the insatiably willing dream-girl of male fantasies and male fiction."

Her second novel, How to Save Your Own Life, is a sequel to Fear of Flying, taking up Isadora's narrative three years later as she leaves her husband. The novel describes Isadora's disillusionment with her marriage, her travels in Hollywood, a series of random heterosexual, lesbian, and group liaisons, and concludes with her discovery of love for a younger man. "I wanted to establish," Jong noted in a Publishers Weekly interview, "that such a woman could move on into a good relationship with men, that it was not impossible for her." The unfulfillment and cynicism of Fear of Flying, ironically, culminates in this second novel in the words of a slender Viennese doctor: "Love is everything it's cracked up to be." Isadora spends most of How to Save Your Own Life trying to establish those very relationships with other human beings which she had attempted to avoid in Fear of Flying. After a series of obstacles are overcome, she heads for Kennedy Airport, ready to fly to the West Coast and meet the man she has chosen to love. She waves goodbye to the giant balloons of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, straining to pull free on helium wings. Their freedom, like her own, is ultimately an illusion. However, it may appear "to credulous little children," she comments, "the balloons don't really fly at all. In an hour or two, they will be tethered to tiny people in clown suits, and will be dragged along the avenues of New York like captured beasts of the wild, like Gullivers through a Lilliput of skyscrapers." The metaphor is a powerful one, for Isadora in attempting to soar free of human relationships only anchors herself more securely to the ground, tethered to the illusions and people who possess her. It is only through the commitment of love that she can soar free.

Many of the themes and characters of Jong's novels are foreshadowed in her poetry. Her first book, Fruits & Vegetables, published in 1971, is a collection of frankly sensual poems about love, feminist issues, and the workings of a woman's mind, dominated by seriocomic visions of the coupling of fruit and flesh. Poems in this series, such as "With Silk," "The Man Under the Bed," "The Heidelberg Landlady," and "Flying You Home," are early silhouettes of the motifs and characters in the novels. Her second book of poems, Half-Lives, is dominated by images of hunger, which are clearly muted in her third poetry collection, Loveroot. The defensive poetic stance adopted by Isadora Wing throughout the novels, her insistence that her sexual experiments are merely an author's search for raw data, is most clearly exposed in the poem "From the Country of Regrets." Hovering over the ocean in a doomed airplane, the poet seeks to escape personal crisis by creating a fictional objectivity. "I am the one," she counters, "with the open notebook, the one who lost her pornographic postcards, the one with thousands of mosquito bites behind each knee. Nothing bad can happen to me. I am only collecting material. I am making notes: on hell, on heaven."