Is it possible to articulate the myriad of complexities that constitute female heterosexual desire? What do women want? Maybe no one knows, but we can at least examine the relationship between desire and articulation, between wanting and saying what you want. In Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Isadora struggles to identify and attain the yearnings of her id. Her relationship with language and communication complicate her problems: thoughts, writing, and dialogue expressed through language stifle the purely physical nature of her sexual fantasies. At the same time, however, words help Isadora sift through her emotions and articulate her needs. Through the feminist theories of women such as Héléne Cixous, I will show how the formal, stylistic, and intentional aspects of language determine the extent to which language helps and hinders Isadora’s female erotic fantasy. Through the linguistic experience that Isadora undergoes, we find that words only help her when she writes with her body, speaks with free-flowing thought, and understands that her desires cannot be definitively defined.
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