Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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Posing the question What Do Women Want? is not a timid move, and only an author of equal boldness would make it. Erica Jong is just such an author. Jong's breakthrough novel, Fear of Flying, sparked a sexual revolution in 1970 by introducing female erotica to mainstream audiences. The publication of that book rocketed Jong to literary fame and made her an icon of women's sexual liberation.

Jong's latest book was not easy to find in the bookstore. What Do Women Want winds up in either non-fiction or women's studies—but the book's content still lies outside convenient categories. In fact, it might best be classified as a memoir. The title poses a general question about women plural, but this book is actually about woman, singular—specifically, about Erica Jong. There is nothing formal or investigative about the work, and it would be best classified as memoir. Jong presents a wide range of musings on her life as a woman and as a writer. These constitute an interesting collection of essays, but hardly epitomizes the female experience.

Although Jong writes that "[she] regard[s] [her]self as a fairly typical member of the female sex," she is anything but typical. She may share the same biological constitution as other women, but most do not not grow up in "a rambling...West Side palace" in a wealthy artistic family. Still fewer become successful artists. Jong's claim to speak for all women seems particularly ridiculous when she describes vacationing in the French Alps, escaping to Venice to write, marrying four times, or jetting to San Francisco on a whim for a face lift. Everything Jong expresses is legitimate as an aspect of her own, unique female experience, but her insistence that readers will be able to identify with her is inaccurate. She refuses to address the socio-economic gap that separates her from the majority of American women, and she writes, "I am just like my readers." If she is, she has a rather narrow readership. Her writings reveal a life that one might deem extraordinary, but she clearly expresses her desire to be seen as a woman like any other. This underlying conflict between her privileged lifestyle and her need to identify with other women constitutes one of the most interesting, if subtextual, feminist inquiries of the book.

Reading What Do Women Want? is like reading Jong's journal. She writes in an emboldened first person that imparts an unflinching subjectivity to her style, and sometimes succeeds in approaching the universal through the personal. The moments in the book where she crystallizes something about the female experience are precisely the moments where she speaks most specifically about her own life.

In a section entitled, "My Mother, My Daughter, and Me," Jong explores the connection between art, motherhood, self-reflection, and growth. Beginning with the idea that "the process of art is also the process of metamorphosis," Jong fluidly moves to the mother-daughter dialectic when she writes, "I have many mothers more than one. And each of those mothers parallels a particular phase in my life. Each represents a change in me more than it represents a change in my mother. As I grow more confident of my identity, I fault my mother less and less. As I grow older, my mother grows mellower along with me." Jong came to this realization through many years of writing about her own mother and reading her own daughter's representation of her in a manuscript. This personal insight broadens into a reflection on the relationship between a daughter's perception of herself and her perception of her mother. This essay makes implicit reference to Simone de Beauvoir's idea that that every woman is torn between being at once mother and daughter. Jong refers to Beauvoir's problematique as the "mother-daughter dialectic," but goes no further in pursuing the connection to her female literary predecessor.

Even though she does not enter into feminist scholarship, Jong's perspective as a successful, independent, female writer is an important one. Seventy-five years after Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own, in an age when more women have the independent income and private space that Woolf claimed they needed to create, many face new difficulties surrounding their independence and their success. Jong's own struggle with the significance of her success is part of a set of updated feminist issues. As Woolf's objectives become obsolete for more and more women, we must ask, "what next?" What happens when the room for creativity is opened in a woman's life? Is she obligated to address women plural, or is she entitled to explore woman, singular?

While Jong's book sparks many such questions, it fails to address any of them directly. The lack of feminist inquiry disappoints; the title sets up expectations that the content does not meet. The purpose of the book is not to inquire into current feminist issues as such, but to share a series of one woman's reflections on the life she has lived as a writer. In the context of Woolf's thought, What Do Women Want? is a sketchbook of Jong's mental space, a recording of the workings of her mind from within her own room. While the confinement to this space can get a bit claustrophobic, the fact that Jong claims the right to write about herself and any topic of her choosing represents one sort of literary liberation in and of itself.