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ABSTRACT
Since Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 publication of Lolita, numerous feminist scholars have argued for rereading the novel from the girl's point of view to understand Lolita not as a sexual agent, but as an incest victim. In this article, I examine how revisionary texts like Roger Fishbite (1999), Lo's Diary (1999), and Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) give voice to the girl in the text, disrupting Nabokov's "aesthetic bliss" and emphasizing aspects of Lolita's victimization. Ultimately, I discuss how a contemporary analytical shift from valuing the aesthetics to a consideration of the ethics of the novel has led to restricted critical readings of the narrative, which, nevertheless, remain open through the acknowledgement of the girl's sexual desire and agency within these female authors' revisionary texts.
KEYWORDS
agency, ethics, incest, revisionary texts, seduction, sexual consent
Dating back several centuries (recall Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740), the trope of the sexual encounter between the young girl and her benevolent and/or malevolent father figure has epitomized a tangle of consent, agency, and coercion for the girl. As the quintessential twentieth-century text in this genre, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) has inspired abundant scholarly analyses, popular cultural critiques, and numerous novels, films, and other creative works. Lolita has also continued to evoke debate on how to read the text-both aesthetically and ethically. Although Lolita has been read as a "love story" (Patnoe 1995: 83), many feminist scholars have urged readers to reconsider the text from the perspective of Lolita, as a child incest victim. In this article, I examine several revisionary texts that present Lolita's voice as a first person narrator, such as Kim Morrissey's Poems for Men Who Dream ofLolita (1992); Pia Peras Lo's Diary (published in Italian in 1995 and translated into English in 1999); and Emily Prager's Roger Fishbite (1999). I argue that these texts emphasize an ethical reading of Lolita by drawing attention to the girl's victimization while, nonetheless, retaining notable ambiguities that acknowledge the girl's sexual desire and agency.
Aesthetics or Ethics?
In his 1959 essay, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," Nabokov argues that the sole purpose of Lolita is "aesthetic bliss," which he defines as "a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity,...