Kellie Dawson, Ph.D.

Cornell University

My fascination with the connection between literature and mainstream America is the basis for this dissertation which intends to explore the roots of the culturally-specific assumptions that a reader may bring to so notorious a text as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Firmly grounded in my interest in observing the vagaries of the American imagination, this work examines the ways Lolita challenges those assumptions and how it may even have had the effect of transforming them. In so doing I reveal the extent to which cultural theory and literary products interact with and upon each other to produce a society’s collective ideals.

Although Vladimir Nabokov denies that he is a writer of didactic fiction, Lolita does carry a valuable lesson. Unfortunately, even though it is the most popular and widely read of his novels, it is also the most resisted. Its characters, situations and themes are so sensational that they tend to distract from the deeper inquiry that is at the core of this inflammatory text. Even as scholars acknowledge it as a literary masterpiece it has never lost its reputation as a "dirty" book – and this reputation still receives more popular attention than do the issues it raises about the tenuous nature of human civility. The overblown consideration given to pedophilic narratives in our culture creates an imbalance of reader engagement that may interfere with attention to the larger questions Nabokov tracks throughout his oeuvre. Lolita, along with being an insightful report of 1950s American culture and a masterful demonstration of the flexibility of the English langu! ! age, is an extraordinary examination of both the heights and the depths of human sensibility. In this novel, Nabokov demonstrates the suffering of the most "monstrous" of men and convinces his readers to sympathize with him even as they continue to abhor his crimes.

Through his extended reading of early sexologists and his research into American adolescence, Nabokov was well aware of the image of "the pedophile" and "the teen" his readers would bring to his novel. In Lolita he systematically demolishes these expectations. His "pedophile" is not a drooling pervert who lures little girls into the bushes – and since his "teen" is no blushing innocent the reader must re-evaluate what she thought she knew about adult sexual deviance and child sexuality. Complications such as these, of suppositions the reader had assumed she could take for granted, influence her to re-examine her own humanity, her own complicity in the ideologies that usually cause her to pre-judge and condemn those who are most in need of sympathy. Through demolition of the stereotypes of "pervert" and "victim," Nabokov teaches the reader to reject categories such as "pedophile" and "adolescent" in favor of attention to the human beings we force into these roles.