JM: This interesting image of
"recognizing a female despite a male pseudonym" began to gain form in
"The Wood-Sprite": "His shabby little coart seemed to
be buttoned wrong - on the female side" (Knopf,p.3)
The woodsprite describes the narrator's "girl": "you lost your way once in a dark nook in my woods, you and
some little white dress..."
I had underlined other items in the past, for
example, matrons or mothers are mainly perceived in the role
of "housewives", unattractive, dedicated to "keep things cozy and clean" (Russian Spoken
Here,p.8).
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Abraham Adams: My friend recently
pointed out that the female narrator of "A Slice of Life" (the only female
narrator in all of VN's work) sounds distinctly masculine or at best a very
masculine imagining of what feminine thought might be like[...] It reminds
me of "The Admiralty Spire", a letter to a writer that the narrator
recognizes as female despite a male pseudonym: "every sentence of yours
buttons to the left".
[...] do these stories
both not seem to betray some contempt for the idea of women as writers? Nabokov
did insist on male translators, and Eric Naiman's article on sexual orientation
in Nabokov, which I have mentioned on this list before, poses a specifically
male homosexual relation between author and reader. I imagine there are more
interesting responses to this pattern of naive female narration than to leave it
at concluding VN was a misogynist, though that is perhaps true as
well.
[EDNOTE. Also note that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight praises
Claire Bishop for the "strong, almost masculine quality" of her imagination" (p.
83). --
SES]
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Retrieved
from VN Archives: Laurence Hochard- 05 de
Jun de 2008 [ Unfortunately I didn't locate all the other comments
connected to this theme. I remember A. Sklyarenko mentioned "A Slice of Life" in
that respect]
SES wrote[ on Natasha]: "It's unusual for VN to make a
female character the center of consciousness in a story, particularly when the
plot emphasizes her
desirability." It seems very true to me; however, I
can think of another story written from the woman's perspective ("with a
third person limited omniscient narrator") and it is the one that has just
been discussed here: Signs and Symbols[...]