Sorry to write again, but I found the quote. Lolita, American Library edition, page 145: "Ante-bellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing." Here's a still I've attached. Couldn't seem to paste it in for some reason. This is obviously what N had in mind, though it's not quite right. Humbert seems to be blurring scenes together.

From: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, October 9, 2009 4:27:33 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Lolita and Gone with the Wind?

Jansy, please explain your comment about Gone with the Wind: what makes you think he specifically was parodying that book in "Lolita" ?

Your comment: "Nabokov's playing with one of the structuring principles of so many melodramatic works: the principal of oppositional characters: good girl/ bad girl; Kitty and Anna Karenina; Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedly from Vanity Fair; Scarlett O'hara and Melanie Wilkes in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With Wind, the movie of which Nabokov parodied in Lolita. "

Thanks, Fran Assa

[EDNOTE. Although I don't have a copy of LOLITA handy--I am at a bicentennial Poe conference, which is why the N-L post was delayed yesterday--surely Jansy is referring to the description of Southern plantations in Technicolor, "with the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing" (as I remember it) that appears in Humbert's account of the American sights that he and Dolores see. -- SES.]

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