JM: [I wonder if ...may be related
to Lucette's "willow-green shorts" (BB, 198.11-12, motif red-green;
willow-green). I was unable to check "willow-green" on line...]
Here it is: 64.27-30: green nightgown . . . the nuance of willows: An echo
of “Mémoire,” ll. 11-12 (see above, 64.15-65.02n.). Cf. 198.10-12: “Lucette . .
. . in willow-green shorts”; 417.25, “Lucette, still in her willow green
nightie.” Especially in view of Marina’s “when I was playing Ophelia, the fact
that I had once collected flowers--” on the previous page (and “Elsie de Nord”
as an allusion to Elsinore at the beginning of the chapter), the willow also
evokes Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death, in the speech beginning “There
is a willow grows aslant the brook . . . ” (Hamlet 4.7.167), with its
description of Ophelia’s clothes that “spread wide, And mermaid-like awhile they
bore her up” (4.7.175-76). The willow was a conventional symbol of a rejected
lover (cf. John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan
[London: Ernest Benn, 1966], 4.2.34 and n.). MOTIF: willow
green.
Discussing Nabokov's criticism of freudian symbolism,
Dave Haan (off list) brought up this quote: "What I
object to is Mr. Rowe’s manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce
sexual 'symbols' into them. The notion of symbol itself has always been
abhorrent to me, and I never tire of retelling how I once failed a student—the
dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher—for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves
as 'green' because Fanny is hopeful, and 'green' is the color of
hope." NYRB '71.
I wonder, now, if Nabokov would have deliberately
associated Lucette to willow-green because the willow is
a "conventional symbol of a rejected lover." If this connection was
established on purpose then... wouldn't our conjurer have
kept something else up his sleeves?
Nabokov's example, by quoting a student's
explanation about Jane Austen's "green leaves" mus already be a
malicious distortion on his part (only during Winter would Austen's
description of green leaves demand any sort of interpretation,
true?)