![]() ![]() Cleaver, in looking at this particular Tumblr phenomenon, says that “These girls are wasting their youth fetishising it, treating it as a theme to be curated, collected and carefully documented.” She highlights how “all Lolita blogs are sad.” But instead of looking at why that is, why is this deep affinity drawn again and again and so deliberately to a wronged girl, Cleaver writes this off as teenage angst, “youth wasted on the young.” That argument feels simplistic to me, and borderline ageist. On the surface, this ends up seeming like self-fetishization. Recently, alongside “Lolita” fashions using the iconography of childhood, and the music of Lana del Rey, which makes frequent reference to the novel and relationships with older men, a fascinating online “culture” has developed, centred mostly on Tumblr, and fueled by young women who seem to relate deeply to the novel and the film adaptations. But as any anthropologist could tell you, the ways in which cultural figures are produced and the ways in which they are received and processed in lived reality are very different, and often far more complex than can be described. ![]() In many cases, that could be entirely true. So it’s understandable that when a number of Tumblr bloggers – most of them girls younger than 16 – start calling themselves “nymphets” and reblog stills from the films, quotes from the novel, and share posts on how to “dress like a nymphet,” any onlooker would be alarmed, convinced that these young girls are self-fetishizing, succumbing to a patriarchal popular culture that has taken the figure of a kidnapped and abused little girl and turned her into a tiny seductress. The beauty of the novel, Nabokov’s mastery of language, its dark playfulness, is seductive, and there are too many who allow aesthetics to trump disdain for the novel’s narrator, the cruel, clever, sophisticated Humbert Humbert. In most literary criticism of the novel, and in the preface of the novel itself, attention is repeatedly drawn to its aesthetics, its rarefied elegance, and how this same elegance is part of its horror – distracting a reader from the banal cruelty and evil of the narrator’s kidnapping and rape of a 12-year-old girl. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is often spoken about as a novel that has been misinterpreted – not only by a patriarchal popular culture but often by the same young, vulnerable girls that would be prey to a man like Humbert Humbert. Image source: Creative Commons licensed (BY-NC-ND) Flickr photo by Maurina Rara () ![]()
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