Lolita in the #MeToo era. New interpretations of Nabokov’s novel by contemporary female authors

Abstract

The article is devoted to ‘Nabokov’s imprint’ on several contemporary novels (K. E. Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, and V. Springora’s Consent: A Memoir of Stolen Adolescence) that revisit the story of Lolita and relate it on behalf of the underage girl sexually abused by her teacher or tutor. The author explores the poetics of the novels and their emergence from feminist discourse and particularly the campaign against sexual harassment and rape culture that started in 2017 using the hashtag #MeToo. Detailed in P. Boyarkina’s study is the image of an unreliable narrator, brilliantly exploited by Nabokov, who teases his reader by letting them decide on the trustworthiness of the narrator’s story and where the author’s view ends and the narrator’s version begins. Modern novels tend to complicate things even further: the unreliable narrator successfully manipulates both the reader and the female protagonist who tells the story of love and abuse.