Lolita: Installing and Subverting the Romantic Myth

Abstract

This thesis examines Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita’s dialectical use of the Romantic myth. I focus on its connection with Edgar Allen Poe’s works. The narrator Humbert borrows Poe’s Annabel Lee as the prototype of a sublime figure and endows mythic and sublime nature to his portrayal of Lolita. As a narrative device, Lolita follows Poe’s myth-making to establish the Romantic myth and engage readers. Parody, in Lolita, is utilized in a dialectical way, and works as a device to demystify the Romantic myth that has been installed, without really canceling it. Through works of installing and subverting the Romantic myth, Lolita assures the functioning of the Romantic myth and introduces a degraded version of the Romantic myth in contemporary culture. I also analyze the similar way of using the Romantic myth in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. Madeleine and Judy resemble the romantic image Portrait of Carlotta and are posited in the sublime position. Vertigo, like Lolita, sets the heroine Madeleine as the Romantic myth, and then subverts it by destroying the hero Scottie’s fantasy.