Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning With the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century by Jenny Minton Quigley

Author:Jenny Minton Quigley [Quigley, Jenny Minton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary theory
ISBN: 9781984898845
Google: MyfzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

Here Lolita is not only in full possession of her autonomy, but she’s now being painted as a bit of a harlot. Cyrus is choosy, but Lolita? She’s a gate the world left open. The lyric reads as slut-shaming and is thus comically distant from the novel, which wouldn’t last more than twenty pages if Lolita were so easy to ensnare. More importantly, the song makes it clear that love is reserved for good girls. Lolita is a sex object, which has the de facto effect of turning Humbert into someone with a broad range of attractions. He is being spoken to directly, as if being convinced of something. But Nabokov’s Lolita is not about a forbidden romance with a man who can be talked into submission. It’s about a pedophile who can only be aroused by underage girls. This is an un-fun fact absent not just from Cyrus’s music but from all pop music on the subject.

In Katy Perry’s “One of the Boys,” she studies Lolita “religiously,” after which she walks “right into school and caught you staring at me.” For Perry, Lolita is code, a password into the society of womanhood. The song also features her reading Seventeen and shaving her legs for the first time. It’s about achieving dominance over Perry’s male peers, who, if they are more experienced than she, it’s not because they have twenty-five years on her. She wishes to prove to her guy friend that she is not “one of the boys” and instead wants to be seen as a “pinup” or a “homecoming queen.” Dealer’s choice. Perry studies Lolita the way one puts on lipstick, so that she (or her musical persona) can become more appealing sexually. But she does not read Lady Chatterley’s Lover to achieve the same effect. Why? Maybe because it’s hard to cram “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” into a song lyric.

Or maybe it’s because, as Perry has explained in interviews, “I have this obsession with Lolita, and I think it’s because she’s both innocent and she’s a little bit of a sex kitten as well and she walks that line. And I think it’s boring if you’re too goody-two-shoes and you come out lookin’ like a slut if you’re a bad girl all the time, so you gotta walk that line.” Whether she is referring to the male expectation that a woman carry herself a certain way (the lady-in-the-streets/freak-in-the-sheets theorem) or her most desired version of herself is, in this instance, irrelevant. What’s relevant is that when she says “Lolita,” she is referring to grown women, to the line any adult woman of any adult age must walk. “Feeling v Lolita rn,” she once tweeted, along with a selfie in a low-cut black negligee, her hair up in two twists. For someone so enamored of the novel, it would make more sense for the accompanying photo to be of her pumping gas in the middle of nowhere.

In the past decade, the music world has hit a serious Lolita zenith with one white lady singer and one white lady singer only: Lana Del Rey.

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