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So, I've been back from college since Sunday, but I got another wisdom tooth out on Monday, so I was realy out of it for awhile. The pain isn't too bad anymore, but I had an allergic reaction to the painkillers they gave me this time. Frankly, I'm a little irritated, because the stuff they gave me the first time was so much better. I can't figure
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As to Lolita - Erica, that book is sick. If people could read it impartially, that'd be one thing. When we read it at OR, there were people in my class who were saying that we were supposed to read this book in order to consider another perspective on things. What's more, the other students couldn't see through the demented fantasies of this man. They really believed that Delores was seducing him! Sure, they thought she didn't know what she was getting into, but they actually thought she was seducing him! (when that was obviously a figment of his imagination). Graeham at one point made the comment that her mother, as a social worker who works with 70-year-old women who are still haunted by these kinds of experiences from their childhoods and teenage years, is horrified and disgusted for such a book to exist. I went through nothing compared to what that girl Delores does, and yet I still have nightmares at least once each week because of my experiences. Iwent across the country, to an environment entirely unlike the places of my childhood and youth and lived in a bubble of innocence for 8 months, but I was still overcome at times by deep depressions and by nearly uncontrollable desires to tear my own body apart in some demented effort to rid my mind of images and memories that were haunting me. I see no reason to consider this an "important piece of literature," and I'm disgusted by Vanity Fair calling it "the only convincing love story of our century." I'd like to slap whatever critic wrote that.
Sorry if this response comes across as angry or rude; I don't mean it that way. I mean no offense, and I know you didn't mean any offense either. I just feel very strongly about this.
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However, I call it an important piece of literature because, when read properly, it opens peoples' eyes to the horrors of such abuse. They may have seen it before, but never understood the magnitude of its atrocity. Its two main problems are a) it's just sick and b) it has been so badly taught in schools. People treat it like a love story or like a different point of view, when in actuality Nabokov was trying to shake us into understading just how horrific raping/abusing a child is. I say it's valuable not because of its content, but because of its message. Its message is that rape is wrong. Child abuse is wrong. It is a sick, morbid, twisted piece of literature that is necessary because so many people refuse to contemplate the true nature of child abuse. They know it's wrong, but refuse to elaborate their thoughts beyond that. If one reads Lolita the way it was meant to be read, one is virtually forced to consider exactly what it means to hurt a child the way Humbert Humbert hurts Dolores.
Did you ever read "Reading Lolita in Tehran?" Excellent book.
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So, maybe, instead of burning copies of Lolita, my mission should be to change the way schools teach the book? But, is that really possible? I mean, any school liberal enough to not ban a book with explicit sex scenes between a grown man and a child is probably going to teach it exactly the same way Oyster River does.
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