![]() Lolita became America’s sweetheart.Īnd yet, there is also a sense in which the citizens of Lolita, Texas, have been proved right. In the sixty years since she first appeared, Lolita transcended her original textual instance: She became an archetype, an icon of youthful desirability. (Gatsby, by contrast, had to settle for a mere adjective: “Gatsbyesque.”) At a certain echelon of pop music megastardom (the domain of Britney, Miley, Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey) they are all Lolitas now, trafficking in the iconography of lollipops and stuffed animals and schoolgirl outfits. Her very name entered the language as a common noun: “a precociously seductive girl,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. With the possible exception of Gatsby, no twentieth-century American literary character penetrated the public consciousness quite like Lolita. ![]() ![]() In the ensuing decades, Nabokov’s novel spawned two films, musical adaptations, ballets, stage adaptations (including one legendarily disastrous Edward Albee–directed production starring Donald Sutherland as Humbert Humbert), a Russian-language opera, spin-off novels, bizarre fashion subcultures, and memorabilia that runs the gamut from kitschy to creepy: from heart-shaped sunglasses to anatomically precise blow-up dolls. In fairness to the good people of Lolita, nobody in 1959 could have predicted what the future had in store for Lolita. ![]()
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