Walsh, Michael. Lolita and the Lover: Pederosis and the Child. 2023

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984) are the best-known literary texts about adult/adolescent sexuality in English and French, respectively. Based on a feminist analysis of power according to which sexual freedom cannot mean that just anyone can have sex with just anyone else, this chapter considers the two novels and the three films made from them: Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover (1995), and Adrian Lyne's Lolita (1997). Arguing that adult/adolescent relationships can be understood in Oedipal terms (the adult male as a psychological child who cannot cope with a partner who is an equal; the abused adolescent unconsciously motivated by the prospect of an Oedipal victory), this chapter also proposes that such relationships foreground inequalities of power so much that Oedipal issues cannot be easily distinguished from social ones. Both novels are narrated in the first person and both center on fatherless female children, but where Lolita speaks for the predator, The Lover speaks for the prey. Kubrick's Lolita is one of many of his films in which erring male protagonists are found in mansions or palaces in which they don’t belong, but is finally understood as a tissue of conflicting subjectivities. Despite its comparative frankness, Adrian Lyne's Lolita makes clear that censorship is an inevitable topic with this text. Duras’ love/hate relationship with Annaud's film of her novel is explored in the context of a casting decision to make the protagonist partly Asian, complicating the settler/colonial subject polarity of the book.