| "The Lolita Phenomenon: The Child (femme) fatale at the Fin de siecle" examines provocative images of nymphets and baby coquettes in literary and visual culture, from the turn of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, in Europe and North America. Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel, Lolita, provides the basis for examining the Lolita icon in contemporary popular culture, and connecting the image of the seductive, dangerous girl to the femme fatale figure. Material from literature, painting, photography and film are brought together in order to situate the Lolita Phenomenon in relation to past configurations of chaotic femininity. The dissertation charts a course that explores how the nymphet functions as a carnivalesque body emblazoned with cultural detritus. Rather than argue that the Lolita Phenomenon requires an aggressive feminist dismantling, this dissertation proposes that there is a transgressive pleasure in the image of the disobedient, destructive girl.; Chapter One introduces the modern Lolita Phenomenon and situates this phenomenon in relation to larger cultural values and fin-de-siecle moral ambiguities. The chapter also introduces the theoretical and methodological basis for subsequent analyses. The four chapters that follow are organised around the four main media; namely, literature, painting, photography and narrative film. Chapter Two examines how the complex intertextuality of Nabokov's novel produces numerous territorial tensions and destabilised spaces. Lolita emerges as an ambiguous, blasphemous character who can be readily adapted to other areas of cultural production. Chapter Three examines the Lolita Phenomenon's visual precursors in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century images of child (femmes) fatales in paintings by Philip Wilson Steer, Die Brucke, and Balthus. The fourth chapter is devoted to the photography of Lewis Carroll, David Hamilton, and Sally Mann, as well as photographs of baby-vamps in fashion advertising. Chapter Five details the nymphet syndrome in Hollywood cinema, and situates both Stanley Kubrick's and Adrian Lyne's film adaptations within larger social discourses. The dissertation concludes, in Chapter Six, by positing that images of nymphets work within paradigms of apocalypse, and that the management of young female bodies is a powerful mechanism for culture to gauge and control moral and social hygiene. |
