In an effort to study Nabokov's use of hidden meanings within Lolita, I read Eric Naiman's A Filthy Look at Shakespeare's "Lolita" where Naiman pointed out that upon the first reading of Lolita, one may miss the double-entendre in the following line.
"My life was handled by little Lo in an energetic, matter-of-fact manner as if it were an insensate gadget unconnected with me."
It turns out that the French word for the sex organ (vit) is a homonym of the word for life. And if you consider that Lolita was twelve when she handled Humbert's life, the word life could be considered a double double-entendre.
Rowe's Nabokov's Deceptive World has an entire chapter and an appendix devoted to Nabokov's use of sexual deception (i.e., sexual double entente). For example, Lolita wrote the following in a letter to her mother and Humbert from camp:
I [crossed out and re-written again] I lost my new sweater in the woods. [Nabokov's brackets.]
The reader learned later in the novel that "sweater" was a reference to 12-year-old Lolita's virginity. The initial reference was to Lolita's "virgin wool sweater", and the subsequent reference was to her virginity, which she lost to Charlie in the woods at camp.
But that's not all! Nabokov drew the reader's attention to the letter "I" by writing it once, crossing it out and writing it again, which is interesting when the reader considers that "I" and "eye" are references to the "female sexual symbol".
Gently I pressed my quivering sting along her rolling salty eyeball. "Good-goody," she said nictitating.
Nabokov used the same literary technique that was used by Shakespeare, which Eric Partridge spelled out in Shakespeare's Bawdy. Here's an example of Shakespeare's use of double-entendre in the poem "Venus and Adonis":
‘Fondling,’ she saith, ‘since I have hemm’d thee hereWithin the circuit of this ivory pale,I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.‘Within this limit is relief enough,Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:Then be my deer, since I am such a park;No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’
The bold (pun intended) words are defined below:
park - the female body regarded as a domain where a lover may freely roamdeer - figuratively used of man and woman in reference to sexual activities. Possibly influenced by the homophone, (one's) dear or darling.mountain - pleasant eminences: breasts, buttocks, and thighsdale - valley between breastsfountain - breastsbottom-grass - the hair growing in and about the crutch [i.e., pubic hair]plain - bellyhillock - buttocksbrakes - pubic hair
Why didn't we learn about Shakespeare's bawdy in high school? According to Partridge, Shakespeare's works were bowdlerized prior to the 1960s.
And if that isn't interesting enough, what about the fact that Adonis was born of an incestuous relationship between Myrrha, a nymphet, and Cinyras, her father?
