Friday, March 20, 2015

The Use of Double Entendre in LOLITA and Shakespeare



I was reading the journal article A Filthy Look at Shakespeare's "Lolita" by Eric Naiman in an effort to study Nabokov's use of hidden meanings within Lolita. For example, upon the first reading one may miss the double-entendre in the following line from Lolita .


"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.(p. 76) [Nabokov's brackets.]

The reader gains the knowledge on page 98 that "sweater" is a reference to 12-year-old Lolita's virginity. The initial reference is to Lolita's "virgin wool sweater" and the subsequent reference is to Lo's virginity which she lost to Charlie in the woods at camp. 

But that's not all! Nabokov draws the reader's attention to the letter "I" by writing it once, crossing it out and writing it again. It turns out 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 nictating


Nabokov used the same literary technique that was used by Shakespeare which is spelled out in Eric Partridge's book 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 here  
Within 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 roam
deer - 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 thighs
dale - valley between breasts
fountain - breasts
bottom-grass - the hair growing in and about the crutch [i.e., pubic hair]
plain - belly 
hillock - buttocks
brakes - 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 young nubile girl (i.e, nymphet), and Cinyras, her father.