Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov

“She is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.

“It’s not my fault.”

            —Alizée, “Moi…Lolita.” (1)

Introduction

On Halloween night in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov opened his front door to discover a schoolgirl trick-or-treating as Lolita.(2) Costumed by her parents, the nine-year-old was holding a tennis racket and a sign that read L-O-L-I-T-A.(3) Nabokov was horrified. Prior to granting Stanley Kubrick the rights to a film adaptation, Nabokov insisted: “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She existed only in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I would never consent to it.”(4) Cast in the titular role at fourteen, Sue Lyon was fifteen when the film premiered in New York in 1962—still too young to be admitted to the theatre to watch herself on screen. Age was not Nabokov’s only concern. He also worried about how an actor would represent his heroine in performance. After all, popular culture had rendered his Lolita unrecognizable. The figure of the underage siren did not originate with the controversial novel.(5) Yet Lolita gave that myth its most enchanting and enduring name, inspiring several plays, a musical, a ballet, an opera, two films, and countless fashion trends that have little in common with the girl at the heart of the book— “beloved, irretrievable Dolly."(6)

Despite Nabokov’s “antitheatrical prejudice,” it is in the theatre that some of the most incisive and moving responses to Nabokov’s novel can be found.(7) This article explores María Irene Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden (1977) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997) as dramatic works that challenge the Lolita myth of popular culture and represent girlhood as a tumultuous process of becoming an autonomous agent who embraces youthful desire and resists capitalist and patriarchal objectification. First, I will examine the cultural stereotype of Lolita, which is an amalgam of the fantasies of Humbert Humbert—the seductive narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita—and the distortions of popular culture. Then, I will show why Fornés and Vogel were fascinated by Nabokov’s novel, particularly its theatricality, and how they respond to Lolita and its afterlife by creating adolescent protagonists who are independent, courageous, with minds of their own. To fully appreciate Fornés’s and Vogel’s achievements in this area, it is important to spend some time with Nabokov’s novel and its ideas about theatre and acting. In a way, Fornés and Vogel were able to create their feminist versions of the teenage girl because they were attentive readers of Nabokov’s Lolita. While borrowing many elements of the novel, they amplified the voice that Nabokov silenced.

The Challenges of Adapting Lolita to the Stage

Nabokov distrusted theatre and embodied performance. Having written several plays, he preferred drama to a “performance-centered” model of theatre, which he associated with the loss of authorial control.(8) Lolita, My Love (1971)—the ill-fated musical by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner—and Edward Albee’s Lolita (1981) were both excruciating flops. These stage versions attempt to adapt a novel that purposefully silences its heroine, so they end up with a two-dimensional Lolita, whose main dramatic purpose is to be the object of Humbert’s aesthetic appreciation and “foul lust.”(9) Even Nabokov’s own screenplay, which Kubrick could not use because it was “much too unwieldy” and would have taken “seven hours to run,” does not give us a deeper look into the young girl’s mind or character, though it does lift up some of her sass and wit, which the novel only hints at.(10)

It is tempting to conclude then that Lolita is simply a book that resists theatrical adaptation. Nabokov has almost nothing positive to say about the art of theatre in Lolita, lumping it together with cinema and associating both with deceit, vulgar commercialism, and sexual exploitation. Clare Quilty, the “clearly guilty” character, for example, is both a hack playwright and pornographer. He first lures Dolly by casting her in his play The Enchanted Hunters and then tries to persuade her to perform in his blue films at Duk Duk Ranch. Despite Nabokov’s mistrust of mimetic theatre, theatre also figures as a space for self-determination and embodied knowledge in Lolita—his adolescent protagonist begins to develop her agency, voice, and defiance of Humbert while performing in theatre at school.

Representing Girlhood in the Theatre

While girlhood studies have evolved rapidly since the early 1990s, especially through their intersection with performance studies, little attention has been paid to the role that the Lolita myth has played in how girls perform their identities.(11) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden and Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive are two salient examples of plays inspired by Lolita that spotlight the political and social agency of their female protagonists. While Nabokov’s concern about a real child embodying his female protagonist led him to draw a line between his novel and any kind of adaptation or riff on it in other media, Fornés and Vogel addressed their relationship with visual media head-on by carefully thinking through settings and stagings. In contrast to film, where the camera’s unforgiving demand for realism and close-ups motivates directors to cast underage actors in the role of Lolita, theatre can make do with actors of legal age who can play young.(12) Blanche Baker was twenty-five when Albee’s Lolita opened in New York in 1981, and Caitlin Cohn in her early twenties, when the York Theatre Company debuted a reworked version of the musical Lolita, My Love in New York in 2019.(13) Both performers appeared teen-like on stage. Neither of these conventional adaptations, however, made use of the recent trend that J. Ellen Gainor identifies in her incisive reassessment of Clare Barron’s Dance Nation (2018), namely of adult actors representing adolescence “even as they never try to mask their adulthood.”(14)

According to Gainor, this “(re-)enactment of, yet also a distanced perspective on, adolescence may indicate that some broader cultural forces are at play—that we are in a moment of both retrospection and interrogation around girlhood, womanhood, and the relation between them."(15) Indeed, this cultural investigation into the relationship between girlhood and womanhood began during the postwar years (more on this later). Because Nabokov was attached to the idea of medium specificity and saw both theatrical and film adaptations of Lolita in the same light (namely, that they were art works in their own rights, far removed from his novel), he did not recognize the specific temporal potential of theatre to explore female adolescence. In the theatre, we can experience what Matthew Wagner calls “the weighting of the present with the past and the future.”(16) For example, Vogel created the role of Li’l Bit “as a character who is forty-something” who goes back in time to make sense of everything that has happened to her.(17) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a children’s play and the titular role can be performed either by an adult or a child. Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas were double cast. In the production photos, Slade, who was in her twenties, appears more adultlike, while Vargas looks like a child (fig. 1 and fig. 2). If, as Adele Senior argues, “the appearance of children” in performance as “natal, biological and relational beings…demand ethical attention,” then this double-casting reveals Fornés’s awareness of the conditions of a child actor’s labor.(18) The burden of the play’s run does not fall on the shoulders of one child actor.

By the time Fornés and Vogel sat down to write their plays, hurricane Lolita had already passed through the globe. Parents had stopped naming their daughters Lolita, so notorious had the novel become, and, in 1959, the citizens of Lolita, Texas, even floated the idea of changing their town’s name. Fornés and Vogel understood that they were dealing not just with Nabokov’s Lolita but with heavily mediatized versions of it (including abysmal attempts at putting the story onto the stage), and so they critically engaged with those transformations. Fornés had started to direct all of the premieres of her plays after 1973, and we can gather a lot of information about the production of Lolita in the Garden from its photos and unpublished script, even though a video recording is not available in the public domain. And, while there have been numerous productions of How I Learned to Drive, including a Broadway premiere in 2022, few directors have followed Vogel’s crucial stage directions that explore the relationship between theatre and other media. In fact, the central scene of How I Learned to Drive presents Vogel’s incisive commentary on the relationship between theatre and photography. 

It is important to note that Lolita in the Garden and How I Learned to Drive are not adaptations of Lolita in Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the term, namely they do not engage in “an extended intertextual engagement” with Nabokov’s novel.(19) Rather, featuring their own distinct characters and plots, these works respond to Lolita on a deeper level than more conventional adaptations precisely because they do not have to worry about fidelity to the original’s storyline. Each of these plays can be compared to a contrafact, a jazz composition consisting of an original melody superimposed on a recognizable harmonic structure or standard tune.(20) Suzan-Lori Parks once described her Red Letter plays (In the Blood and Fucking A) as contrafacts of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter: “Like a contrafact, if you know jazz. You take the chords, and you write your own melody.”(21) While Dolly’s voice is nearly absent from Nabokov’s Lolita, in the plays of Fornés and Vogel, the voice and agency of a young girl take center stage. Both dramatic works contrast the Lolita myth to a different vision of what it means to be a girl—idiosyncratic, defiant, self-determining. Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a theatrical attempt to give Nabokov’s heroine back her childhood. Vogel was in part inspired to write How I Learned to Drive as a response to Nabokov, calling her Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Lolita from Lolita’s point of view.”(22) Both rely on their audiences being “haunted” by the preexisting text of Nabokov’s Lolita and by the cultural script of the Lolita myth.(23)

“The Lolita Syndrome”

The cultural stereotype of Lolita owes its iconography more to Bert Stern’s notorious poster for Kubrick’s film than to Nabokov’s novel. Stern’s photograph features a blonde fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon peeking over red heart-shaped sunglasses (found nowhere in the novel), with a cherry red lollipop between lips of the same hue. The provocative nature of the poster lies not only in its taunting tagline— “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?”—but also in the visual interplay between the signifiers for child and adult, a division that James Kincaid notes “has been at least for the past two hundred years heavily eroticized.”(24)This Lolita dominates visual media today as seen in the performances of pop stars like Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Taylor Swift. Yet this cultural icon is far removed from Nabokov’s Dolly— an auburn-haired, freckled, sooty-lashed tomboy, who is a victim of abuse and rape, but who is also, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, “an agent with sexual motives and motions of her own.”(25)

The popularity of the Lolita myth was in part a response to the sweeping socioeconomic changes in the situation of men and women after the Second World War. According to Simone de Beauvoir, there is a historical reason for the “Lolita syndrome,” a term she uses for the invention of the “erotic hoyden” through the gamine charm of “Audrey Hepburn, Françoise Arnoul, Marina Vlady, Leslie Caron and Brigitte Bardot,” as well as dramatic characters such as the almost-eighteen-year-old Catherine from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955). Beauvoir argues that this “Lolita syndrome” emerged at a time when “social differences between the two sexes diminished” and consequently so did eroticism. (26) As Beauvoir notes, because the “adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man,” the attention of filmmakers, who were predominantly men, turn to the “child woman” who “moves in a universe which he cannot enter.”(27) The “age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire,” so that “a new Eve” is created by fusing the “green fruit” with the “femme fatale.”(28) In other words, while the growing economic empowerment of women dampens male desire, the girl-child possesses two interconnected features that attract male filmmakers and consumers. Her underaged status makes her an enticing taboo, while her economic dependency makes her accessible and vulnerable. In Lolita, Humbert is Dolly’s legal guardian and pays for her sexual favors. In How I Learned to Drive, Uncle Peck offers Li’l Bit free driving lessons during which he molests her.

The mythmaking of Lolita also involves a fantasy of control and dominance: while the Lolita-figure of the popular imagination is “dangerous so long as she remains untamed,” she is open to “the male to domesticate her.”(29) Thus, she is, in many ways, a figure of conventional femininity. In Beauvoir’s reading, while aesthetically Brigitte Bardot might display many features of the “erotic hoyden,” her behavior on and off screen challenges that stereotype through her spontaneity, her freedom, her frank and earthy sexuality, and, most importantly, her refusal to be cast in one definitive type— “nothing can be read in Bardot’s face.”(30) Thus, the phenomenon of Bardot proves, as Tom Maguire argues in reference to HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex, that performance can “have efficacy in disrupting a heteronormative adult male gaze."(31)

Even as Nabokov’s Lolita appeared during the postwar boom of the mischievous woman-child, its heroine resists the script of heteropatriarchy. Similarly, both Fornés and Vogel explore and ultimately reject the dominant culture’s desire for a compliant young girl molded by the demands of white heteropatriarchy when they give us their stage versions of Lolita—autonomous, queer, and—in Fornés’s case—also non-white. Before delving into my argument (why these playwrights respond to Lolita and its influence on popular culture and why embodied performance is central to their responses), it is helpful to keep in mind two interconnected facts: the complex way that Nabokov constructs his adolescent protagonist in Lolita and the contradictory role that theatre plays in this construction.

Dolly versus Lolita

In American Sweethearts, Ilana Nash explains the popularity of the adolescent girl in terms of her being “a non-person constructed as a foil for adult men…who predominately controlled the production and circulation of popular culture during the twentieth century.”(32) This description of twentieth-century American culture at large also captures the oppressive and transactional relationship between Humbert and his stepdaughter. Nabokov’s Lolita poignantly captures the process of the marginalization and coercion of the adolescent girl, while the Lolita myth becomes an example of what Nash calls an “iconic abstraction representing dominant culture’s desires or nightmares.”(33) Both Beauvoir and Nash discuss this “Lolita” of the public imagination as a kind of abstraction. Indeed, the novel itself presents Lolita as such, when Humbert speaks of her as a figment of his imagination— his “own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita.”(34) In this way, the novelistic character Lolita and the pop-cultural figure Lolita can be analyzed as commodities in the Marxian sense of the term. A commodity, as Marx argues, is “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” and has “value only because abstract human labor is objectified or materialized in it.”(35) While Lolita is the commodity that satisfies the desires of adult men with significant capital in the novel, there also exists a “real girl” in the book who is performing all the sexual and emotional labor.    

It speaks to the unfortunate success of Humbert’s sly narrative voice that the name that stuck to his stepdaughter is not the one that she calls herself (Dolly) but rather the romantic moniker he chooses for her (“But in my arms she was always Lolita”).(36) In fact, Humbert is the only character in the novel who refers to her as Lolita, namely the figure of his poetic and erotic imagination. Dolly, by contrast, stands for the “real girl” who appears in the novel through glimpses and traces. Thus, when I refer to the main character of Lolita as Dolly, I join critics and scholars who use this name to describe the girl-child that exists outside of Humbert’s fantasies.(37) As Michael Wood suggests, this Dolly “is what a reading finds.”(38) In other words, the reader of Nabokov’s novel must resist Humbert’s seductive voice and solipsistic visions and search for signs of Dolly.

“Only Words to Play With”

The combination of exposing the oppression of the adolescent girl while simultaneously revealing glimpses of her vibrant personality is one reason that, despite its disturbing content (“a pedophile’s playbook,” as one commentator dubbed it), Lolita has found its main defenders among female readers, including Fornés and Vogel.(39) Indeed, girls and women have always been Lolita’s most devoted readers, often identifying with its female protagonist, even as some worry that their enjoyment of the novel “makes them complicit” in its representation of coercion and violence.(40) To name a few recent examples, Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of the novel My Dark Vanessa (2020), in which an English teacher preys on his underage student by giving her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita, spent her adolescence on an online message board dedicated to all things Lolita. In this early Internet community, Russell talked to girls of her age obsessed with the book and to older men who lurked in the comments. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi relates how her Iranian female students draw parallels between Dolly’s loss of freedom under Humbert’s abusive guardianship and their own lives under a repressive regime. Stockton reads Dolly as a queer, “quintessential not-yet-straight child,” who resists the heteronormative cultural script that Humbert tries to impose on her.(41) And Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO hit show Girls (2012-2017), calls Lolita one of her favorite novels because of “how fully realized a character Lolita is, despite the fact that we are seeing her through the lens of her stalker.”(42)

As many defenders of the novel have pointed out, Lolita’s narrative architecture and moral puzzle reveal “the true nature of sexual crimes by men against girls and women: in patriarchy, they are silenced.”(43) The good reader should notice this silencing of Dolly’s voice, become appalled at Humbert’s actions (even if taken by his rhetoric at the beginning), and—as the fictional editor John Ray implores—hear “a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita” that Humbert’s “singing violin can conjure up.”(44) What all these moralistic readings of Lolita miss is the novel’s critique of the commodification of young girls in the sexual marketplace. It is not just a matter of condemning one fictional character named Humbert Humbert and becoming a better reader with a heightened capacity for empathy and a burning curiosity about the minds of others. When Nabokov writes that, when it comes to the book cover, there is “one subject” which he is “emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl,” he reveals that he understands that his novel exists in a marketplace where sex sells.(45)

Thus, Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on Humbert’s crime of abusing and silencing Dolly. If Humbert stands for the figure of the artist, Lolita asks us: what should we do with the art of creators who have done horrific, unspeakable acts? A timely question. In order to pose this question, Nabokov shapes his novel around the glimpses and traces of Dolly, who struggles to be heard through Humbert’s domineering voice. It is not Nabokov’s intention to give us a nuanced portrayal of a teenage girl. Rather, we are meant to see through Humbert’s manipulation and miss Dolly in her absence.

Given the novel’s focus on the absence of its young heroine, it becomes evident why adapting Lolita has been problematic and why Nabokov worried about the afterlife of his book. Since so little is known about Dolly, works that attempt a standard adaptation of the story, such as Albee’s play and Barry and Lerner’s musical, present a superficial Lolita, who is a cross between the fantasies of Humbert and the distortions of popular culture. If, while reading Nabokov’s novel, we can picture the kind of strong woman Dolly might have become had she survived, stage and film adaptations leave little to the imagination. Moreover, the embodied performance of an actor in the role of Lolita, whether on stage or on screen, risks falling into precisely the kind of commercial objectification and sexualization of the adolescent girl, even if played by an actor of legal age, that Nabokov’s novel explicitly denounces. One need only remember the many provocative magazine covers featuring fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain, promoting the release of Adrian Lyne’s controversial Lolita (1997).

Throughout Lolita, Nabokov stresses that its story should only be represented in the textual universe of literature and through the novel’s specific reorganization of events, echoing the Russian Formalist notion of the inseparability of form and content.(46) “Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair!” Humbert laments at one point.(47) His missed opportunity echoes the warning at the heart of Lolita—to transpose its story into visual media and/or embodied performance is to risk slipping into child pornography. Lolita thus depends on “dismediation,” a fruitful term that Martin Harries has coined to signify the “remediation through negation of another medium.”(48) Nabokov constructs his novel through the dismediation of cinema, photography, theatre (which he often lumps with cinema), and other media that make possible the visual representation and exploitation of young girls.

 While attempting to control Lolita from spilling into other media, Nabokov explores the dangerous power of language to seduce his audience and the antidotal potential of language to unveil that rhetorical coercion. Literary scholars are thus more likely to argue that the girl-child in Lolita is just a figment of Nabokov’s imagination and that what the reader is engaged with is not real, but just a text,(49) or as Humbert puts it: “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”(50) By contrast, theatre and performance studies scholars view texts (even closet dramas and impossible stage directions) as inherently virtual.(51) However problematic or dangerous a text is, it has the potential to be performed and corporealized in the theatre. A text, as John Muse puts it, has the “capacity to generate virtual violence.”(52)

Figure 2: Judy Vargas as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden. Courtesy of The Fales Library &

Special Collections.

“The Theatre Had Taught Her That Trick”

Nabokov maintained a lifelong interest in theatre and was aware of its virtuality. In fact, Lolita predicts the rise of virtual reality and the latter medium’s deep ties to theatre.(53) At its core, Lolita is a theatrical novel that interrogates the relationship between imagination, representation, and action. The reader witnesses Humbert go from daydreaming about Dolly to writing down his fantasy to finally enacting it, and this transition from thought to action is rendered in the novel through theatrical and cinematic metaphors. When Humbert reflects on how he managed to masturbate in Dolly’s presence, “with her legs across [his] lap” on the sofa, but without her (in his view) awareness of his onanistic endeavor, he compares the act to the theatrical performance of a magician, a comparison that moves from theatre to virtual reality to cinema:

Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe—and I was safe; What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own.(54)

By the end of this attempt at justification, Humbert envisions his stepdaughter as a kind of free-floating, virtual avatar (what today we would call a hologram) that presumably has nothing to do with the girl-child Dolly. He goes on to mix theatrical and cinematic metaphors: “The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.”(55) Initially, the pairing of the words “repeating” and “performance” point to a theatrical performance, in which Humbert is an actor who “repeats” the same gestures in the presence of an untouched and unaware Dolly-the-spectator, who does not understand what she is seeing. But as the sentence continues and Humbert describes an adult movie theatre, in which he is watching Dolly on screen, it becomes clear that he has a very different kind of “performance” in mind and that Dolly cannot, in fact, be as unaffected by the proceedings as he wants the reader to believe. For whatever cinematic image to appear on a screen, a real person, in this case—a real child—would have to be filmed.

Nabokov’s distrust of theatre and cinema is thus connected to his protective view of child and young adolescent actors. As Nicholas Ridout points out (following the work of Bert O. States), child actors pose a particular problem onstage because the audience often worries whether children can give “properly informed consent” and whether they will be “damaged by their appearance on stage.”(56) Such concerns presume childhood innocence— a social and historical construct that has played a significant role in the preservation of white heteropatriarchy, as Robin Bernstein has argued—and are fairly recent in theatre history.(57) As Kristen Hatch has shown in her study of Shirley Temple, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, audiences took “pleasure in children’s performances” because they accepted childhood innocence as “inviolable.”(58) By the mid-twentieth century, this “inviolable innocence” of children gave way to Freud’s theory of sexuality and to the fear that children were “in danger of being corrupted through contact with the world of adults."(59) Indeed, Nabokov himself once admitted: “If I had a little girl I might want to ban the book, too. Certainly I wouldn’t let her read it.”(60) Despite Nabokov’s public pronouncements, his own novel, published during the mid-century cultural shift in views on childhood, challenges the many myths surrounding the abstract concept of childhood, including innocence, ignorance, and lack of agency. Dolly, as we find out, has explored her sexuality before Humbert and, as Stockton notes, is “queer herself, [s]exually schooled by ‘little Lesbians.’”(61)

Nabokov’s paternal attitude toward child actors echoes his prohibitive position in regard to transposing his novel to the stage and to the screen. Although he eventually did allow other artists to adapt Lolita into other media, he considered those works to be artistic creations in their own rights, far removed from his novel. Thus, Nabokov thought Kubrick’s Lolita was excellent but “only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture [he] imagined.”(62) And just like the novel’s depictions of childhood are more complex than Nabokov’s public statements on the matter, so are the novel’s representations of popular culture more astute and realistic than Nabokov’s own expectations. In Lolita, popular culture has already invaded almost every aspect of the characters’ lives in post-war America. There is no going back. Visual media dominate. Humbert is not only an artist but also an adman who earns his living writing perfume advertisements.(63) Dolly is “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”(64) Humbert reminds her of “some crooner or actor chap” on whom she “has a crush.”(65) He describes himself at one point as “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood” and Charlotte, Dolly’s mother, as “a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.”(66) Hollywood’s reach is everywhere in the novel as is its underbelly—the pornographic industry. The characters exist in a world of commodity fetishism where the “definite social relation between” people “assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”(67) Theatre is not immune to this type of commercialization and alienation. Upon closer examination, however, Nabokov’s attitude toward embodied performance in Lolita turns out to be deeply ambivalent.

It is Dolly’s foray into acting, while rehearsing for Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunters, that eventually leads to her escape. During one of her early attempts to stand up for herself, Humbert remarks: “It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”(68) “Mimetic imagination,” as Maria Tatar notes, “is less about copying and representing than about making contact and participating”—exactly the kinds of activities a student would embrace in the theatre.(69) The theatre, as I have suggested earlier, has also provided fertile ground for feminist responses to Nabokov’s Lolita. Fornés and Vogel represent different visions of girlhood on stage by contrasting it to the Lolita myth of popular culture, the heteropatriarchal fantasy of the adolescent girl, which is influenced by Humbert’s solipsistic view of Dolly. And the tensions between imagination and action explored in Lolita are amplified on the stage.

Fornés Gives Lolita Back Her Voice

In the late spring and early summer of 1977, Fornés directed her “theatre piece with music for children and adults,” Lolita in the Garden, with music by Richard Weinstock and with Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas in the title role at Intar 53 Theatre in New York.(70) This unpublished play features no Humbert character, spotlighting instead Lolita as a little girl. Fornés would represent child abuse in her later play The Conduct of Life (1985), in which a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant kidnaps, terrorizes, and repeatedly rapes a twelve-year-old girl named Nena. In Lolita in the Garden, the focus is on a girl-child before anything bad happens to her. Significantly, she is described as being eleven years old in Fornés’s script (Humbert meets Dolly when she is twelve). Fornés must have read Nabokov’s Lolita with great attention, as she borrows many elements from Lolita—the lyrical name, the fairytale leitmotifs, and the garden imagery—but repurposes them, like in a contrafact, for her own melody, one that reclaims her heroine’s autonomy.(71) The production toured New York in two versions, an English and Spanish one, thereby disposing of Humbert’s exoticizing tendency to call Dolly his “Carmencita”(72) and making Fornés’s fairytale accessible to Spanish-speaking children.(73)

Moreover, by casting a young Brown and a young Black girl (Vargas and Slade respectively) in the title role, Fornés challenged the cultural myth of Lolita as “an expression of whiteness.”(74) As the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan explains, “Lolita” has always meant a very specific kind of femininity— “nubile” and white.(75) According to Givhan, Lolita “was not written within the context of what it meant to be a young black girl” because the “culture does not see black girls as having a fragile, dangerously irresistible beauty.”(76) Instead, the culture marginalizes and “oversexualize[s] black bodies.”(77) By contrast, Fornés centers the young girl of color as the main heroine of her fairytale as both vulnerable and learning to stand up for herself.

The garden of the play’s title refers not only to the Garden of Eden, where innocence and temptation co-exist, but also to Charlotte’s garden where Humbert first lays eyes on Dolly. Moreover, the garden is an important metaphor for Dolly’s inner world, which Humbert admits remains inaccessible to him: “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.”(78) It is this inner world of the child that Fornés’s theatre piece explores. And it is appropriate that music plays a crucial role in recovering the young girl’s voice. Toward the end of the novel, Humbert recalls an earlier episode, “soon after her disappearance,” when he looked down from a mountain and heard the “musical vibration” of children at play.(79) He realizes there and then that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.”(80) In Lolita in the Garden, the songs of children can now be heard loud and clear.

Fornés not only gives Lolita back her childhood by writing a children’s piece in which she is the main speaking character, but also teaches her young spectators the importance of self-determinacy at a time when their parents and pedagogues are telling them what to do. The submission to parental authority is, of course, a necessary part of a child’s development, but it is also the same mechanism by which an abuser might manipulate a child (as Humbert does his stepdaughter). Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is thus a lesson in how to think for oneself. And theatrical mimesis is a crucial step in this lesson. Set in a magical forest, populated by a talking tree, a flexible flower, and a poet-bear, the play begins with a fairy godmother named Hard granting three wishes to an eleven-year-old girl named Lolita, telling her that she can do whatever she wants and that she does not have to follow anyone’s orders. As Lolita puts it, “I want to do what I want. And I want no one to tell me what to do. And I don’t want to have to do what other people want.”(81) She also tries to stretch the definition of “three wishes,” asking Hard for “a magic prince in silver with rubies and diamonds,” “a white wedding dress so [she] can marry the prince,” and “three girlfriends who are very nice to [her] and don’t take [her] boyfriends away.”(82) But Hard reminds her that she has already used up all her three wishes when she asked for complete autonomy and rejects her desires for romantic clichés. Doing whatever she wants and not listening to anyone’s advice turns out to be a more difficult task than Fornés’s Lolita initially imagined. She learns many things the hard way—that gorging on an unlimited supply of candies, for example, makes her “feel sick and fat.”(83) And as Lolita continues to roam and play in the forest, she begins to want for someone to tell her what to do. In this way, according to Norma Ford, Lolita in the Garden is “an allegory for the responsibility that true freedom demands of us.”(84) 

It is difficult to gauge how aware the children in the audience were of Nabokov’s Lolita, but the adults in attendance would have picked up on the allusion. As Fornés’s Lolita learns the lesson about how to be a self-determining agent, she does so in a world marked by violence toward women. Echoes of Nabokov’s Lolita can still be heard and conjure up a sense of menace in Fornés’s contrafact, giving it a Brothers Grimm aesthetic. While Nabokov’s Lolita borrows fairytale elements from Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid, and Sleeping Beauty among many others, to hint at how enchantment takes place on the level of language (the inattentive reader might fall under Humbert’s spell), Fornés restores all these magical elements in a fairytale written for children with a female adolescent at its center. When Bear asks Fornés’s Lolita “what” she is, she responds: “A child. I’m a girl.” “Ahhhh. What’s that?” asks the scared Bear. “A human being,” says Lolita.(85) This is a simple exchange but one that reminds us how invisible the humanity of young girls has been throughout the twentieth century. As Nash elucidates, the teen girl suffers a “double enforcement of oppressive representation:” “her femininity makes her more sexually objectified than teen boys in the same narratives, while her youth makes her more ignorant and diminished than grown women.”(86) By contrast, Fornés’s inclusive musical fairytale for the theatre represents the autonomy of the female adolescent by giving her back her voice and her childhood and by reminding the audience of the diversity of girls who can be the main character.   

Vogel’s Lolita Drives Away from the Dead-End Road

Given that Vogel has mentioned on several occasions that How I Learned to Drive was in part inspired by Lolita, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the connections between the two works aside from the occasional nod to Vogel’s interest in Nabokov’s novel. Vogel develops her own storyline and characters, so the relationship between the novel and the play may seem at first superficial. From Lolita Vogel borrows the car setting, the road motif, the subjects of pedophilia and incest, and the mixture of comedy and pathos. How I Learned to Drive follows the relationship between Li’l Bit and her aunt’s husband, Uncle Peck, from her pre-adolescent years all the way through adulthood. “I hope people are seeing the resonances,” Vogel stated in an interview with Charlie Rose, referring to the echoes between How I Learned to Drive and Lolita.(87) Vogel first read Lolita in high school and kept revisiting it during her student days at Cornell, where there had always been “a huge Nabokov presence,” as “he’d been on the faculty.”(88) While How I Learned to Drive stands on its own, there is another level to this play as a response to Nabokov’s Lolita and to the popular culture that has usurped Lolita into its apparatus of sexualizing children. First, How I Learned to Drive adopts a similar moral and temporal framework. Like Nabokov, Vogel seduces her audience by giving them a charming pedophile, one who might initially gain some of their sympathy, and by manipulating the chronology of the events in order to reveal the problem of succumbing to her seduction. Contrary to Nabokov’s modernist attachment to medium specificity, Vogel’s meticulous stage directions offer directors a roadmap for taking on the contemporary mediatized environment and for exploring theatre’s power in it.

As a feminist, Vogel was unnerved by the fact that she felt sympathy for Humbert. Indeed, Vogel’s “relatively benign depiction” of Peck has garnered much attention.(89) Like Nabokov’s Lolita, How I Learned to Drive, in Vogel’s words, “dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.”(90) Like Humbert, Peck falls in love, and that love makes a moral demand on him. If Humbert’s gift to Dolly is “to make her live in the minds of later generations” by writing the manuscript that the reader allegedly holds, then Peck’s gift to Li’l Bit, while less artistic, is more life affirming.(91) By teaching Li’l Bit how to drive like a man (“with confidence—with aggression”(92), Peck not only saves her life, but also empowers her to “reject him and destroy him.”(93) Whether you feel (negative) empathy for Peck or not is ultimately a subjective experience. When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997 at the Vineyard Theatre, some critics praised its moral complexity, while others criticized Vogel for not villainizing Peck (David Morse).(94) But How I Learned to Drive is no melodrama. As Joanna Mansbridge has ably argued, Vogel’s play explores “the culture that created Peck.”(95)

Significantly, Vogel makes Lil’ Bit the main narrator of How I Learned to Drive, explaining in an interview that, while she “wanted to explore the sadness of her Humbert Humbert in Peck, she didn’t want her Lolita to go down the same dead-end road.”(96) While Nabokov’s “pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly” dies in Gray Star, Alaska, Vogel’s Li’l Bit drives off toward an uncertain but hopeful future.(97) Referencing Cathy Caruth’s work on the delayed temporality of trauma, Ann Pellegrini argues that Vogel’s memory play reenacts “the belatedness of trauma” and the “revision” of memory through Li’l Bit’s use of “piecemeal” narration.(98) Li’l Bit goes back in time and revises the events of the past in order to gain control of them, transcend victimhood, and allow herself to heal. Graley Herren reads these “dramaturgical manipulations” of Li’l Bit as her “coping mechanism.”(99) But Li’l Bit’s narration has another function, beyond that of therapy, which align her with Humbert’s sly handling of words and his use of “retrospective verisimilitude.”(100) The play’s use of nonchronological narration forces the audience to consider at what point the relationship between the two characters becomes uncomfortable and painful for them to watch. As Vogel explains:

If you look at the structure of my play, all I’m doing is asking how do you feel about this? We see a girl of seventeen and an older man in a car seat. You think you know how you feel about this relationship? Alright, fine. Now, let’s go back a year earlier. Do you still think you know what you feel about this situation? … The play is a reverse syllogism. It constantly pulls the rug out from under our emotional responses by going back earlier and earlier in time.[101] 

In this way, How I Learned to Drive is not simply “a drama about an individual family,” but “a way of looking on a microscopic level at how this culture sexualizes children.”(102) When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997, the sexualization of children in the media was at the forefront of legal and moral debates. The early nineties saw the scandal of Amy Elizabeth Fisher, branded by the media as “Long Island Lolita,” who, at the age of seventeen, shot and wounded her secret lover’s wife. The murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey took over the news cycle in late December of 1996. Beauty contest photos and videos of the little girl with bleached blonde hair and in full makeup, striking provocative poses, dominated TV screens. As Vogel reminds us, “JonBenét Ramsey was not a fluke.”(103) American consumer culture had been profiting from the sexualization of young girls for a long time, as the Calvin Klein jean ads, featuring fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields from the early 1980s, attest to.

It is this mediatized environment (which had also co-opted Nabokov’s Lolita) that Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive takes on. Vogel’s original script suggests “the notion of slides and projections, which were not used in the New York production of the play.”(104) Nor were any slides or projections employed in the Broadway premiere in the spring of 2022, which featured the original leads—Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse—and where changes in mood and in action were evoked through lighting and the reassembling of set pieces. In my discussion of the play, I look carefully at Vogel’s stage directions, arguing that her version engages in a critical intervention with visual media and that directors miss an important opportunity when they disregard them.(105) In what follows, I analyze Vogel’s stage directions by imagining what a potential production that heeded them could accomplish aesthetically and ethically.

Vogel employs dismediation in the theatre—through the negation of pin-up photography—to confront mass culture’s sexualization of young girls. In a culture still dominated by gender violence, misogyny, and mass-produced images of stereotypical femininity, Vogel carves out a space of subversion, resistance, and escape (however temporary) where Li’l Bit can come into her own and write her story. It bears stressing that the role of Li’l Bit “was originally written as a character who is forty-something.”(106) Mary-Louise Parker was thirty-three when she debuted the role at the Vineyard Theatre. Thus, instead of a child actor posing for erotic photos, we witness an adult woman revisiting her past, as she looks back at the girl that she once was.

If, as Paul Auslander suggests, “mediatization is a vehicle of the general code in a way that live performance is not (or is no longer),” then How I Learned to Drive acknowledges that both Li’l Bit’s coming of age and its own ontology as a theatrical work take place in a culture where mediatized representations predominate.(107) For example, during the driving lesson, when Peck instills in Li’l Bit the importance of driving aggressively, Vogel’s stage directions indicate that “it would be nice to have slides of erotic photographs of women and cars,” including one of “Li’l Bit with a Bel Air.”(108) Accustomed to screens, the audience’s attention might be split between the images on the slides and the two actors onstage. Yet this set-up aptly reflects the mediatized culture in which young girls grow up.

During the photo shoot, which is the central scene of the play, the Playboy aesthetic predominates at the start. Peck takes pictures of the “nervous but curious thirteen-year-old” Li’l Bit with a Leica camera, while “something like Roy Orbison” plays in the background.(109) Yet even as Peck objectifies Li’l Bit, she pushes back and he, along with the audience, begins to see her in a different light, as a unique, irreplaceable, singular human being. In other words, she resists becoming a commodity. As Peck instructs his niece on how to move her body and what poses to strike, Vogel’s directions recommend that there “be a slide montage of actual shots of the actor playing Li’l Bit—interspersed with other models à la Playboy, Calvin Klein and Victoriana/ Lewis Carroll’s Alice Liddell.”(110) Unlike Nabokov’s Lolita, How I Learned to Drive does not posit that it is “immune from contamination by, and ontologically different from mediatized forms.”(111) Rather, by recognizing that theatre is a medium among other media and by privileging some mediatized forms over others, Vogel can influence which images of Li’l Bit are aesthetically and ethically effective and which ones are not. When Peck asks Li’l Bit to “arch [her] back” and “throw [her] head back,” the audience sees a “Playboy model in this pose,” and not the actor playing Li’l Bit. Likewise, when Peck asks Li’l Bit to put her hand on her cheek and move her hair back, “[a]nother classic Playboy or Vargas” appears.(112) Evidently, Playboy and Vargas have shaped Peck’s imagination and how he views Li’l Bit. But Li’l Bit does not remain an object of this mass-produced fantasy: she resists it, becoming, to borrow Pellegrini’s turn of phrase, an “active, unruly subject of desire.”(113) When Peck calls Li’l Bit “beautiful,” she looks back at him “a bit defiantly” and reminds him that “Aunt Mary is beautiful.”(114) And Li’l Bit rejects Peck’s idea of creating a portfolio of her photos and sending them to Playboy when she turns eighteen. She refuses to become another commodity on the sexual marketplace. Most importantly, interspersed among all the pin-ups are the aleatory photos of Li’l Bit that Peck takes during the shoot in real time. For example, after Peck says “I love you” to Li’l Bit, the directions read: “Li’l Bit opens her eyes; she is startled. Peck captures the shot. On the screen we see right through her.”(115)

There are thus two kinds of images being contrasted in this pivotal scene. There are the sexualized pin-up photos of “aesthetic consumerism,” to which Susan Sontag claims “everyone is now addicted,” and the photos of Li’l Bit that reveal what Roland Barthes calls in Camera Lucida, “the impossible science of the unique being.”(116) By giving space and time to both kinds of images onstage and by projecting them alongside two unique human beings as they navigate their transgressive relationship, Vogel paradoxically achieves more artistic control over the representations of her characters and the meaning of her play than Nabokov did when he tried to prohibit any visual representation and embodiment of his heroine. And while Vogel dismediates pin-up photography, she allows for photos, in which we see the mature actor playing a teenage Li’l Bit, to supplement the performance of her two actors. Not only is thirteen-year-old Li’l Bit’s wish that her erotic photos never see the light of day respected, but also the photos that we do see projected onstage—that of an older actor performing the memory of the teenage version of her character—serve as a reminder of the passage of time. In this scene, theatre and photography are engaged not so much in competition as in a symbiotic relationship that shines light on Li’l Bit’s mortality. Indeed, as Barthes points out, photography and theatre have much in common, “by way of a singular intermediary”— “by way of Death.”(117) The “first actors,” Barthes reminds us, “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead.”(118) According to Barthes, there are, thus, two kinds of punctums. There is the “unexpected flash” of detail that “sometimes crosses” the field of a photograph.(119) And then there is “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”(120) It is this punctum, as a trace of time and a reminder of mortality, that is amplified in the palimpsest photo shoot scene. In a way, these projected photos of the older actor posing as a teenager also function as “surrogation,” which Joseph Roach describes as the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution.”(121)

Although there are no roles for child actors in Drive, Vogel “strongly recommend[s] casting a young woman who is ‘of legal age,’ that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as close to eleven as possible” for the role of the Teenage Greek Chorus.(122) “If the actor is too young,” Vogel explains, “the audience may feel uncomfortable.”(123) The youthful appearance and the young-sounding voice of the Teenage Greek Chorus are necessary for the scene in which the first episode of molestation occurs. In 1962, when Peck holds eleven-year-old Li’l Bit in his lap and shows her how to drive for the first time, the thirty- or forty-something-year-old actor playing Li’l Bit performs the physical actions, while the Teenage Greek Chorus speaks all the lines, standing “apart on stage.”(124) After Peck and the Teenage Greek Chorus exit, Li’l Bit faces the audience and says: “That day was the last day I lived in my body.”(125) This separation of body and voice represents, in David Savran’s words, “the radical alienation from self that results from having been molested.”(126) In this way, Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive creatively employs exactly what Nabokov’s Lolita displays anxiety about—embodied performance—in order to both stage Li’l Bit’s sexual trauma and help her transcend it.

Conclusion

In the fall of 1959, almost a year after the infamous Halloween episode, Nabokov visited Paris where he witnessed yet another Lolita cosplay. This time it was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet—Catherine—who “had dressed herself à la gamine.”(127)Nabokov was not horrified. He was delighted by the “petite, pretty wife, a young actress” who “continued [her] performance the next day” when the two writers met again for lunch.(128) Both men found it hilarious when, after serving everyone else alcohol, the waiter asked Catherine if she would like a Coca-Cola.(129) Reminiscing about this “very funny” episode, Nabokov assumed that the young woman was “pretending to be Lolita” in his “honor.”(130) Perhaps. Or, there might have been something else at play. The Robbe-Grillets were in a consensual sadomasochistic relationship, in which Catherine was the submissive. She enjoyed being “mistaken for a teenager” and being “refused admission to a film for 18.”(131) In any event, Nabokov clearly did not have a problem with age play between consenting adults, even if it involved elements borrowed and repurposed from his novel. On some level, he must have known that, just as Dolly runs away from Humbert and Quilty, so too would his Lolita escape his authorial control. What he opposed was that Lolita contribute to the kind of commodification of young girls that his novel both documents and resists. Despite Nabokov’s admonition, throughout the years, book covers for Lolita have gotten more risqué. And the name of his beloved nymphet has become associated with exactly the kind of exploitation his novel condemns, such as Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express plane.

Amid all the misreadings and misappropriations of Nabokov’s Lolita, Fornés and Vogel have stood out as the novel’s most conscientious readers. Their theatrical responses challenge the pervasive Lolita myth of popular culture, explore the relationship between girlhood and womanhood, and present their audiences with alternative versions of the adolescent girl. Fornés’s non-white Lolita is curious, brave, and autonomous. Vogel’s Li’l Bit is witty, resilient, and not defined by her sexual trauma. Many of these characteristics can already be detected in Nabokov’s Dolly, whose fictional fate is that of the deceased muse who will “live in the minds of later generations” in the manuscript written by “HH.”(132) The artist in Nabokov’s literary universe is almost exclusively male.(133) Unless, of course, she is Vivian Darkbloom— the anagram of the author’s own name. By contrast, the protagonists of Fornés and Vogel are unmistakably artistic, writing and making sense of their pasts, presents, and futures. They give us an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young girl. 

Still, Fornés and Vogel share Nabokov’s anxiety about representing youthful desire on stage. Although both playwrights show adolescence to be a time of chaos and confusion instead of “an idyll of childhood,” they are aware of the danger of their female protagonists becoming mere “objects of male desire” and capitalist consumption.(134) Reception, after all, is challenging to control. Fornés circumvents the issue by placing her heroine (who can be played by an adult or a child) into the protective environment of a theatre play for children, from which Humbert Humbert has been expelled. The erotic awakening of her Lolita is relatively tame. Vogel assigns an adult to play Li’l Bit at different stages of her life and relies on a childlike voice of another adult to communicate her protagonist’s youngest age.

In the twenty-first century, however, there has been “a growing interest in children as both performers and performance makers of experimental work.”(135) Many of these performances are meant to make audiences deeply unconformable and to encourage them to think about the adult-child dynamic (136) The performance of girlhood in the theatre will always be ridden with anxieties and risks. Silencing girls, however, is no longer an ethically viable option. In their Lolita-inspired plays, Fornés and Vogel found several ways that embodied performance could channel the agency of girls during the messy, painful, exhilarating experience of growing up. There are still more to discover.

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