Little Luring Lolita
Summary
After Nabokov’s eponym entered the world she started to live a life on her own. She gets adapted almost every day and became a common denominator for a sexually precocious adolescent girl. Different texts helped to create the general view that Lolita is an adolescent girl who likes to seduce older men and brings them mischief. With returning to Nabokov’s Lolita, Lyne attacks this view. He shows in his Lolita that she is actually not an adolescent yet. Furthermore, she seduces the older man, because she craves for attention. At last, the crimes she is guilty of are nothing in comparison with what Humbert and Quilty did to her. Mendes did the same with his American Beauty in which he partly adapts Lolita. Although Angela Hayes is an adolescent he shows that she is still a child and adult have to pay attention to that. Furthermore, like Dolores she seduces Lester because she wants his attention. Mendes comments on the guilt question in a totally different way, as he shows that almost all his characters act like Dolores to get recognition or to break out of the miserable situation they find themselves in. Al these new texts show that Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation is not sufficient to comment on all the new meanings for Lolita have been generated after its publication. The meaning of Lolita changes all the time and will keep changing in the future with every adaptation, if it is an extended engagement with Lolita or not.