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Popular Culture Review
her story. For in the minds of her makers (readers and writers) she is a cipher
that lacks content until her rapists infiltrate her. Then, forever after haunted by
the spirit of sexual degeneracy, she becomes a secondary source of evil
transformed into an image so fascinating that we cannot ignore her.
Nabokov maintained that “the initial shiver of inspiration” (Nabokov,
5123-31) for Lolita Haze was a newspaper story about an ape that when he was
taught to draw, he sketched the bars of his cage, surprising his captors with the
fact that he knew he was imprisoned. In his novel. The Story o f the Eye, Georges
Bataille said that he “found” Marcelle in the shadows of his parents’ sordid
histories. He claimed that twisting memories of a dismaying childhood into the
lewd images of his novel allowed him to solve a riddle that “no one divined
more deeply than I” (Bataille, 46). In this explanation he refers to, “The ‘eye of
conscience’ and the ‘woods of justice’” (Bataille, 45). Perhaps he proposes an
all-seeing eye that judges transgression and maybe he means the woods where
feral behavior is often bom, in literature anyway. Stieg Larsson, author of the
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series claimed that Lisbeth Salander was the result
of a rape he saw and failed to prevent. Nabokov alleged that there was no moral
to his story. Larsson was an avowed political activist. Bataille said he used
transgression to create what he called a “breaking point of the conscious,” where
he said deviancy could erase the separateness responsible for trapping people in
bad moments. Each writer in his own way sought expiation from feeling badly
and chose a young girl to take the bmnt of punishment in service of his goals, a
helpless and frail shape to house the questions of guilt.
If we look at all three of these fictive females, we see prime examples of
voiceless victims. All three are casualties of men who muzzle them and who try
to replace their identities with sexualized fantasies. All three are the result of a
masculine intention to maim and avoid responsibility for the act, and as a result,
all three become dangerous creatures, resistant strains of societies in which little
girls are disposable. The beauty of these three characters in particular is the fact
that they are so sturdy that they fight the deadening fit. Although some are
vanquished, all three elude erasure because instead of disappearing, they stand
out, frightening us with connections to fiercely erotic and violent tendencies that
threaten the assemblies that insisted they be raped, and like it, in the first place.
The fact that these novelists had different authorial intents, and yet all relied
on a girl to tell their stories, emphasizes the control this image of femininity has
on the male mentality. The fact that each of these books sold well perhaps
indicates that this myth of the pretty, bad girl has a profound hold on more than
just the male imagination. Further, each of these works continues a conversation
with literature and literary criticism that has resulted in a solid base of
paperwork. The little girl has history and she fascinates her audiences. Bataille’s
work is still widely referred to in scholastic and popular culture. Its content
surfaces in popular novels, is referred to in pop songs, appears in movies, and
has been featured in seminal critical works. Lolita is an international cultural
icon, and Larsson’s trilogy not only topped international book selling charts but