Education

Teaching Lolita

by Clay Burell

categories: Religion And Education, Student Culture, Student Rights And Welfare, Teaching Ideas And Resources

Published June 09, 2009 @ 03:08PM PT

[Note: Shipped the furniture to Singapore yesterday, cleaning apartment and moving out today. Backache from hell from waist-high Korean broom. Until normal comes back, have some Lolita. Written 10 April 2008. See this intro post for more. - Clay]

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In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus kills his father, then marries and impregnates his mother: we teach this parricidal, incestuous, antique “classic” to 14-year-olds.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the prince’s uncle murders his brother and marries that brother’s wife, enjoying her in “incestuous sheets“: again, we teach this 400-year-old Renaissance “classic” to 15-year-olds.

And let’s not forget the sentimental favorite about a 12-year-old whose father is trying to marry her off to a prize bachelor of at least 25, and in which instead the 12-year-old heroine elopes with her maybe 14-year-old lover, and spends a night of tender love-making a few paces away from her iconic balcony. Their pillow-talk the morning after their love-making is something we have 13-year-olds recite by the millions in our annual, usually painful, front-of-the-classroom recital days. Yes, I’m talking about Romeo and Juliet. Juliet would be a middle-schooler today - and her father would be in jail for pandering her to his cellmate Paris, the noble pedophile.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 40-year-old pedophiliac professor of literature marries an over-sexed 12-year-old’s mother, who shortly thereafter dies in a freak accident, plunging the professor and the 12-year-old in a morbid love affair that ruins both their lives. Often brutal, as often tender, more often laugh-out-loud funny, but never vulgar or graphic, this acknowledged masterpiece and “classic” of modern, 20th century literature - “the only convincing love story of our [20th] century,” according to Vanity Fair - sends educators running for the hills.

It’s a tragic irony and a very telling double standard: teach controversy from old, safely removed times? No problem. (Well, maybe just skim over Paris’ age, Juliet’s loss of virginity, Oedipus’ and Gertrude’s incest.) But teach the same issues about modern schoolgirls? No, no, no. That hits too close to the real world. Let them learn about that, if at all, from their sensationalistic prime-time TV’s at home: To Catch a Predator, anyone? School is not the place for unsafe subjects. We only think critically about safe ones here.

That we should think about these subjects in our classrooms - our young females, in particular, but our young males too, as is shown below - can be supported by a few statistics (USA only): (Click "read more" below...)

• Teens 16 to 19 were three and one-half times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• According to the Justice Department, one in two rape victims is under age 18; one in six is under age 12.
• While 9 out of 10 rape victims are women, men and boys are also victimized by this crime. In 1995, 32,130 males age 12 and older were victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault.
• Nationally, nearly one million young women under age 20 become pregnant each year. That means close to 2800 teens get pregnant each day.
• Approximately 4 in 10 young women in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before turning 20 years old.
• In the U.S., 1 in 4 sexually active teens become infected with an STD every year.

Some comments from my last post, and from the thread on Bud Hunt’s post that splintered this discussion (not your fault, Bud - you asked them to come here), give us some main reasons we choose to be (un?)witting accomplices to daily contemporary tragedies by only teaching the ancient, irrelevant ones. PaulC, who started the meme, commented:

Do I want to take a chance and have the Parents’ Club down my neck for teaching an ‘inappropriate’ novel? The principal has enough fires to put out.

Of course, the censorship debate arises occasionally for many different reasons, sometimes over trite reasons. It’s worthwhile to take a stand, but is it worth it for the study of Lolita? For that reason I think the novel should be left for post secondary study.

As the above statistics show, the damage is too often done by the time of “post-secondary study.” The principal might be enjoying a no-alarm day in the fire department, the parent enjoying a nice day in denial-land, and the teacher enjoying a nice cool neck, but at what cost to the latest quiet statistic sitting at one of the classroom desks, trying to make sense of this thing that happened last night, and that her school never warned her about in the daytime? This latest example of “fear and irrelevance in education” gives one tragically twisted twist to the term “hidden curriculum.” (Update: But Paul, I hear you: other ways than Lolita exist to educate about this - but are principals and parents using any ways at all, by and large?)

Charlie Roy gives an interesting angle in his comment, largely sympathetic to the idea of teaching the realities of over-flirtatious teens playing with fire and getting burned by unseemly adults via Lolita, when he writes,

I don’t think Lolita would fly at my school. At far as age appropriateness goes it is a hard one to nail. Some argue adolescence has been extended into the early 30’s. If that is the case then it might be an inappropriate read.

I can only respond that, if adolescence is now delayed into our 30’s, as Charlie states, isn’t that because schools perpetuate the situation by infantilizing teens? (See Dr. Robert Eptstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen)

New York librarian and teacher Diane Cordell nails an irony by now cliche, but no less pernicious, about American “family values,” I want to say, when she comments:

Re. teaching Lolita: about 5 years ago, our HS (grades 11-12) English teacher used “In Cold Blood” as the basis of a class unit. The principal asked me to find examples of other schools using this book, and I did so. No parents objected to the choice of text. When we get back from Spring Break, I’ll ask the present teacher and our HS principal what the reaction would be if “Lolita” were listed as required reading. I can almost guarantee that murder would be deemed more suitable subject matter than sex!

–and Corrie Bergeron, the “crunchy conservative” foil to my own more liberal viewpoint, does the conservative view a good deed with this bit of fresh air:

5th graders are having sex. 1 in 4 American teen girls has an STD. (1 in 2 if she’s African-American.) Not that this is a good thing, but it’s reality, today. Literature deals with the human condition, makes it accessible, gives you a proxy to explore ideas. A safe place to talk about things without getting too personal.

Teach Lolita in high school? Maybe not such a bad idea.

Oh-and-by-the-way… worldview-wise, I have a fair amount in common with the Puritans. But ignorance makes poor armor.

Meanwhile, over on Bud’s offshoot from my post, Joe, a principal, weighs in against my view:

Clay - we are public servants. We work for an elected school board, under the twin rubrics of the state and federal governments. You said: “I shouldn’t have to ask a parent’s permission to teach it any more than I do to have students read James Joyce, Huck Finn, or D.H. Lawrence.” I disagree with that line of thought for the potential pitfalls it could cause. We have an adopted curriculum for a reason. A process exists. Obviously you have a set of values that are important to you. I have a set of values that are important to me. I can almost garuntee that you would not want some of my personal views taught in the classroom. Public education should not be a free for all!

Miguel Guhlin joins the discussion over there with too many interesting lines for me to snatch, but this remark is noteworthy for a connection I want to make to Joe’s, above:

Far better the teacher who, like the local Fireman’s Halloween Haunt House, enjoys the trust of the community that nothing found in that House will be judged objectionable by anyone….

–and that connection, namely, has to do with notions of democracy, and of “public values.” With all due respect, Joe’s invocation of public education being no space for a “free for all,” no place for conflicting “values” to come under the scrutiny of critical thought and inquiry, just strikes me as un-democratic. Miguel’s ideal of ideas not “judged objectionable by anyone” seems (though I think unintentionally) similarly contrary to what democracy is. The public, to state the obvious, consists of wildly divergent and often conflicting viewpoints. If nobody finds an idea objectionable, then how relevant and engaging - at least in a humanities classroom - is that idea? And why are we devoting time to safe ideas, when the health of a democracy consists of citizens informed about those uncomfortable but real controversies demanding civic resolution? Those viewpoints can, and I would argue should, in a healthy democracy, receive scrutiny and debate in our schools. That authentic critical thinking is the remedy for the biases and prejudices that plague every democracy.

Joe, I would argue, mistakes indoctrinating students - teacher teaching what to think - with teaching students to think. Uncomfortable? Yes. But so is the uncritical, prejudiced alternative. And call me idealistic, but the possibility now, with online forums and other ways to include parents and communities in classroom debates about real-worldly issues instead of unreal schooly ones - that possibility, to me, points to schools as true centers of learning, not just for students, but for communities.

Back to Lolita. Most people, first of all, probably haven’t read it, and so are arguing from a position of misinformation, at best, or at worst, of ignorance. I just finished it for the fourth or fifth time. It is every bit as disturbing as it was the first time. It shows the dangerous consequences of young girls not conscious of the effects of their fashions and attitudes; it shows how deceptively normal and respectable pedophiles can be; it uses no curse words, no vulgarities, and generally does not dwell on carnal scenes. More interestingly, though, its fictional editor, in the preface, claims the novel contains a “moral apotheosis,” while Nabokov himself, in the cagey Afterword, claims his novel has no moral at all. That contradiction alone opens up a discussion.

And in the meantime, our students, increasingly out there blogging and tweeting and face(book)ing the ever-more-porous public world, are learning, in the safety of a modern classic, a few lessons that might save them from becoming an addition to the statistics above.

I suppose I could stick to the safe, and teach them to identify oxymorons so they get higher SAT scores. But I’d rather help them learn not to be world-ignorant morons period. Significantly, the word “moron,” according to my Leopard dictionary, originated in “the early 20th century (as a medical term denoting an adult with a mental age of about 8–12): from Greek mōron, neuter of mōros ‘foolish.’” We can keep ignoring the realities of life after age 12 in our schools at our own - and our students’ - peril.

The funny thing? My students are a matter of months away from being legal adults. Doesn’t that underline how weird it is to treat them like children until the very last minute of their minority? And doesn’t that set them up to be quite the naive young adults when they walk, all vulnerable, into the real world after graduation? It’s all so unreal - and we’re talking schools here, so that’s hardly surprising - but sheesh, this goes beyond unreal to surreal.

Photo by macropoulos