From Lolita to Where Have You Been? The hypersexualization of the female teenager in Nabokov’s novel & Oates’s short story

Abstract

This essay will consist in a study of the hypersexualization of female teenagers in North American Literature. The examples that will be analyzed are Nabokov’s novel Lolita and Oates’s short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? In order to clarify if the female teenagers of these stories (Lolita and Connie, respectively) are actually represented in a hypersexualized way, we will focus our attention in certain points of the narrative (e.g.: the description of the female teenagers and the representation of female teenagehood) which will be a key to understand the role and portrayal of men and women in the North American society reflected in Lolita and Where Have You Been? Moreover, we will also observe how the male protagonists (Humbert Humbert and Arnold Friend, respectively) see the girls in order to figure out their obsessions and the justification of the sexual aggressions they finally commit (and their apparently lack of regret) are biased by the patriarchal society in which all the characters inhabit. Finally, another point we will take into consideration in this essay is the difference between the representation of men and women in these stories, which is displayed in several evidences such as: the age gap between the male and the female protagonists or the fact that these adolescents are the victims of the assaults perpetrated by men. To sum up, our purpose is to study how female teenagehood is depicted in these examples of American literature