From Lolita to Fang Siqi: Sabotaging the Narrative of Rape across Cultures

ABSTRACT

This article reads the Chinese-language novel Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love (Fang Siqi de Chulian Leyuan) against the English classic Lolita by focusing on three areas where the novels converge: the intertwinement of rape and romantic discourses of love, the relationship between rape and masculinity, and the dynamics of vulnerability, victimization and agency. The analysis reveals that as a time-tested classic in English literature, Lolita is in fact rather conventional as a rape text. In contrast, Fang Siqi articulates rape in a way that challenges conventional frames of thinking and representations of the experience of rape and sexual violation. In many ways, Fang Siqi can be read as a retort to Lolita. Despite the fact that the novel relies equally on the traditional binaries of the male sexual predator and the adolescent female victim, Fang Siqi nonetheless sabotages conventional rape paradigms embodied in Lolita – by turning the clichéd love narrative upside down, by subverting masculinity and male dominance on various levels, and by linking personal agency to collective resistance and action. Writing Fang Siqi with Lolita in mind, the Taiwanese author Lin Yihan stands in a rather provocative posture vis-à-vis Vladimir Nabokov, self-consciously pitting herself against theworld literary giant by bringing in the frequently-absent but much-needed female perspective to the rape narrative.

Acknowledgments

The writing of the article is funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Grant (Grant No.: 18YJC752028).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. After finishing writing the book toward the end of 1953, Vladimir Nabokov began searching for a publisher in the spring of 1954. The novel was rejected by a number of publishers in the United States before being published in 1955 by the Olympia Press in Paris, France, which had distributed books not allowed in the English-speaking world. Since the Olympia Press was a small publisher known for the publication of pornography, Lolita, with only 5000 copies, did not receive reviews from significant magazines. Controversy began to build up around the book, generating growing demand for the book to be published in the United States. Upon its publication on August 18, 1958 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in the U.S., Lolita became a sensational hit and a best seller.

2. This is not because rape is anything new in Chinese-language fiction, but because it is often included as part of a story, but is never quite able to be the story itself. Another reason is that in much modern and contemporary Chinese fiction, rape is often not interpreted as rape, but as part of a larger discourse. This, of course, has to do with the practice of literary interpretation. In her article “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse”, for instance, Lydia Liu examines how interpretations of Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death often subsume the trope of the raped woman, and hence the question of rape and gender, under the nationalist discourse. Such kind of interpretations echo Frederic Jameson’s oft-cited article “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. They are not confined to third-world literature alone, however. Lolita, by the way, did not entirely escape the sad fate of being read as a tale about old Europe’s infatuation with the carefree youth of America. What Lin Yihan did was push the subject of rape into the spotlight, into public scrutiny, in a way that makes rape an issue on its own terms and in its own right, and is often interpreted as such, rather than as a ploy for a larger discourse (with regard to Lin’s novel, it is just not plausible to make other, different interpretations that could subsume or subvert the central question of rape).

3. The nature of the novel as a semi-autobiographical one is clarified after Lin Yihan’s suicide. Before her suicide, Lin insisted that the writing of the novel had been based on the life experiences of her friends rather than her own. It was only after her death that her parents came out and explained to the public that it was Lin’s personal experiences that had informed the lives of the victimized girls in the novel. It is understandable that Lin had tried to deny her own victimization. After all, by writing down what she had gone through, Lin was aware that they would be up for public consumption and judgment, which could amount to something like a second rape.

4. Placing Humbert in the long line of deranged heroes in American fiction, Julian Moynahan identifies the core element of Humbert’s perversity as an attitude toward time, describing Humbert’s sexual obsession with Lolita as an obsession with an echo of the past: “his pursuit, seduction, and enslavement of Dolores Haze are an attempt to reinstate in the present and preserve into the future what was irretrievably lost in the past” (35).

5. She points out that Li Guohua in the novel has a prototype in real life, referring implicitly to the mandarin teacher who raped her, believed to be a certain Mr. Chen (full name Chen Xing, or Chen Guoxing). Chen, Lin notes, also has a prototype in China’s recent literary history: Hu Lancheng.

6. The love discourse in Fang Siqi has been explored in greater depth in my essay on this novel, entitled “Rape, Victimization, and Agency in Fang Siqi’s Paradise of First Love” (Shen 2020). In addition to the love discourse, the essay also examines, in greater depth and detail, rape’s sociality and the victim’s agency.

7. In the Western context, the act of rape is sometimes tied more closely to physicality rather than sex and sexuality. Brownmiller, for instance, severs rape as violent physical assault from its conflation with sex, to foreground its oppressive and brutal dimension. Rape, according to Brownmiller, is an expression of power and domination: “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation in which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (15). That statement recalls Susan Griffin‘s fiercer and more global, earlier theorization of rape as “a form of mass terrorism” (Griffin 35). The act of desexualization is reminiscent of Foucault‘s proposal to desexualize rape as a productive form of resistance. Foucault argues that rape should not be treated any differently from other forms of physical attack such as a punch in the face (“Foucault” 200–02), an argument that feminists such as Cahill have taken issue with (“Cahill”). Understandably, Brownmiller‘s attempt to desexualize rape has also met with criticisms. In an article entitled “Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape”, for example, Winifred 1991 points out that the refusal to link rape to sex comes in response to the reactionary claim that rape is the inevitable result of a supposedly innate male aggressivity coupled with an uncontrollable sexual urge. The feminist counterargument made by Brownmiller and others, notes Woodhull, ultimately “rests on a notion of power divorced from sex, as if sex preexisted the social, from which power is said to derive” (170). According to critics such as Woodhull, sex cannot be eliminated from an analysis of rape which is “experienced by women sexually, not just as domination”, as evidenced by the testimonies of women who have been raped (171).

8. Some recent studies on rape have attempted to define rape not as a sexualized crime committed by men against women, but as a problem of hegemonic masculinity. Carine Mardorossian‘s Framing the Rape Victim, for instance, seeks to bring rape to public attention not as “a woman’s issue” but as an issue that “defines structural masculinity’s relation to femininity and not women’s relation to men” (3). Masculinity and femininity are viewed “as structural positions rather than as biological designations” (6).

9. Some critics have ventured much further by suggesting that Nabokov had transposed his passion for butterflies onto Humbert’s passion for nymphets, and that Humbert was infatuated with Lolita the way Nabokov was obsessed with butterflies. Nabokov was infatuated with hunting, collecting and classifying butterflies since his youthful time. He was a professional lepidopterist in addition to being a writer and scholar. In a 1960 article entitled “Lolita Lepidoptera”, for instance, Diana Butler draws parallels between Lolita and Nabokov’s scientific quest for a species of butterflies he discovered and named Lycaeides sublivens. This species, Butler points out, display a brown and white pattern on their downy wings, which is reminiscent of Humbert’s description of Lolita’s golden-brown limbs covered in soft down (58–84).

10. In The Fragile Scholar (2004), Geng Song, following on from; Louie, discusses literary representations of the caizi (learned scholar) model of Chinese masculinity at length, suggesting that in much of Chinese history, it is the discourse of caizi rather than the Confucian concept of junzi (gentleman) or the macho hero that is frequently sexualized and heterosexualized in romances and in popular imagination.

11. The male literary culture, however, did come under attack in the early twentieth century when intellectuals faulted the long-standing gendered elitism in China’s literary and educational practices. Complete rupture from the past was nonetheless impossible, and it is understandable that the patriarchal mind-set and misogyny have remained with men and women in modern China.

12. While language and literature are partially responsible for Siqi’s victimization, they are also what she resorts to when trying to make sense of her own traumatic experience and the predator’s behavior, only to find, however, that literature has failed her. A similar observation is made by Yiting who, upon reflecting on the years she has spent in the same building with Siqi, laments how literature has failed them (223). This scene is quoted by Lin Yihan to conclude her interview where she admits emphatically that the whole novel, from the character of Li Guohua to the act of writing itself, is a huge paradox intended to interrogate the values of truth, kindness and beauty that literature and the arts purport to champion (Lin Yihan Fangtan).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education [Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Grant (Grant No.: 18YJC752028)].

Notes on contributors

Lisa Chu Shen

Lisa Chu Shen is a Zhi Yuan Scholar at Shanghai International Studies University where she researches in the field of feminist theories and gender studies.