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

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]