How I Learned to Drive and Lolita: A Comparative Study of Social and Cultural Myths

Abstract

This paper discusses how victimizers are created by different social circumstances; these victimizers, in turn, make victims and other victimizers. The main question of the paper is "who is to be blamed and why?" This study aims at demonstrating how culture creates myths that define social concepts about victim and victimizer. The study follows a comparative approach based on a comparison between the play How I Learned to Drive (1997) by Paula Vogel and the novel Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov; the comparison leads to the conclusion that family, society, and media should collaborate to change these myths. The comparative approach is based on the theory of adaptation, and the whole study employs a qualitative analysis between the two texts. Vogel is a modern American playwright. She responds to classical texts and adapts them to create new stories. She adapts in order to question historical and cultural myths. She admires Nabokov’s novel Lolita; Nabokov is a Russian American writer. She retells Lolita that is a story of pedophilia, but she treats the subject of pedophilia in How I Learned to Drive from a completely different angle.