Nabokov’s Women

David Larmour’s chapter, “Reading the Woman on the Train,”

Rampton’s “Jealously Guarded Secrets: Nabokov’s Women and the Vicissitudes of Desire,”

the feminine in Nabokov as “a coded text that, although authored by Nabokov and his male narrators, takes on a significance which ulimately remains beyond their cognitive reach

wanderer, a stranger, a marginal figure never to reach ‘the blessed land, where at last she would be understood.’

investigates the autobiographical figure of his Swiss governess Cecile Miauton, also known as Mademoiselle O, a seemingly unlikely candidate for Nabokov’s alter ego and another woman to join the list of Nabokovian heroines,

xcept those like Claire Bishop in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight whose “imagination was of a particularly strong, almost masculine quality”

from the beginning of his career, Nabokov associated writing with maleness and masculinity

“literary transvestism” or “narrative cross-dressing”—a scenario where a solipsistic narrator imagines possessing the power of a “lady-writer’s pen,” an instrument he simultaneously despises, envies, and desires

some cases, this oblique or mediated mode of expression is a sign of the female character’s marginality or lack of status in the male character’s perspective, but in other cases, it is this very lack of face-to-face presence that gives the female’s communication special force.

explores the notion of female communicative agency