Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010535, Sun, 7 Nov 2004 11:27:24 -0800

Subject
Fw: More on Marygold
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----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: don barton johnson
Sent: Sunday, November 07, 2004 5:54 AM
Subject: More on Marygold


Three other entries on Marygold:



Image of Caltha palustris (Ranunculaceae )from
Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé
Flora von Deutschland Österreich und derSchweiz.1885, Gera, Germany
Index of all images Image of Caltha palustris (Ranunculaceae )
Screen size image (497 x 800 pixels) 87,800 Bytes
300 dpi scan (1462 x 2353 pixels) 739,662 Byt


Sumpfdotterblume - Marsh Marygold
Caltha palustris

Ada’s sentence on souci d’eau then carries on to suggest synonyms Fowlie could have used, such as “mollyblob, marybud, maybubble.” Marybud does mean “marigold,” and May blob “marsh marigold,” but the invented “mollyblob” and “maybubble” point instead to Molly Bloom’s famous musing on what a character in Ada will later term “popping the hymen” (523): “and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too purply” (Ulysses 633, 18.1125-28). Nabokov confirms the allusion to this most celebrated of interior monologues by introducing as topics of Ada’s arcane disquisitions “a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device-- . . . monologue intérieur” (61). ( Part One, ch. 10, Afternote: ADA on Line, B.Boyd)