Dear Colleagues,

 

This is the letter I wrote today to the Christian Science Monitor, in response to S. Mintz’s editorial.

 

Humble regards,

David Powelstock

 


From: David Powelstock [mailto:pstock@brandeis.edu]
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:28 PM
To: 'letters@thenewstribune.com'
Subject: Steve Mintz "The Golden Age of Childhood?"


 

To the Editor,

 

I applaud Steven Mintz’s demystification of our era’s romanticization of the 1950s, an era of appalling hypocrisy.  But am stunned, utterly stunned that a respected professor of history could have so profoundly misrepresented—or misread—Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita.  To suggest that this novel, a masterpiece of such subtle and powerful moral impact was in any way complicit in the reprehensible commercializing eroticization of children that it so persuasively indicts is obscene.  It borders on the farcical that Professor Mintz should adduce to his putatively moral ends this novel, the first and perhaps the most eloquent critique of the growing appropriation of defenseless childhood to the corrupt and selfish ends of adults.  I wonder if Prof. Mintz has even read Lolita.  Nabokov’s masterpiece is not symptomatic, but if anything diagnostic of the 1950s.

 

Sincerely,

David Powelstock