Scenes of Instruction: Representations of the American Girl in European Twentieth-Century Literature

In Journey to the End of the Night (1932) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov, and Birthday Letters (1998) by Ted Hughes, the American girl is represented with ambiguous appeal. Three cultural constructions, the femme fatale, the "nymph," and the femme fragile, emerge from these works in which the European intellectual attempts to "educate" the American girl. However, the American girl challenges her European "benefactor" through her New World independence and expressivity. Indeed, the American girl becomes the embodiment of everything Europe does not, cannot, understand about America, her femininity a marker of the unattainable, the obscure and the attractive.