![]() ![]() What happened to blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood? What became of childhood innocence? Without a doubt, the upheavals of the 1960's - from divorce and the breakdown of the family, to women's liberation and increased employment - weakened the protective membrane that once sheltered children from precocious experience and knowledge of the adult world. There is no doubt that 9-, 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds of the 1980's have more in common with Lolita, at least in what they know, than with those guileless and innocent creatures in their shiny Mary Janes and pigtails, their scraped knees and trusting ways that were called children not so long ago.īut if parents are no longer surprised, many are still distressed and genuinely con-fused about whether their children are being inevitably cheated out of childhood or whether some good may come from this early worldliness. The public of 1956 was outraged not only by the thought of early sex but also by the image of a child so knowing, jaded and unchildlike. ![]() Twenty-five years after ''Lolita's'' publication, as Edward Albee's dramatic adaptation prepares to open on Broadway, Nabokov's vision of American childhood seems nothing if not prescient. Once upon a time, in the Golden Age of Innocence, an imaginary 12-year-old girl from New England named Lolita slept with a middle-aged European intellectual named Humbert Humbert and shocked American sensibilities the daily reviewer of The New York Times called Vladimir Nabokov's novel ''repulsive'' and ''disgusting.'' ![]()
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