Cultural References
Critic Alexander Dolinin proposed in 2005 that Frank La Salle and Florence Sally Horner were the real life prototypes of Humbert Humbert and Dolores "Lolita" Haze from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Though Nabokov had already used the same basic idea — that of a child molester and his victim booking into a hotel as man and daughter — in his then unpublished 1939 work Volshebnik (Волшебник), it is still possible that he drew on the details of the Florence Horner case in writing Lolita. An English translation of Volshebnik was published in 1985 as The Enchanter. Nabokov explicitly mentions this case in Chapter 33, Part II of Lolita: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?"
Read more about this topic: Florence Sally Horner
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“The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values.... Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.”
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