The Secret Diary of Dolores Haze: Lolita as Re(a)d

Abstract

In this article, I explore the narrative structure of Little Red Riding Hood to re-imagine Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1958) using Vladimir Propp’s analyses of folk and fairy tales. In producing The Secret Diary of Dolores Haze, a critical feminist response to the novel in the form of a fictive autoethnographic diary, I argue that through arts-based inquiry I discovered/uncovered Dolores (Lolita) as Red. I wrote this fictive diary to loosen the myth of blameworthiness attached to Dolores’s story by giving her a voice. Equally important, arts-based inquiry offers the researcher new ways of understanding data through creative production.