M.Wildish: OED entry: nymphet
1. young wife,
bride[...];2.marriageable maiden; 3. daughter-in-law;4. young girl;5. Nymph
or goddess of lower rank, esp. of springs: hence, poetically, water, in mystical
theology; applied to souls seeking birth; 6. doll, puppet; ; 7. young
bee or wasp: in the pupa stage; 8. winged male of the ant; 9.
kind of mollusc; 10. point of the ploughshare; 11.hollow between the under-lip
and chin: depression on the shoulder of horses; 12. opening
rosebud; 13. clitoris;14. niche.
JM:: It seems that item 5 is prevalent in Ada
[ "nymphs ...elemental limpidity since the
similarities of young bodies of water are but murmurs of natural innocence and
double-talk mirrors"] Various authorial hints
indicate that OED items 7,9,10,11,13 are to be desconsidered [ or
else, why would there be a "Mr.Nymphobottomus"?..."the celebrated old rascal who drew his diminutive nudes invariably
from behind — fig-picking, peach-buttocked nymphets straining upward, or else
rock-climbing girl scouts in bursting shorts — [...] schoolgirls and poolgirls ..." ]
Even so, at last, I understand the original meaning of nymphomania.
But how did Dr. Van Veen see Ada, or
conceptualize nymphomania is unclear: "A diligent student of case histories, Dr Van Veen
never quite managed to match ardent twelve-year-old Ada with a non-delinquent,
non-nymphomaniac, mentally highly developed, spiritually happy and normal
English child in his files."
.......................................
After having concluded that "nymphets", in "Lolita" are
unrelated to butterflies and moths, there are two curious entries on "nymphalic"
insects, in ADA. The first might simply indicate metaphoric variations taking wing
from Proustian themes ( Odette, Guermantes...), somehow related
to the gipsy Carmen and to Lolita.
Bobby Ann Mason connects this carmen-larva in Ada to
Lolita through pedophile Zemski (Insects and Incest, 1974,
"Nabokov's Garden). I didn't check in Boyd's annotations,
but Google showed me a "Nymphalis" butterfly, though: it is
the "Mourning cloak" or the "Camberwell beauty"... I found
no description of a
"N.carmen" butterfly.
The Zemski genealogy which I checked following B.A.Mason was
more informative because it refers not only to an ancestor called Daria, ie
"Dolly" but also to a special "blue" that reminds Van of Proustian
themes*.
The second example has Van call Ada "his butterfly" (in
other moments she was a "nymphet"!), while the insect in question is an
"imitation Vanessa" ...
(a) "A freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen
was fanning its lemon and amber-brown wings on a sunlit patch of grating,
only to be choked with one nip by the nimble fingers of enraptured and heartless
Ada; the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him, into an elephantoid mummy with a
comically encased trunk of the guermantoid type;"
(b) "Ada [...] pointed
out some accursed insect that had settled on an aspen trunk.(Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically
rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white
foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly
directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best
known imitators. In Ada’s angry hand.)...‘Tomorrow
you’ll come here with your green net,’ said Van bitterly, ‘my
butterfly.’"
.............................
* Van’s maternal grandmother Daria (‘Dolly’) Durmanov, was
the "daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, who had married,
in 1824, Mary O’Reilly... Dolly, an only child... married in 1840, at the tender
and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan Durmanov."
[...]
"A former viceroy of Estoty, Prince Ivan Temnosiniy...had a
millennium-old name that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’[...]Van could not help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet
background [..] In later years he had never been able to reread Proust [...]
without a roll-wave of surfeit [...]; yet his favorite purple passage remained
the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his adjacent
ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind...
Prince Vseslav Zemski (1699-1797) was "a
friend of Linnaeus and author of Flora Ladorica, who was portrayed in
rich oil holding his barely pubescent bride and her blond doll in his satin
lap....the rose-bud-lover...[...]
Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls
[...].
The Zemskis were terrible rakes (razvratniki), one of them
loved small girls, and another raffolait d’une de ses juments [...]
Concerning Lucette, Van wondered
"whether she had become fat and freckled, or had
joined the graceful Zemski group of
nymphs."