Like many books that have achieved classic status, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov has had its run with censorship issues when first being published for its extreme sexualization of children. Its taboo content, documenting a middle aged man’s run with perversity and his love affair with a child is unfortunately all Lolita is commonly known for. The genius behind Lolita is so easily misunderstood, stemming from the common practice of relating oneself to a novel’s characters while reading. However, Nabokov has opposed this practice of the reader several times, specifically in his essay Good Readers and Good Writers.
What then, must be considered when reading Lolita? Most notably, readers consider how they are pulled against their will to empathize with the sexual criminal, Humbert Humbert, and against his stepdaughter, the supposedly victimized Lolita. Nabokov puts the reader’s integrity to the test by making it easy to justify Humbert’s actions due to his inner dialogue, explaining the childhood events that make him the way he is. In addition, Nabokov does not grant readers the comfort of classifying Humbert Humbert as a monster, convoluting the reader’s emotions towards him and telling of a more complex character at hand.
Unlike novels such as Tropic of Cancer which can be simply boiled down to perverse sexual pursuits, Lolita is complex, witty, and devastating all at once and more than what can be understood at face value. Though often regarded as a text that critiques the fetishization of young girls, upon further analysis of Lolita’s and Humbert’s relationship there is a complex commentary on the blurred power dynamics between the two and the burden of an unhappy childhood. One might object here that Nabokov’s purposeful trivialization of Humbert’s behavior is purposefully understated to normalize male paraphilia.
In a literary review by Elizabeth Patnoe from Johns Hopskins University titled “Lolita Misrepresented, Lolita Reclaimed: Disclosing the Doubles”, Patnoe argues that “The Lolita story and its discourse have become an ongoing and revealing cultural narrative, a myth appropriated in ways that validate male sexuality and punish female sexuality, letting some people avoid the consequences of their desires as they impose those desires on others” (Patnoe 85). Patnoe refers culturally relevant. ssues, including several personal accounts of rape, relating them to Lolita’s story with the purpose to reveal that Lolita’s traumatic sexual experiences serve as an understatement to exaggerate the reality of the horrific experience. In other words, Nabokov’s tactics to “minimize such signals…. to illustrate and themize what happens when an allegedly charming, clearly powerful character wreaks his egocentricity on a weaker one. ” (Patnoe 83). For this reason, critics argue that Nabokov soliciting an empathetic reaction from the readers is to make them forget the horrors at hand.
Patnoe’s argument would only seem to be true to what Nabokov describes as the worst kind of reader in his lecture Good Readers and Good Writers: “the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. ” (Nabokov 4). Patnoe’s essay focuses primarily on a cultural understanding of the text, describing in detail the aspects of individual lives that mirror what happened to Lolita.
The foremost issue with her argument is that she too generally groups people who have experienced sexual trauma, where the text demands to be read as an individual case study. Though some books may be great due to the ease of relatedness between the reader and the novel, to inflict personal issues onto Lolita is limit the extent of a complex story, an author’s purpose in writing, and their artistry. Lolita and Humbert have a commonality which may account for their sexual problems and abnormal behavior: they both do not have proper parents to contribute to a healthy development.
Humbert in the beginning of the novel briefly glosses over major life events such as the sudden death of his mother and first lover, Annabel, which inarguably have a considerable impact on his development despite their brief mention. Annabel who is notably the same age as him during the time (Nabokov 11), is important to consider when understanding Humbert, because she is the catalyst to his taboo sexual behavior, ‘When I try to analyze my own cravings…. I am convinced, however, in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel” (Nabokov 8).
Another traumatic event in Humbert’s childhood which is glossed over is his father’s decision to send him off to boarding school: “my father gave me all the information he thought | needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycee in Lyon… I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. ” (Nabokov 7). With the abandonment of his father, Humbert had no one to confide in, setting him up to express those naturally occurring sexual curiosities in deviant channels.
Similarly, Lolita grows up with no father figure and a mother, Charlotte Haze, who spends too much time demonstrating contempt for her daughter rather than parenting her, “[Lolita] had been spiteful, if you please, at the age of one, when she used to throw her tows out of her crib so that her poor mother should keep picking them up, the villainous infant! Now, at twelve, she was a regular pest. Of course, moodiness is a common concomitant of growing up, but Lo exaggerates. ” (Nabokov 30). Both Lolita and Humbert parent’s show extreme apathy towards their children, proving their inability to coach their children on the correct sexual behavior.
In order to understand the underlying complexity of what seems like a plainly out of bounds relationship, one must examine Lolita and Humbert from a psychological point of view. Psychologists have come to a general consensus that the way a child is raised has an immense impact on how they are to behave sexually in the future (Hubble 1958; Spanier 1977; Thigpen and Fortenberry 2007). Benjamin Karpman, a Northwestern sexual psychopathy researcher, in his paper The Sexual Psychopath states: abnormal sex behavior, be it in the adult or the child, derives from the unwholesome family and social atmosphere in which the child develops.
The fault lies with the parents, who, themselves products of unhealthy repression and much involved in sexual problems, do not know and cannot set themselves to be frank and open with the child whose naive and artless curiosity should have been handled in an equally simply way. Because of the many evasions, rationalizations, and sheer prohibitions, the child is led into aberrant channels that, not being corrected, become magnified and distorted. (Karpman 194) The implication that the main characters both have to endure the burden of an unhappy childhood demonstrates that they are to blame for their perversion.
Misunderstanding Humbert and/or Lolita as sexual freaks is a gross oversimplification as they are illustrated as extremely curious individuals who lack dialogue with their parental units. Lolita’s mother lost in “her blind faith in the wisdom of her church” (Nabokov 50) fails to coach Lolita sexually with “sound religious training” (Nabokov 55) and Humbert’s suddenly cut off relationship with Annabel and missing father figure, show that their habits of seeking out replacement figures for lost love or parental figures is a manifestation of an emotionally damaged childhood.
In a typical pedophilic relationship, there is a clear distinction between who is the victim and who is the victimizer. In Lolita this power dynamic is missing and both Lolita and Humbert are shown to be the victimized and victimizers. At first, readers sympathize with Lolita because Humbert is portrayed as a power hungry, dominant man, “I was… an exceptionally handsome male… I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose” (Nabokov 16).
However, once Lolita realizes that Humbert is in love with her, she uses this power to manipulate him to no end, But I was weak, I was not wise, my school-girl nymphet had me in thrall. With the human element dwindling, the passion, the tenderness, and the torture only increased; and of this she took advantage…. she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not live more than a few days in a row, and which, because of the very nature of love’s languor, I could not obtain by force. Nabokov 121) Since Lolita does not understand all of the emotions that come with sex, she is easily able to use it to manipulate Humbert into giving her money and more freedom. When Lolita falls ill, she finds the opportunity to escape with another old perverted man, Clare Quilty.
Lolita does not escape for sexual freedom like the readers would expect but to have fun with another man, deceiving Humbert, who despite his convoluted way of expressing so – truly loves her: “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! (Nabokov 189). Lolita does not seem to be the victim anymore, as it is revealed that she has been using organizing her escape with Quilty this whole time (Nabokov 166). At the same time the audience begins to feel bad for Humbert. He spends the next next several years driving himself crazy over Lolita: “plunge into the freedom of sudden insanity… My heart was a hysterical organ” (Nabokov 171), and then out of the blue, she has the nerve to write him a letter asking him for money, revealing that she has been married and pregnant.
Lolita is in no way useless and uses men to get her way. The misunderstanding of Lolita is very persistent with Nabokov’s strategic manipulation of the reader’s moral pride to focus on the artistry of the book over the shocking events that occur. When reading the story of Lolita, it is important to implement the tenets of being a good reader as Nabokov has outlined in his lecture Good Readers and Good Writers, and detach oneself from relating to the characters of the book.
Only when the reader recognizes that the story is not a run of the mill obscenity can they realize the complex nature of the relationships portrayed in the novel and the emotional response it evokes from its readers. Lolita is about a lot of things, but one of the things it is definitely not is plain smutty book that should be known for its perversity. Rather, upon further examination of the relationships in Lolita, and the lines of power that typically exist in a nuclear family, can the genius of how Nabokov conveys the ins and outs of human relations be revealed.