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Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Robu Diana

Title, Author & Publication Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov. It was first published by Olympia Press of France in 1955. Currently the novel is published by Random House of New York. Setting The events of the novel Lolita take place through the late 1940s and early 1950s. The story begins in the south of France and then moves to America where it ranges through a series of nondescript towns. Characters Humbert Humbert: the protagonist of the novel, H.H. is a well educated European with a history of mental instability and a fondness for adolescent girls. Humbert becomes obsessed with the 12 year old daughter of his landlady, and all ensuing events spring from this passionate fixation. Dolores Haze (Lolita): the ultimate victim of the novel, Lolita is the object of H.H.s pedophilia. Dolores is kidnapped by H.H. and is stripped of her childhood. She becomes a precocious and manipulative girl who uses her power over H.H. to satisfy her childlike desires. Plot Lolita is the fictional memoir of Humbert Humbert. The story traces the growing obsession of an older man with an adolescent girl. As the relationship between Dolores and Humbert develops, the reader sees the dangerous nature of obsession and the terrible consequences to the victim.

Dolores (Lolita) Haze - The novels eponymous nymphet. An adolescent, she is seductive, flirtatious, and capricious, and she initially finds herself attracted to Humbert, competing with her mother for his affections. However, when his demands become more pressing, and as she spends more time with children her own age, she begins to tire of him. Humbert attempts to educate her, but she remains attached to American popular culture and unimpressed with his cultured ideas. Eventually, she runs off with Clare Quilty, but he abandons her after she refuses to participate in child pornography. She eventually marries Dick Schiller and dies in childbirth.

Lolita at first sight: [] without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.(1.10.11) Humbert immediately regards Lolita as an incarnation of Annabel Leigh, a second chance at lust. Most importantly, the first sight of Lolita is through his eyes, as are all sights of her. We do not know Lolita through any perspective other than Humbert's highly subjective one thus to talk about Lolita is to talk about Humbert's thoughts about Lolita. It's important to remember that over the course of the six or so years represented, Lolita changes, but Humbert does not. He is already an adult and is telling the story after it has all happened. The fact that she is a fresh nymphet of twelve-and-a-half at the beginning of the story and a haggard pregnant seventeen at the end matters a lot, especially to Humbert. He keeps close watch of her nymphet quotient remember you can't be a nymphet after fourteen. As Lolita reaches the ripe old age of fourteen, Humbert notes the changes: Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an unwashed face. (2.14.2)

Lolita is a fantasy, a nymphet, and a figment of Humbert's past, a reincarnation of his lost Annabel, and a girl whose "true nature" as a nymphet, in Humbert's words, "is not human [] but demoniac." Because "Lolita" has become synonymous with tween seductress, the reader is challenged to understand the character beyond the cultural reference which does not reflect the fact the she is, after all, a victim and not a siren. (In an interview, Nabokov said he was "probably responsible for the odd fact that people do not name their daughters Lolita any more" (source: James Kincaid, "Lolita at Middle Age"). Do ya think?!

Lolita also changes a lot, going from the skinny-armed, freckle-faced, foul-mouthed animated girl (and icon of all nymphets) to a hugely pregnant, jaded married woman just trying to survive. The pop culture abundance and shallowness of her youth becomes a blue-collar struggle against scarcity.
But beyond Humbert's designation as "nymphet," Lolita is an ordinary North American girlchild real name: Dolores Haze who loves cheesy pop music, Hollywood melodramas, teeny-bopper magazines, cottage cheese, and bubble gum. She "it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster" (2.1.7). At times she is downright boring, bratty, and gross: "There she would be, a typical kid, picking her nose" (2.1.17). Lolita curses and loves slang (words like "revolting," "super," "luscious," "goon," and "drip"), something Humbert is willing to overlook for all his love of fancy talk, Latin references, and multisyllabic words. Despite her casual air and teenage aloofness, Lolita is deeply damaged. Though she makes jokey references to having been "daisy-fresh" (1.32.33) before he defiled her, Lolita and Humbert both know that he has ruined her.

Central to Humbert's defense is that Lolita is already corrupted when he gets to her, no longer a virgin, and therefore, in his mind, fair game. Part of how he sells this image of her is not only by detailing her numerous risqu sexual experiences but also by presenting her as the ultimate shallow consumer: [Lolita] believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Land or Screen LandStarasil Starves Pimples, or "You better watch out if you're wearing shirttails outside your jeans, gals, because Jill says you shouldn't. If a roadside sign said: VISIT OUR GIFTSHOPwe had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. (2.1.7) Lolita, as a typical American teenager has a deep affection for the shallow and meaningless culture industry, which already implies a sort of loss of purity. That she doesn't always comply with Humbert's appetite for sex is a source of enormous frustration to him; along these lines, he describes her as "A combination of navet and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat" (2.1.7).

Ultimately, Lolita is a tough character to puzzle out because she simply does not easily fit into the victim category. She is, in spite of her treatment under Humbert, a very strong figure. It is certainly notable that she initiates the first sexual encounter according to him, at least. From that moment on, she figures out how to get (almost) whatever she wants out of Humbert new clothes, magazines, trinkets, and long vacations. She takes her victimization and uses it against him, teasing him for being a rapist and predator, even accusing him of murdering her "mummy."

But she doesn't run away until deep into their relationship, despite ample opportunity. When she does finally run away, it's into the arms of another predator, Clare Quilty. In her final encounter with Humbert, she is a disillusioned but practical young woman. She loves her husband (though isn't crazy about him as she was Clare Quilty) and bears no grudge against Humbert. She knows that what he did to her was deeply wrong he "broke" her life, as she puts it but finds hope in her relationship with her husband Dick and the impending birth of her baby.
It is dark to realize that as the novel begins, Lolita is already dead; but even the most astute reader would not understand that point from the Foreword, where her death (and that of her child) is announced: "Mrs. 'Richard F. Schiller' died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952" (Fore.3).

Lolita Although the name Lolita has become synonymous with underage sexpot, Nabokovs Lolita is simply a stubborn child. She is neither very beautiful nor particularly charming, and Humbert often remarks on her skinny arms, freckles, vulgar language, and unladylike behavior. Lolita attracts the depraved Humbert not because she is precocious or beautiful, but because she is a nymphet, Humberts ideal combination of childishness and the first blushes of womanhood. To nonpedophiles, Lolita would be a rather ordinary twelve-year-old girl. Her ordinariness is a constant source of frustration for Humbert, and she consistently thwarts his attempts to educate her and make her more sophisticated. She adores popular culture, enjoys mingling freely with other people, and, like most prepubescent girls, has a tendency toward the dramatic. However, when she shouts and rebels against Humbert, she exhibits more than the frustration of an ordinary adolescent: sheclearly feels trapped by her arrangement with Humbert, but she is powerless to extricate herself.

Lolita changes radically throughout the novel, despite aging only about six years. At the beginning, she is an innocent, though sexually experienced child of twelve. Humbert forces her transition into a more fully sexual being, but she never seems to acknowledge that her sexual activities with Humbert are very different from her fooling around with Charlie in the bushes at summer camp. By the end of the novel, she has become a worn-out, pregnant wife of a laborer. Throughout her life, Lolita sustains an almost complete lack of self-awareness. As an adult, she recollects her time with Humbert dispassionately and doesnt seem to hold a grudge against either him or Quilty for ruining her childhood. Her attitude suggests that as a child she had nothing for them to steal, nothing important enough to value. Her refusal to look too deeply within herself, and her tendency to look forward rather than backward, might represent typically American traits, but Humbert also deserves part of the blame. Humbert objectifies Lolita, and he robs her of any sense of self. Lolita exists only as the object of his obsession, never as an individual. The lack of self-awareness in a child is typical and often charming. In the adult Lolita, the absence of self-awareness seems tragic.

. While Humbert slavishly worships and idealizes Lolita, Quilty takes her for granted and wishes to denigrate her through pornography. Humbert paints himself as a man in love, while Quilty is, in many ways, a more typical pedophile. Charlotte is not particularly fond of Lolita. Although Lolitas adolescent tantrums certainly dont make her a very likeable child, Charlottes distain signals a greater lack of motherly concern than normal. Charlotte seems to see Lolita as a threat, almost as competition, and she sends Lolita to camp to keep her from hindering her romantic plans for Humbert. Humbert, of course, sees Charlotte only as an obstacle to his romantic plans for Lolita. Though Charlotte is not an overtly kind and wonderful mother, her presence does protect Lolita when Charlotte dies, Humbert is free to kidnap Lolita and change her life forever.

The Story

Troubled narrator, Humbert,, falls in love with a pubescent girl - Lolita Marries girls mother to get close to Lolita. Mother dies, Humbert and Lolita embark on romance filled road trip. Between protagonist they are lovers, for world they are fatherdaughter. Eventually Lolita, with the help of another older lover, Quilty, runs away and later marries a peer.
Humbert learns of Quiltys relationship and murders him.

Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the texts major themes.

Butterflies
Images of and references to butterflies and lepidopterology, the study of butterflies and moths, appear throughout the novel, emphasizing not only the physical similarities between the fragile insect and young Lolita but also the distant and clinical way in which Humbert views his lovely prey. He effectively studies, captures, and pins them down, destroying the very delicate, living quality he so adores. Virtually every time Humbert describes a nymphet, he uses such terms as frail, fragile, supple, silky, or fairylike, all of which could just as easily describe butterflies. Like butterflies, nymphets are elusive, becoming ordinary teenagers in the blink of an eye. Lolita, in particular, undergoes a significant metamorphosis, changing from innocent girl-child to exhausted wife and mother-to-be. Next to such delicate and mercurial creatures, Humbert becomes aware of his own monstrosity, often referring to himself as a lumbering brute.

Nabokov on Lolita

Nabokov rated the book highly. In an interview for BBC Television in 1962, he said: Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult bookthe book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.[62] Over a year later, in an interview for Playboy, he said: I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzleits composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other works at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.[63] In the same year, in an interview with Life, Nabokov was asked which of his writings had most pleased him. He answered: I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglowperhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.[64]

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-leeta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

The book's title may be Lolita, but it really should be Humbert's Lolita, because we never get a chance to hear from her at all. On that note, some critics differentiate "Dolores" (a character we never actually meet) from "Lolita," who is a projection of Humbert's fantasy . There are very few direct quotations from Lolita in the text, though he does admit that he likes her slangy language in a cutesy, condescending sort of way. Ultimately, he doesn't really care what she has to say. During the entire time they live together, Lolita's direct speech is almost completely absent. Of course, he also picks and chooses what to recall of Lolita's words. Of all the characters, Quilty is the only one who earns Humbert's admiration, as Humbert explains: [] the tone of his brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well-read. He knew French. He was versed in logodaedaly and logomancy.

We know Lolita's looks matter a lot. You can't go many pages without reading one of Humbert's detailed physical descriptions, and her qualification for nymphet status depends almost entirely on her appearance. But we can neverreally know what Lolita looks like because she is always described through Humbert's highly erotic subjective lens. When he attempts to give us any objective details about her appearance, he lapses into lust, which colors all images of her: Only in the tritest of terms [] can I describe Lo's features: I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked red candy, the lower one prettily plump. (1.11.13) Not exactly an impartial collection of facts.

Defining the Archetype of the Nymphet

Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita has faced numerous criticism, judgments and banishment from popular culture, making its very utterance unmentionable in day-to-day society and an invocation of lust, innocence, and taboo. However Nabokov is not the only writer to have written on relations between older men and what Nabokov described best as a nymphethe is only the most infamous. Nabokov first coined the term nymphet in 1955 in his novel Lolita. The term was used in reference to maidens who were deemed nymphic in nature; Nabokov initially defined the nymphet as a being Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic.[1] However, this definition is taken from the beginning of the novel, and as the book progresses it is revealed through the actions and sentiments of the protagonist, Humbert Humbert, that this initial definition of the nymphet is neither steadfast nor completely accurate.

Defining the Archetype: Nymphic, , nymphetsare words that derive from the alluring, entrancing, bewitching deity, the Ancient Greek nymph. The nymph was a young female mystical being, usually associate with nature that entranced lone travelers. While there are many Greek myths that tell of the nymphs and their exploits, one of the most well known tales is Apollonius Rhodius Argonautica. Vladimir Nabokov and William Faulkner have attempted to resurrect the essence of the nymph in their writing. Nymphets are literary creations that exist with a partner paradigm. Similar to the nymph victims of Ancient Greece, contemporary characters that suffer from nympholepsy, an obsession with a nymph or nymphet, are male. However, different from Ancient Greece, nymphets do not exist in their own right. Nymphets are the product a male that projects his own image onto particular individuals and the individual engaging in the males fantasy. While Nabokov asserted his own definition of the nymphet in his 1956 publication of Lolita as being Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic, this definition contradicts itself later in the novel and is never amended.[2] The most famous case of nympholepsy in contemporary literature and culture is Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita. Lolita has faced numerous public and literary criticism for its content describing a love affair between thirty-six-year-old European Humbert Humbert and the twelve-year-old American Dolores Haze, also known as Lolita. Initially unable to be published in the United States due to its content, Lolita first found a home in France with Olympian Press in June of 1955

Nabokov paved the way with Lolita to analyze the archetype of the nymphet. Without the notoriety and attention Lolita received, the subject of nympholepsy would not be nearly as well known as it is in todays society. Today Lolita is not just the name of a book, it is a name known worldwide from Lolita fashion in Japan to a Lolita make-up collection in the United States that boasts a lipstick entitled Underage Red. However, with this notoriety, Lolita and the subject of nympholepsy have been scrutinized, criticized, and ultimately misinterpreted, as images of pornography and pedophilia become synonymous with the word Lolita. Naming criminal cases The Long Island Lolita and contemporary books using Lolita as a universal symbol for the sexualization of youth, demonstrates not only a negative interpretation but also an incorrect interpretation of the worlds most famous nymphet. Nympholepsy is not meant to exist within the real world. It is a psychosis that afflicts literary characters and the nymphets that are imagined, do not exist and cannot exist in the world. After all, you cannot depict something that only exists within the minds eye.

Adaptations [edit] Lolita has been filmed twice, been a musical, four stage-plays, one completed opera, and two ballets. There is also Nabokov's unfilmed (and re-edited) screenplay, an uncompleted opera based on the work, and an "imagined opera" which combines elements of opera and dance. Lolita was made in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick, and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and Sue Lyon as Lolita; Nabokov was nominated for an Academy Awardfor his work on this film's adapted screenplay, although little of this work reached the screen, his screenplay having been thoroughly rewritten by Stanley Kubrick and James Harris, though neither took credit. The film greatly expanded the character of Clare Quilty, and removed all references to Humbert's obsession with young girls before meeting Dolores. The 1997 film Lolita was directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain, and Melanie Griffith. It received mixed reviews. It was delayed for more than a year because of its controversial subject matter, and was not released in Australia until 1999. Multiple critics noted that this film removed all elements of dark comedy from the story. In Salon, Charles Taylor wrote that it "replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism."[66]

Bibliography
http://journals.english.ucsb.edu/index.php/Emergence/artic le/view/28/91