Starving Artist–I think you would find a re-read of Lolita very interesting, and I do not mean that in a snotty or snarky way at all.
Humbert uses every argument you have articulated plus some–that other cultures marry young, that Juliet was 12, that some special young girls really want sex, that some special young girls are able to have relationships, that the aristocracy in particular are in favor of young marriages to consolidate kingdoms and insure heirs, that there are plenty of applauded examples in history and literature, etc.
These arguments, as you have noted, are not crazy–there is a basis for these views–there have been and are cultures where young girls marry, there are girls who mature at an outlier young age, there is a thin line between admiring a beautiful 12 yo, a beautiful 14 yo, a beautiful 18 yo–nature does not stamp a “do not use before” date on people.
Part of the reason the book is so effective (and a big reason why people think it promotes pedophilia) is that Humbert uses these really pretty good arguments to justify his desires and actions–Nabokov truly gives these arguments the best possible spin they can take–but still condemns Humbert. They are on a slippery slope continuum, anecdotal and reliant on exceptionalist examples. On reread, you will see all of your points being made by Humbert–they are true, but twisted by Humbert they are horrifying.
Lolita cries every night. Nothing in Humbert’s arguments can justify that.
I also had a similar reaction when I started it around age seventeen. Not that I was exactly pedo bait, but I thought of myself as totally special, like, I could be a delicate sexy nymphet, too. Because there had to be something special and ethereal about HH’s love for Lolita–it wasn’t just skeeviness. It was based on something deep and boring prudish types just didn’t understand that love could be weird and transgressive, and why do we have to have boundaries? And now I just look back and feel creeped out that I ever thought that way.
Starving Artist, I don’t think Humbert qualifies as a hebephile. He describes Lolita as being undeveloped–she has no breasts, no hips, nothing that would mark her as adult looking. Yes, some twelve year olds do menstruate and look older, but Lolita wasn’t one of them.
Thanks for your comments, HS. I’ve thought from time to time that I need to read Lolita again, but for some reason never get around to arsing myself to go get it. I think part of the reason is that, having read it before, I should spend the time reading something I’m not already familiar with, and secondarily, frankly, I’m somewhat put off by the scowls I know I’ll get and the mental images I’ll create when I, a sixty-one year old guy, approach the register or library checkout counter holding a copy of Lolita in my hands.
But perhaps you’re right, maybe I need to reread the book from the perspective of adulthood in order to see it for what it really is. It’s difficult from the male perspective, in which sex is such a strong drive, almost always desireable and not physically harmful (in the main), to understand the psychic pain that it can cause young girls and women under the wrong circumstances, or even that it causes that psychic pain. For many men this is something that has to be learned from outside observation in the form of anecdotal evidence from the victims rather than from some sort of innate understanding. Now that I know better I would likely interpret the book in a completely different light than the action/adventure/travelogue accounting of love gone bad that I viewed it as being when I was 14…assuming I can keep myself from being distracted by the elegance of Nobokov’s prose, that is.
And on preview, yes, FS, Lolita was on the cusp of adolescence, but Humbert’s love for her did not diminish as she grew older. IIRC, they were together for a couple of years or so and he still wanted her back when she was 17 and pregnant from another man. (Come to think of it, I believe this was the basis for my earlier comment that Humbert was driven more by love for Lolita than he was by a desire for pubescent or prepubescent girls.)
Did he? I thought he wanted her back. And to the degree that the luster had worn off, I attributed that to what I would now call the trailer-park type of life she had fallen into – a life more attributable to Quilty than to Humbert, btw, and yet Quilty largely gets a pass.
I don’t remember the timeline exactly, but they were on the road together for a full year, and then they go to Ramsdale. I don’t know how long they stay there but I figure it’s only a few months, and it’s definitely not a whole school year. Then they’re back on the road where they are tailed by Quilty. Eventually she runs off.
He doesn’t want her sexually, but he does love her. So he realizes she doesn’t love him and he needs to get out of her life.
Well, he does keep pointing out that he needs to spend as much time with her as possible before she starts to mature. This is part of why he’s so upset when she goes to summer camp.
Plus he spends the whole book talking about how he’s only attracted to nymphets. And then again, he talks about how in terms of personality he has contempt for Lolita and her low class tastes–the magazines and movie stars she loves, the way she speaks, the food she likes. In his eyes, he loves to look at her and sexually violate her, but in terms of a human being, he definitely has contempt for her. Where did you get that he loved her as a person and not as a warm body?
I’ll take your word for that as I don’t remember the book that well. Still, IIRC, he was something of a tortured soul, living a solitary life while pining in middle age over the loss of a childhood love that was never consumated. And while a person could possibly argue that he was more troubled by the fact that that relationship was never physically consumated than he was by the loss of the girl herself, it could also be argued that Humbert simply never progressed emotionally and in terms of who attracted him because he never got past that loss. He may never have been able to learn to love adult or even adolescent females because he remained largely fixated on the idea of love and sex as it had formed during that childhood love.
Well, he is French.
Having said that, there is nothing at all to prevent people from falling in love with someone either above or below their own station in life. Such a situation as been the premise for many a popular movie.
Well, for one thing let’s not forget the role that being a “warm body” plays in love. The warm body of the loved person is a major component of that love, even when it progresses from passionate kisses and sex in the early days to hugs and pecks on the cheek in old age. People still relate strongly to the physical embodiment of the people they love.
But emotionally and in his actions Humbert was compelled to go much further with Lolita than he had with any other young girl. He allowed himself to be played for sexual favors and to be dictated to by her in certain ways. He only really asserted himself strongly over her when it was necessary to do so in order to keep her. And even after he hadn’t seen her in years he gave her money and implored her to leave her husband and come back to him.
Now, was all this out of nothing more than overwhelming lust, or because of love, or both? My guess is both.
The problem with these kinds of discussions is that they, like discussions of race, can get derailed by the kind of thinking that goes “If you’re not totally against it, you must be for it.” I hope you’ll keep in mind that I’m not in any way suggesting that sex between 12-year-old girls and adult men is hunky-dory; it’s just that like I said earlier, it’s possible that people can engage in harmful activity without realizing just how harmful it is and without necessarily being “bad” people. On those occasions when Humbert realized how he was harming or had harmed Lolita, he was remorseful because of it. But it wasn’t until the end of the novel when he was able to overcome his desire for her and let her go, and even then, that was because he truly came to realize that she did not love him. If he had been driven solely by lust, he wouldn’t have cared that she didn’t love him; he would have tried to get her back anyway. But the realization that she didn’t love him broke his spirit and caused him decide to take himself out of her life, which would be the reaction of a man with a broken heart rather than of a man driven purely by lust.
Well, while I definitely agree with you that Humbert counts as a pedophile, I think it’s the just-pubescent rather than prepubescent stage that he’s really into.
There’s a passage from when he’s living with the Hazes and sees Dolores going off to a birthday party (? I think) in a dress with a tight bodice, and says (in his diary, natch) something like “her little doves seem well formed already, precocious pet”. (I remember thinking “WTF??” on reading that, since I’d never seen breasts called “doves” before, and in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Nabokov just made it up.) Clearly he was getting off on her being at a transitional stage between childhood and adolescence, rather than on the idea of her as a totally undeveloped little child.
Yeah, but with him, there was NOTHING emotional attaching him to Lolita. He thought she was as vapid as her mother, except more attractive to him sexually.
Well, I’d assume that’s because he didn’t have access to any other young girls. Short of kidnap and murder, how many pedophiles have access to their prey?
I’d also dispute that he allowed himself to be dictated to by her. He did what he had to do because he wanted to keep her his prisoner. I don’t think she was “playing” him so much as she was trying to survive and get out of this messed up situation as soon as possible. He was trying to do everything to keep her under his power–trying to deprive her of money, of a means to escape.
I just don’t see where the love comes in. He was attracted to her and he acted on that. I’m not seeing love anymore than the man who kidnapped Jaycee Duggard and held her prisoner. The person may be under the delusion that they’re acting out of love. I suppose it depends on how you define love, but to me, they’re acting out of some kind of perverted, messed up version of love.
Kind of a shameless bump here, but I was thinking about identity in the novel, and the idea that Humbert erases Lolita’s. I remembered that every single character in the body of the novel is identified by a pseudonym. Humbert Humbert is a nom de plume, and John Ray Jr. says he has changed all the other names in the book for reasons of privacy and propriety. He admits he couldn’t change Lolita’s first name because of its centrality to the story, but he did change her last name, which “only rhymes with Haze.” And I like to think he didn’t change the name McFate either because it’s too important and too unlikely a name- but Ray doesn’t say anything about that.
And another thing: recall that the frame story makes clear that Humbert specified that his narrative shouldn’t be published until after Lolita’s death, which he expected to be decades in the future. But shortly after he dies in prison, Lolita herself dies from complications in childbirth.
So in a sense, by acclimating her to a life of sexual exploitation (which continued after she ran off with Quilty), from which her only escape (if it counts as an escape) was marriage and early pregnancy in a hardscrabble working-class environment with poor medical care and bad maternal mortality chances, Humbert has arguably literally erased Lolita.
It may be a bit far-fetched, but it seems plausible to me that his abuse of her not only destroyed her adolescence but actually, though indirectly, was responsible for depriving her of her entire future life. If it hadn’t been for him, she probably never would have ended up pregnant and then dead at the age of, what was it, 18?
And yes, he probably has destroyed her entire life. I guess it has to be pointed out that her mother didn’t make great choices in men, either, but still.
Considering her mom’s reaction when she realizes Hum’s reason for marrying her was her daughter (not so much concern for Lolita as jealousy), yeah, mom pretty much sucks, too. But Humbert did drive Lolita away from him into the arms of yet another pervert. I agree–it’s no stretch to say he erased her.
“Men”, plural? What was wrong with the original Mr. Haze, other than that he died? (Besides having had, according to Humbert’s inferences from Charlotte’s behavior in bed, some allegedly amusing but minor sexual quirks?)
No, there’s nothing Asperger’s about pedophilia, just the normal human projection of rationalizations and perception of what your target is doing to fit what you want it to mean. Humans are surprisingly adept at projecting their desires onto another and ignoring reality when it suits them. It’s the spectrum of behavior that leads from standard crushes to stalking. Infatuation has many forms and many means.
I’ve seriously had this book described to me by a friend as “a story about this little girl who seduces an guy” and my reaction was hesitation. Why on Earth would I want to read this?
After reading this thread and seeing that there’s a subtext that my friend seems to have missed, maybe I’ll give it a shot.
