I agree, Skald–we can’t look at what he says. As you quoted, he’ll tell us about such raptures he’s in and overlooking the fact that Lolita is doing everything she can to gather up every piece of money to escape him as soon as possible.
spoke-, even if she is in love with Quilty, does that make her less of a victim? Many real life sexual abuse victims run off from their abusive households and find themselves abused yet again, and in many cases prostituted. If anything, Lolita doesn’t look like some abnormal case study of a bizarre half victim half temptress. She looks like the average girl who really does get abused. I don’t find it hard to believe that a girl living with a stepfather who’s raping and abusing her would run off with anyone else available. And it’s very easy for me to believe that someone that vulnerable would again fall prey to another abuser.
And as you say, Skald, what is conventionally innocent? By these standards, I don’t think there is anyone who is conventionally innocent.
Freudian Slit, you seem to be focused like a laser beam on Lolita’s victimhood. I think that labeling her a victim misses the point. I think that denies the character her power. She is as much puppeteer as puppet. Which Humbert learns to his chagrin.
But she doesn’t seem to have any power in the book. I think Humbert wants us to think that she does, that she’s manipulating him. But he’s attracted to her from the moment he sees her, as he is with all girls he deems “nymphets.” What you see as her being a puppeteer, I see as her doing everything she can to survive. She doesn’t want to give him oral sex or be raped when she’s got pneumonia? So she’ll try to get money out of him. I see it less as manipulation on her part and more of a survival technique.
She doesn’t have any power and she isn’t sexually sophisticated. That’s just Humbert’s projection. she’s nothing close to a “puppeteer.” That’s just how Humbert justifies his own actions. If you think Humbert is getting manipulated, then you’re gtting whooshed.
Wow. I just answered that. In detail. In the same post that I used the term. In the same paragraph. I even contrasted with what I would consider ‘conventionally innocent’ in the very same sentence.
If you don’t agree with me that is fine, but to act as if you have no clue the idea I am trying to get across is just making me tired of this topic already.
Quite the opposite. Humbert would like her to be an innocent he has corrupted. That would be his ideal narration. But he has to admit the truth to us.
And we learn that truth not from the “unreliable narrator” Humbert, but from Lolita’s own lips. She’s the one who tells us that she left Humbert for Quilty. She’s the one who tells us what Quilty was up to sexually. She’s the one who tells us that she was in love with Quilty.
None of that means she had any power or sophistication. What she had was the survival tools of a victim. She wasn’t gaining anything by running off with Quility and she is destroyed by the end of the book.
But Lolita thought she was in love with Humbert initially. And she’s what, seventeen, sixteen, when she meets up with Humbert again? She’s still basically a kid. And just because she’s left Hum for Quilty doesn’t make her “complicit” as you seem to think she is. She went from one abuser to another–a very common occurrence for abuse victims in the real world, too.
I think to assume that there are “normal” little girls and girls who like to exploit their sexuality is dangerous. And it’s coming close to Humbert’s nymphet idea, too. The reality is that most young girls are aware of their sexuality and will flirt with the power they have over older men. Does that mean they’re nymphets? No, but rapists and abusers will see them that way. They’ll see normal behavior or childlike flirting as the idea that the child is also into sex. The reality is that they’re seeing normal behavior and viewing it through their lens.
“Destroyed?” How so? Maybe I am mis-remembering. She has a husband her own age and and a child on the way, and she manages to get the utterly broken Humbert to give them $4000 with which to get their lives started.
With whom she thinks she is in love. Victims of systematic abuse, especially when they are children at at the time of the abuse, very frequently have their wires crossed; they cannot distinguish between genuine affection & respect and the fascimiles of same that an abusive person presents.
What Humbert waves away, as an unreliable narrator, is that from the very beginning he was interacting with her in inappropriate ways. There’s a scene that occurs fairly early on after Humbert moves into the Hazes’ home as a lodger where he gets an erection and has an orgasm while she is playing in his lap, and supposedly he does all of this unnoticed. The parts of the book where Lolita reveals that she’s sexually experienced occur after Humbert has been living with the Hazes for a long period of time and perving on Lolita.
I know that’s not your style at all. I will keep it real. I HATE that I am on opposite sides of you on this topic! I want you to see it my way, so I’m cranky and fussy.
I don’t want to come off like I don’t think the girl is a victim. I do. But I believe in my heart that there are levels of childhood innocence. I remember being a little girl. Some little girls I knew were…more little girly than others. I myself was smoking and drinking by age 9. I never had anyone try to molest me, but if I did, at age 12, I was the kind of kid that would have stood up for myself. I was one kind of little girl, and I knew others that were other kinds of little girls, and I knew some little girls that were probably acting out their sexuality because they had been molested, and I new some little girls that we called ‘fast’ that were acting out their sexuality around adults in ways that most little girls don’t; and I doubt every single girl I knew like that was molested.
I think there are lots of different stories to tell about lots of different kinds of little girls, and I always interepreted this story to tell about a little girl that wasn’t quite ‘conventionally innocent’. It doesn’t excuse what Humbert did.
But it wasn’t like he was some strange guy who came up to her and raped her all of a sudden. He was so insidious about it. He started off as this attractive guy that she crushed on and who gave her attention when no other adult really did. Lolita’s mother expresses little affection towards her and she has no father. So this guy who crushes on her is nice to her and seems really interested in her and slowly maybe she starts to think she’s in love with him.
I’m pretty sure that at twelve, I would have been skeeved by a stranger molesting me but if it was someone I thought I was in love with, I’d probably go with it. And that’s how most molesters act. They do what Humbert did–they groom their victims so that they don’t think of themselves as victims. The sad thing is that so many people read Lolita and don’t think of her as a victim either.
I don’t think that makes Lolita less innocent. I think she just made the perfect victim because she had so few people in her life who really cared about her and it was easy for Hum to take advantage. And when she was exposed to people, like the teachers at Beardsley, who were starting to pick up on the fact that she seemed abnormal compared with kids her own age, Humbert did everything he could to try to keep her away (i.e., trying to limit her participation in the play).
(Flipping through the book…) Ah, it’s in the Foreword, not in the main body of the novel. That’s why I had forgotten it.
But I don’t think we are meant to understand that Humbert’s actions somehow resulted in her death. Her death is mentioned because it was a pre-condition to publication of Humbert’s “Memoir.”
You misunderstand me. I didn’t think you were trying to excuse Humbert, and I understand that you’re saying the characters aren’t exactly black and white. What I was saying is that the ways in which Lolita is not “innocent” might also be because Humbert’s influence, and his attempts to shape her into his own personal sex toy, were there before she started experimenting sexually.