What’s the name of the condition where a person falls in love with their captor? I don’t think that that makes the love any less real. If you’re experiencing the emotion, the feeling, of being in love, you’re in love. After all, that’s all love is. It doesn’t have to be healthy or whatever for it to be real.
You’re thinking of Stockholm Syndrome, but that’s not about love- it’s about identifying with one’s captors. (Similar idea to what we’re talking about here, though.) It’s obvious that Lolita is deeply affected by what Humbert does to her - even he admits he stole her childhood - but it’s a little patronizing to say she could not have felt any kind of love for Quilty. It implies that her judgment doesn’t count because she’s been abused.
From the other thread on literary characters:
But just because you’ve had sexual experiences doesn’t mean you can’t be victimized. I think the tendency for most of us is, when we conjure up a sexual abuse victim, is to think of someone fairly virginal who has few ideas about sex and who went abused says no immediately. But in real life, it’s so rarely like that. Most abuse victims are like Lolita. They may not be super pleasant and easy to identify with. They may even be manipulated into being complicit. And I think that’s why so many victims blame themselves–if society thinks that you’re not really a victim or that it’s “complicated” when stuff like this happens, I can definitely see why.
Absolutely. Even earlier than that, there was a scene where she was sitting between her mother and Humbert on the patio, and he took advantage of the darkness to stroke her legs and back and nuzzle her hair. It made my skin crawl. Maybe it’s my big sister instincts or the fact that I’m only six years older than Lo was, but that was the point where Humbert’s attempts to romanticise his situation stopped working on me.
You’re fixated on calling Lolita a victim to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t think I or anybody else has been denying that she is a victim and I explicitly called Humbert a monster.
I do think that if this is all you’re getting from the book, you’re not getting the book at all. You seeing a surface and missing all the depth.
I don’t think that’s all the book is about. I never said there weren’t other planes on which to analyze it–the language, symbolism, etc. Just that it is missing the point to think that Humbert isn’t a pedophile or an abuser. To assume that he isn’t because Lolita is different is to get taken in by his self serving “nymphet” language. I think one reason why Lolita is so great is that the language is so gorgeous that it’s hard to see Humbert as what he really is. You’re reading about depraved acts described in some of the most gorgeous prose ever written.
Who said he wasn’t? I know Exapno Mapcase made the point that the first time they have sex, Lolita initiates it. That’s true. It’s true, and complicates the story, that she is not exactly virginal even before the two of them get involved. It doesn’t make him any less of a pedophile or a stunted manipulator, but it does add other dimensions to the story.
Don’t forget that this version of the story was written - and set - in the aftermath of WWII. America’s image, self-proclaimed, of the young, fresh, innocent saviors of the decadent populations of Europe who have gotten themselves in another mess must have galled Nabokov. If Lolita represents America think of her in this fashion, as the tempting outsider who wreaks havoc on established society, supplants the old order, and then waltzes off oblivious leaving it to its ruins. You could easily argue that the book is really about death, not sex. Everybody dies in the end. The one thing America hates worse than thinking about sex is thinking about death. (This was long before the fad for serial killer novels, of course.) I said in the other thread that the book is similar to a science fiction novel, set in an artificial world, stripped of normal “realistic” cues so as to make the aspect of society being satirized hypertrophied and demanding all your attention.
The “depraved acts” take up no more than a few short passages out of a 300-page novel. You started in the other thread by saying that the novel was misunderstood. You still have never said how. You haven’t said anything of the “other planes” either. You keep saying pedophile and victim as if nobody else has ever noticed this. Can’t you say something else?
Or not. Continue thinking about the book as the story of victim suffering depraved acts. How boring. Why would you re-read such a book?
All I said in the other thread was that it’s a mistake to view a “Lolita” as an underage girl who’s a sexy seductress. I’m not saying those other aspects don’t exist–I’m just saying that I think it’s a mistake to view the book as one where Lolita seduces Hum because that’s just naively buying in to what HH, an unreliable narrator, says.
Because it’s really good. That is exactly what the book is about, though. What makes it good is the narrator’s application of erudition to justify the unjustifiable.
Do you think the concept of a “nymphet” exists anywhere outside of Humbert’s mind?
Humbert SAYS she initiates it. Humbert is entirely self-serving.
And what I was trying to say earlier in this thread is: yes, Lolita may initiate sex* but this is not when Humbert’s corruption of her begins. It begins much earlier on, almost from the very first day Humbert meets the Hazes, and it is his influence that leads her to believe it is appropriate to initiate sex with an adult. What Humbert does to her is much deeper than just physically sexually abuse her. He warps her entire mind so that she believes that even if her situation is awful, it’s permissible and that it’s basically her only possible manner of living.
The point of my previous post is that Humbert is an unreliable narrator in the sense that he’s very self-centered and he largely sees people exactly as he wants them to be, and sees their responses to his behavior as serving his purposes. So when he’s trying to get close to Lolita and when he touches her and steps outside appropriate boundaries when playing with her, he thinks she has no idea what’s going on, but what is actually happening is that he is giving her the only idea she has of what is an appropriate relationship between the two of them. She does like him initially as a person (as the person she THINKS he is - and that’s how she can think she’s in love but not really be in love: loving a totally false idea of who someone is) and that’s why she becomes excited about having a sexual relationship with him. He has convinced her that this is an appropriate way, and the BEST way, to show her appreciation for an older man whom she admires.
So what I’m saying is: no, it’s not oversimplification to call Lolita the victim in this situation. No, Lolita is not more sexually sophisticated than Humbert. He has totally fucked her up from the very beginning. She goes from being a normal little girl to someone who moves from one abuser to the next, believing it’s the only kind of relationship she can have with someone.
- and I will take it for granted that she does, because considering Humbert a completely unreliable narrator (ie, lies about events) would make this whole discussion pointless in my opinion; in order to analyze the story we have to take its events as told
True. Then again we get to see through his other lies and manipulations because that’s how we know he’s distorting the truth. I don’t think we ever see any evidence that this encounter didn’t happen the way he says it did. Which, again, doesn’t make him less of a monster. It’s just fair to point out that it makes the story more complicated. I think I said upthread that even when she flirts with him early in the story, it’s role playing by a young girl and not something a healthy person would ever pursue.
This is an interesting idea, but I don’t know that he has that much influence on her early in the story. I don’t remember her taking him that seriously in the beginning.
She moves from one abuser to the next, but as far as we know, “the next” is the last one. We don’t have any reason to think her relationship with her husband is abusive. According to Humbert, she hints that it isn’t.
I agree with Electric Warrior. The entire point of an unreliable narrator is that the interpretations and shadings the character gives can be refuted by the reader seeing the real picture. If the narrator is making facts and incidents up as well, then the implicit bargain with the reader is destroyed.
Besides, why in the world should Humbert imagine this set of facts and incidents? What separates Lolita from porn is that the story does not go as fantasy would. It is destructive.
That doesn’t mean the others weren’t abusive. Quilty was exactly the same as Humbert. That’s part of the running joke of the novel. Quilty wasn’t a better option, and neither of them was manipulated by the girl, Quilty was just better than Humbert as DOING the manipulating.
ETA, I agree that Humbert’s bare facts should be taken as essentially accurate, by the way. He isn’t fabricating things out of whole cloth, or outright lying. In his mind, he believes he’s being 100% factually accurate. It’s his intepretation and spin of the facts that’s unreliable.
I always saw it as a metaphor for the older, traditional America’s relationship with the coming-of-age Baby Boomers.
The book is set in 1947, with Dolores born in 1935. It was written in the early 50s. The first baby boomers were born in 1946. I don’t see how you can make this case. Nabokov couldn’t possibly have known anything about baby boomers.
I think we’re perhaps disagreeing over what the basic incidents are, though.
I’d say that the basic incident is HH fucking Dolores. The way it happens is how he distorts it. I don’t think she initiated it any more than I think her name was really (in the context of the story) Lolita.
I was considering all actions and dialogue to be ‘true’.
I suspect Nabokov would have resisted that reading of it, given his aversion to sociopolitical commentary in fiction, but if we want to take that road, I think the “young vs. old America” line of metaphor is more interesting re: Charlotte and Dolores. Dolores exemplifies the ostentatious vulgarity of American pop culture at that time, while Charlotte is mired in bourgeois aspiration and pseudo-intellectualism (I don’t remember whether that great line about “Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Zhivago” is in the novel, but it should have been), which is really the other side of the same coin, all of which Humbert obviously rejects. Of course Charlotte, though pretentious, not a great mother, and not as cultured as she thinks, isn’t one-hundredth of the horrifying tyrant Humbert turns out to be, while Dolores is ultimately just a pathetic little girl.
I think Nabokov is playing a subtle game with American culture in relation to morality: from the point of view through which Humbert depicts the events of the novel, culture is no one’s savior. It offers Charlotte no comfort, and Humbert’s willing to relax his own standards of taste and aesthetics when his own libido comes into play. Vulgar is as vulgar does, and Humbert is at his most coy and vulgar when writing about the specific sexual behaviors he’s engaged in. Though he pretends to lead a life of the mind, even treating his sordid past in absorptive Proustian detail, his culture doesn’t redeem him from being a monster. He can’t even find words, try as he might, to justify what he’s done. From Nabokov’s standpoint, maybe this is Humbert’s additional failure as an intellectual and a human being.
Nabokov is too subtle to outright condemn the kind of snobbery which would have derisively judged post-war American culture in relation to “the Continent,” but it seems clear from what he says in Strong Opinions that he wasn’t all that interested in actually judging American culture of that time period (I don’t have my copy with me, but he says something about how a magazine reviewer misquoted or misinterpreted his interest in “cheerful American vulgarity,” and he turns a jaundiced eye toward a good deal of contemporary European culture). His interest, if he was concerned at all with the social, lay more in getting a broader view of what everyone - intellectuals, readers of popular fiction, American tastemakers - would prefer to overlook.