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Review: Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
This was a really good book, I thought it was fascinating and well-written. I understand why this book would have been very controversial at the time of its publishing, as this style would have been rather novel. I am of the opinion that this was a fascinating and thrilling book that also goes deep into the brain of a criminal. Definitely recommend this book!
Spoilers.
Story
The book was written as a memoir of a man who was to be on trial. However, he had requested that it only be published after the death of both himself and the girl he was in love with, so we can assume that both people are dead. The writer used the pseudonym of Humber Humbert throughout this book.
The first part of the book was something of a manifesto. Humbert explained to the audience his theories on his sexual attraction (pedophilia). He brought up historical examples, and he pushed forward his theories on what the perfect little girl was like. He deemed these girls ‘nymphets.’
Humbert was born in Paris to an English father and a Swiss mother. His first encounter with love and lust was in his childhood, with a friend called Annabel. They were deeply in love, and had tried to have sex on the beach but were unsuccessful. Annabel died soon after of typhus. We can imply that due to his unfulfilled romance with Annabel, Humbert was constantly stuck in the past and fixated on girls of this age.
Humbert was married once to a woman called Valeria. However, there was no love between them. He may have thought she was cute once, but they were ultimately incompatible and Humbert was not nice to her. She eventually had an affair with a driver.
Humbert moved to the US, and he described some of the work he did, including going on an Arctic expedition. He eventually decided to settle down. Humbert accepted staying at the house of a friend, as he found out that the friend had a 12 year old daughter. On the day of his arrival, it was revealed that the friend’s house had burned down, but he had arranged alternative lodging for Humbert. Humbert was very troubled, and his whole mood was soured because the only reason he had even wanted to move to the area was so that he could stay with the daughter of the friend. However, that changed when he stumbled upon Dolores Haze sunbathing and fell in love.
Humbert became the lodger of the Hazes, and he would sneak around to try to spend time with Dolly. He would chat with her, but he would also sneak affection, like kisses and such. The relationship between Dolly and her mom Charlotte was what you would expect of a mom and daughter. Charlotte was exasperated at her daughter’s behaviours, but in my opinion it was nothing extreme.
Dolly went to summer camp, and while Charlotte was taking her away, she had left a letter with Humbert, confessing her love for Humbert and giving him the ultimatum that he must leave or marry her. Humbert decided to marry Charlotte so that he could have full-time access to Dolly. There was a very short honeymoon period between Charlotte and Humbert. They went around and met other couples of the neighbourhood and such. However, Charlotte discovered Humbert’s diary where he expressed lust for Dolly and contempt for Charlotte. Charlotte rushed out of the house to mail letters to warn others of Humbert, but was killed in a car accident on the way. Later in the book, Dolly would accuse Humbert of murdering Charlotte. The situation was not portrayed that way from Humbert’s point of view, but I think that is something that can be debated. Humbert’s behaviour in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death was probably also pretty odd from onlookers. The man who had killed Charlotte had offered to cover funeral costs, and to his surprise, Humbert had accepted. The man was taken aback, and while I don’t think Humbert was necessarily wrong to accept, it was just another example of his selfish and unsympathetic behaviour at this time in his life.
Humbert went to summer camp to pick up Dolly, giving the reason that her mother was in the hospital. Humbert then went on a road trip all over the US. Humbert first tried to rape Dolly by giving her sedatives. However, the sedatives didn’t really work so he didn’t make a move. However, later Dolly told Humbert about her sexual experiences with other kids at the summer camp, and he took advantage of that to rape her. The day after, Dolly had talked about discomfort, talked about how she should tell the police that Humbert raped her, and Humbert was afraid that she would actually do it. For much of the road trip, Humbert was trying to appease Dolly in the short-term with gifts to keep her by his side.
During the road trip, Humbert also revealed to Dolly that her mother had died. Humbert did note that Dolly would sometimes cry at night, and he would pretend to be asleep. Dolly would come to him for comfort, because she had nothing else, and Humbert said nothing throughout all this. Humbert would also express frustration during this road trip at having to deal with Dolly. At one point, he said that he finally sympathized with Charlotte’s exasperation at Dolly. Humbert would try to scare Dolly with boarding school. This would not be known later, but during this road trip, Dolly would already have been in contact with Clare Quilty, the man she was in love with.
Humbert and Dolly settled in Beardsley, Dolly’s hometown, and Dolly was enrolled in the girl’s school there. The school prided itself on education girls who were fashionable and well-liked in society (over girls who were well-educated). They had noted Dolly’s odd sexual behaviour, in which she didn’t seem eager to mature sexually and showed little inclination to boys, but she had also showed sexual behaviour towards her female classmates. During this time, Humbert would occasionally spend time with a man who he suspected to also be a pedophile who liked boys. Humbert restricted Dolly’s behaviour a lot, not letting her hang out with her friends, only letting them come to the house where he could monitor them. He also showed paranoia towards Dolly possibly falling in love with a boy, to the point that Humbert had once rewarded Dolly with a gift when she said that she didn’t like any of the boys that had come to a party at her house. Only after being spoken to by a teacher, did Humbert allow Dolly to act in the school play.
Before the play was to be performed, Dolly suggested another road trip, which Humbert was more than willing to oblige. On this trip, Humbert felt that he was being followed. Dolly had fallen ill and was checked into the hospital. However, she was checked out by someone who was said to be her uncle.
Humbert tried to look for Dolly to no avail. He spent two years without her, though he was spending a lot of time with a woman called Rita. I thought it was interesting that Rita’s name was so close to Lolita and I wondered if it was meant to signify that Humbert tried to replace Dolly’s presence in his life, though that was likely impossible as Rita was a totally different person. She was an older woman who was more attached to Humbert than Dolly ever was.
Dolly eventually reached out to Humbert. She was seventeen years old, married and pregnant, and she asked Humbert for money. She did not give her address in case Humbert was still angry with her, but Humbert found their address anyway. He realized that her husband Dick was not the man who she had run off with. Dick was a pretty normal young man, and Dolly thought of him as a ‘lamb,’ probably to show that he was soft-hearted.
Humbert found out from Dolly that she had run off with Clare Quilty, who was actually a man, and the playwright of the play that Dolly was acting in. I don’t remember the exact details of their meeting, but I believe Dolly had met Quilty before, when she was still with her mother. But presumably they didn’t really have any kind of relationship until the first road trip. After Dolly ran off with Quilty, she lived with him on a ranch for a bit. However, he kicked her out after she refused to act in a porn movie. And that was how she found herself in the present day with Dick. Humbert asked Dolly to come with him, but she refused. Humbert gave Dolly her inheritance (whatever came from the house) and left.
Humber then sought revenge on Quilty. He tracked down Quilty and killed him. Weirdly enough, he was able to walk free out of the house as none of Quilty’s friends seemed to care that he was dead.
Prior to killing Quilty, Humbert stated to reflect on his love for Dolly. He seemed to understand that he had never taken the time to understand her as a person. He even observed himself able to resist his lust for little girls. However, while cornering Quilty, it seemed like Humbert was portraying himself as Dolly’s rightful father and protector and Quilty as the evil kidnapper. When in reality, Humbert was just as if not worse than Quilty as a guardian for a literal child. I thought that at this point in the book, Humbert wanted to make himself look repentant.
Humbert was eventually arrested, which was why he was writing this memoir in the psychiatric ward, awaiting trial. He understood that he had committed a grave crime, and that even if he was tried for only the rape, his sentence should have been 35 years. However, due to this memoir already having been published, Humbert was already dead and likely did not stand trial.
As a whole, I felt that this novel was almost like a crime thriller, written from the point of view of our criminal Humbert. Especially in the first half, until the end of the first road trip, Humbert’s thoughts were filled with how to extend the time he had with Dolly, how to keep her happy. Of course, the book was still filled with lots of commentary and themes at that point.
Even in the second half, it still felt very much like a crime novel, as Humbert tried to hide his secret to the world, and Dolly started to show rebellious behaviour like asking for money in return for sexual favours. Not to mention the whole part where Dolly ran away and Humbert was trying to find her.
In the last few chapters, the book settled to be more of a discussion on Humbert’s mindset, now that we’d learned of his life story. What is the verdict? I think that was one of the big questions Nabokov wanted to leave us with.
I didn’t expect this book to be so thrilling, and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that it was both thrilling and deep with discussion.
Writing
The only book I’d read by Nabokov prior to Lolita was Ada or Ardor. I felt that Ada or Ardor was more dense and more difficult for me to understand as it was rife with references and themes. Lolita was a little like Ada and Ardor, but a little lighter and more down to earth, as it was set in relatively regular neighbourhoods, as opposed to Ada or Ador that was more of a grander story.
The writing was similar in that like in Ada or Ardor, Nabokov used a lot of frilly flower language. Humbert always had his head in the cloud, always thinking about his fantasies with his nymphets. As well, Nabokov’s writing was witty and punny, using a lot of alliterations and rhymes. Honestly I was rather impressed with that first conversation between Humbert and Quilty, where Quilty was accusing Humbert of preying on Lolita, but constantly covering up his words with rhymes.
The only times I thought that Humbert was an unreliable narrator was perhaps regarding the death of Charlotte Haze, and also at the end when he was showing remorse. However, for much of the book, I felt that Humbert was not an unreliable narrator so much so as he was actually presenting the facts as they appeared in his head. It didn’t occur to him that he was selfish and unsympathetic to people, it was only us and other people who noticed it.
Anyway, I thought this book was well written but not too hard to follow.
Characters
Humbert Humbert
The main criminal, the pedophile (or hebephile). I think Humbert wanted the audience to think that he was a normal person, possibly even above average. Towards the beginning, when he had just met the Hazes, I remember Humbert insisting that he was actually quite good-looking, and that Dolly possibly thought that he looked like a movie star she liked. I wonder if this was Humbert’s wish, for us to think of him as a handsome, well-educated, desired man. Because it was clear to me as a reader that he was ugly on the inside. He was conniving, wholly focused on fulfilling his fantasy, and nothing else.
I found Humbert for much of the book to be self-absorbed and unsympathetic. His life revolved around having his fantasies achieved and nothing else. He didn’t care that he would hurt Charlotte in the process of marrying her to get to Dolly; it had not crossed his mind at all because he did not see Charlotte as a person. Related to that was the fact that Humbert was probably a misogynist of some sort. He always evaluated girls as whether they were nymphets or not, and he evaluated women as whether they once could have been nymphets. They were all sexual objects in his mind. When Humbert first raped Dolly, he told the reader that this was basically the defining moment of his life. It was something like “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me…” committing rape against Lolita.
Another way in which I found Humbert to be self-absorbed and fantasy-chasing was his habit of staying in the present, living in the now. He never thought in the future. He didn’t care about the long-term impacts of marrying Charlotte and taking Dolly as his ‘lover.’ He acknowledged that he wouldn’t like Dolly once she grew up, but he hadn’t thought of the consequences of that, only thinking of the possibility of Dolly having a daughter, and that daughter having a daughter so that Humbert could continue to abuse little girls.
At the same time, I think Humbert lived in the past as an excuse. He implied that his attraction to little girls was due to his unfulfilled romance with Annabel. Perhaps that might be true, but his decision to hurt them was his decision alone. As well, Humbert’s revenge on Quilty was entirely for selfish reasons. Dolly had already moved on. She had said that she had been crazy about Quilty, but she was with Dick now. So why did Humbert want revenge on Quilty? For taking away what he deemed to have been his all those years. Nothing to do with Dolly, all to do with himself.
Humbert was purposely ignorant of the harm inflicted on Dolly for much of the novel. He only chose to focus on the good things, none of the bad. He ignored all of the signs of trauma for Dolly. After she found out her mother had died, and that she had never gotten to bid farewell to her, she would cry, and Humbert would simply find it troublesome. Or in some cases, he would pretend to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to deal with her. He tried to appease Dolly in the short term so that she wouldn’t out them, and when angry, he would threaten Dolly with boarding school, claiming that it would be worse. It was only in these times that he ever ‘sympathized’ with Charlotte, if you could call it that. When Humbert was first booking a motel for him and Dolly, he said that it was awkward trying to think of how to announce themselves. Father and daughter? Man and child? At the time, he was talking about it in a humourous manner, but he was totally unaware of how this was only a problem for him and him alone, because he saw Dolly the way that he did.
As you can see, I have a very negative view of Humbert, so I never thought that this book was at danger of romanticizing Humbert.
Humanizing is a different story, because as much of a monster as Humbert was, he was human. At the beginning of the book, he was explaining his theories on pedophilia and his form of attraction. I felt that he spoke about that in the way that a normal person talks about their hobbies. He was very into it, very excited, he had examples to back up his theories. Yes, Humbert is human. Doesn’t mean he’s a good person though.
There was a bit of a redemption story arc at the end of the book, but only in the sense that it explored the possibility of redemption and not that Humbert was actually redeemed. He started to realize that he had never gotten to know Dolly as a person. Throughout the book, Humbert had tried to imbue his sense of art and style in Dolly but she wasn’t very receptive. There had been a conversation between Dolly and her friend, where she had said that people were all alone when they died, and it was then that Humbert realized he never understood her as a person, that he’d failed her if he was really to be a ‘lover.’ In the last chapters, Humbert started to realize that he had actually harmed Dolly, had robbed her of a childhood. Perhaps he had only realized that in the course of writing the book. Because when he was confronting Quilty, it didn’t seem that regret had gotten through Humbert yet. He had still considered himself as Dolly’s rightful guardian, and Quilty had to argue that he really wasn’t a good guardian at all.
Humbert had asked that his memoir only be published after both he and Dolly died, and perhaps that was where the idea of their relationship being romanticized comes from. Humbert asked that Dolly be happy with Dick, that they hopefully had a son (presumably so that their daughter couldn’t be abused like Humbert abused him). And Humbert asked that their relationship only be immortalized in this book.
I think the nature of Humbert being on trial already had me questioning his actual state of mind, whether he actually felt regret for abusing Dolly. Sure, he was able to understand why someone in his position would feel regret for their actions. Whether he actually believed and was sincere in them was a different story. But the deed has been done, and the man is dead now. So what justice is there? None at all.
Dolores Haze/Lolita
I’ve called Lolita “Dolly” for most of this review. I don’t want to call her Lolita because that was Humbert’s name for her. It was a name he called her in private, because she was his fantasy. It wasn’t even the true Dolores Haze that Humbert really coveted, but a version of her that would be his forever.
Dolly was a tomboy, a typical girl of that age, daughter of a single mom. There wasn’t much that suggested her behaviour to be out of the ordinary. Even her crush on movie actors or Humbert at first was not anything that raised red flags to me. Dolly mentioned that she’d had sexual experiences at camp. Now I don’t know if that’s normal lol. I was definitely not having sexual romps at age 12. But even then, she was exploring sexuality with her peers.
After Dolly was first raped by Humbert, she complained about it, she felt sore. She said that maybe she might tell the cops that she was raped. Later on, Humbert dropped the news on her that her mom had died. After that, we saw that she would cry sometimes, which is very natural. But at that time, she only had Humbert to rely on, and Humber took advantage of that. Dolly was isolated with her abuser without a permanent home. Add to that the fact that she was simultaneously being preyed upon by Clare Quilty. More on Quilty later. But Dolly was showing signs of trauma from all of these things, that Humbert just chose to see as annoying teenager things.
Things changed at Beardsley. I think this was when Dolly started to realize that something was not right, that Humbert was not on her team. That was when she started to ask for money in return for sexual favours. She would constantly hide the money away from Humbert. There was a scene in which Dolly and Humbert were with a friend of Dolly’s. The friend was hugging her father and Dolly had burst into tears. Humbert on realized in hindsight that she was perhaps crying over the fact that she did not have a healthy family relationship as this friend had. She had loving parents and several siblings and they all loved each other without anything in return. Humbert did not love Dolly, Humbert wanted sex from her.
The teachers had noted Dolly’s odd behaviour, that she had either excellent emotional control or none at all (probably meaning she would emote in very sudden and extreme ways), and that she wasn’t interested in sex, but exhibited sexual thoughts to other girls. All of this was undoubtedly the result of her having been abused from a young age.
Dolly asked to go on another road trip, and she was much more elusive this time, often hiding from Humbert. She eventually ran off with Quilty, and Humbert did not hear from her again until she wrote.
When Humbert visited Dolly, she called him dad, and she was fairly casual with him. She seemed settled and comfortable in her new life with Dick. She recounted her experience with Quilty very casually. And it was in this conversation too that Humbert realized that Dolly never loved him, never saw him as a love interest. He was just the person who was supposed to take care of her. And he didn’t. But Dolly was past that. She was focused on her life now. When Humbert asked her to come with him, she declined, wanting to stay with Dick and their unborn child.
Dolly said that Quilty was the only man she had ever been crazy about, implying love. However, we have to remember that she was around 15 years old here. Did she love Quilty, or was Quilty just an opportunity for her to get away from Humbert? Add to that the fact that Quilty had forced her to act in porn and Dolly had refused. At this point, Dolly had probably grown to understand that sex is something that she can refuse, thus recognizing that what she did with Humbert was inappropriate.
Dolly seemed surprisingly well adjusted when she saw her married and pregnant at the ripe old age of 17. But perhaps there’s a lot of trauma underneath that we won’t see because Humbert left soon after. I will say, the trauma that Dolly went through is extreme. No girl should ever be subject to that.
But Dolly was never Lolita. Lolita was Humbert’s idea of the perfect nymphet, his fantasy. Dolly was a girl who was hurt very badly by people who should be looking out for her. Speaking of which –
Charlotte Haze
Charlotte was Dolly’s widowed mother. She was constantly exasperated by Dolly’s behaviour, much like a mom of a teenager would be. At the same time, Charlotte was trying to catch the attention of Humbert. She would always try to spend one-on-one time together, annoyed whenever Dolly joined them though Humbert much preferred that. I was only mildly surprised that Charlotte was madly in love with Humbert as her behaviour had suggested it. As well, being a widow, she was likely lonely as well.
However, as a mother, she had failed to protect Dolly. She had been completely unaware of Humbert’s attraction to Dolly until after she had married him and had found his diary. Granted, Humbert had been discreet, but perhaps Charlotte should have done more research before demanding marriage from Humbert. She found out too late, and didn’t even manage to get her message out. And due to her death, Dolly fell into the hands of Humbert.
Later in the book, Humbert had noted that perhaps Charlotte and Dolly’s tough relationship was better than no family for Dolly, though I argue that Charlotte and Dolly’s relationship wasn’t all that tough but a normal one between mother and daughter.
Clare Quilty/Cue
I did some reading before writing this, and some called Quilty Humbert’s doppelganger. I think there is merit to that. Both of them were involved with Dolly, and kidnapped them away. Both of them wanted Dolly to act in their fantasy; for Humbert, Lolita was his fantasy, and for Quilty, he wanted Dolly in his porn movie. I read a comparison stating that Humbert was the side that worshipped Lolita, whereas Cue was the side that tossed her away, kicking her out for ever disagreeing.
So the act of Humbert killing Quilty was like Humbert killing the side of him that used people cruelly. Only after he did that, did he seem to start understanding remorse.
Themes
There was a lot going on in this book, so I’m just going to go through these themes in the order that they popped up in my head, and definitely not in order of importance or magnitude.
Misogyny
Humbert definitely held misogyny towards the various women and girls in his life. Whenever he saw a girl, his first thought was to determine whether she was a nymphet. They might as well be animals to be categorized to him. Whenever he slept with women, he did so trying to imagine them as possibly having been nymphets when they were young. That was it. The only value that female people had to him was whether they had nymphets.
Humbert had a fantasy that he and Dolly would move to an island somewhere, and that when Dolly grew old for his taste, then he would hopefully impregnate her so that she would have another daughter, Lolita the second. And then hopefully as Lolita grew too old, then she would have another daughter, so that Humbert would be able to continue to abuse Lolita the third. So other than nymphets, women were only valuable as being able to give birth to nymphets.
Fantasy
Humbert was constantly living in fantasy of abusing little girls. He used various different ideas to divide reality from fantasy.
For example, Lolita was his secret pet name for Dolly. Lolita was his, whereas Dolly or Dolores was just a girl. Humbert had once found a list of students in Dolly’s class, and he considered the list to be somewhat of a poem. Of course, his favourite part of the poem was “Haze, Dolores.” He said that it kind of masked the mystery of Lolita, again showing that Lolita was only his. His devotion to Dolly was only ever to Lolita the nymphet, not Dolores Haze the person. In addition to spending as much time with Dolly as possible, Humbert was committed to keeping Dolly innocent because that was what he was attracted to (e.g. keeping her away from boys, though that is also because of jealousy).
At the beginning, Humbert went into a lot of historical or mythological examples of pedophilia. I think there was a lot of exoticism in his ideas, which again was related to him having a fantasy of a world where nymphets were a normal taste.
I think the name of Haze was also a reference to fantasy, that Humbert could ever only think of the Hazes through the smokescreen of his own infatuation with little girls, and that was why he never saw them clearly as they were but only as nymphet and obstacle (Dolly and Charlotte respectively).
Another instance of Humbert being too caught up in fantasy was at the end of their first road trip, when he realized that he remembered nothing. Because his entire trip was spent focusing on abusing Dolly.
Past and Future
As I mentioned, Humbert seemed stuck in the present, only wanting to fulfill his fantasy. But I think he wasn’t the only one. After Charlotte and Humbert got married, Charlotte would want Humbert to recall his old loves and hate on them, seeming to want to erase them from Humbert’s past. The difference between Humbert and Charlotte, however, was that Charlotte was focused on the future and Humbert was not. Charlotte wanted a good future with a good family as Mrs. Humbert. Humbert wanted none of that, he just wanted to enjoy pedophilia right now. He didn’t care about how he was going to (and did eventually) ruin two lives, of Charlotte Haze and Dolores Haze.
Again, Humbert was also sometimes stuck in the past but as an excuse to be selfish. He implied that his romance with Annabel was why he loved little girls, almost blaming Annabel for his own transgressions. As well, his revenge on Quilty was very much rooted in the past, as even Dolly had moved on from the trauma that both men had inflicted on her. But Humbert couldn’t let his pride take a hit, even if it was all in the past.
Abuse and Trauma
Humbert initially intended to rape Dolly by sedating her. I think he believed that he wouldn’t hurt her if she was unaware of it, and it would keep her innocent. Even before all of that, when Charlotte was still alive, Humbert would sometimes play with Dolly and then give her kisses. They were just signs of normal affection to her, but to Humbert, they were something totally different. Due to that line of thought, I think Humbert realized to some degree that he was projecting onto Dolly. However, when Dolly related her sexual experiences to him, Humbert couldn’t resist and raped her. And that began the sexual abuse of Dolly. When Humbert first raped Dolly, he claimed that it was not sex, but the kind of activities that Dolly did with her peers. So he portrayed it as something playful, when it really wasn’t from his point of view. Again, he was kind of whitewashing the situation.
On top of rape, Dolly suddenly found out that her mother had died, and she hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to her. Add to the fact that she was completely reliant on Humbert on their road trip. She must have been severely traumatized. But Humbert ignored as much of it as he could, feigning sleep when Dolly cried at night, seeing her mood swings as an annoyance.
When at Beardsley, signs of Dolly’s trauma became a little more apparent due to teachers observing her. A teacher said that Dolly either had excellent emotional control or none at all, that she had no interest in sex but also exhibited sexual thoughts to other girls and young women. It was all considered unusual compared to her peers, and was definitely because of her being sexually abused.
She was emotionally unstable as well. There was the example of Dolly bursting into tears when she saw that her classmate had a loving family. It reminded her that she did not have anyone looking out for her who did not want something from her. Both Humbert and Quilty wanted sex from her.
I think Dolly’s signs of abuse are an example of why this book did not romanticize the relationship between Dolly and Humbert. All the signs of trauma and hurt were there, only that Humbert chose to ignore them.
Parenting
Humbert thought of Dolly’s signs of trauma and abuse as annoying teenager behaviour. He ‘humourously’ sympathized with Charlotte during their road trip, realizing why she was always annoyed, except Dolly’s behaviour back then was definitely very different from Dolly’s behaviour on the road trip. Humbert ignored Dolly’s cries for help, because it was in his interest to have her reliant on him. He simply didn’t think anything of it when she cried, and whenever she was really acting up, he would get angry and threaten her with boarding school, portraying boarding school as a bad and unsafe place (as if being with him was better).
At Beardsley, Humbert appeared to be a very strict and conservative dad, with how he never let her hang out away from home or with boys. Only after pulling teeth did the teacher manager to convince Humbert to allow Dolly to act in the school play. He took nothing away from the conversation about her odd maturation. And then immediately after, he went to the study room where Dolly was studying, and asked her to masturbate him while he watched another girl. That scene made me so sick, made me realize that Humbert had no interest in this child’s wellbeing.
Romance
In Humbert’s eyes, Dolly was his lover. He constantly gave her pet names that invoked such a relationship. He even called Charlotte his mistress, seeing as how Dolly was his one love.
Humbert exhibited very jealous behaviour at Beardsley, constantly keeping Dolly away from boys. Part of it was so that Dolly wouldn’t run away. But it also came off as very immature, in the sense that Humbert was competing with literal boys.
When Humbert met up with a 17 year old Dolly, I felt like he almost loved her the way that people love an ex-partner. She was no longer a nymphet, but Humbert realized that he still held affection or her. After all, why would he ask for Dolly to come with him even if she wasn’t a nymphet anymore? And perhaps only after this did Humbert realize that if Dolly was his lover, then he was a poor lover because he never understood her as a person. Humbert also started to find himself resisting little girls when they were around him, and it also made him think if he was over that phase now, that his heart was now fully with Lolita.
Redemption
In the last chapters, Humbert showed that he had noticed times when Dolly was hurt, only that he chose to ignore them at the time, like when Dolly burst into tears at seeing her classmate’s relationship with her family. He realized he never knew Dolly as a person when she was talking about death.
At the time, I wonder if Humbert believed that killing Quilty would be redemption, because he would have killed a cruel man who abused Dolly. But he had failed to kill the man who worshipped Lolita and still abused Dolly. And the poem that he’d written and shown Quilty had still portrayed Quilty as the wrong party, and Humbert as her protector when he was anything but.
At the end of his memoir, Humbert expressed some remorse for having abused Dolly and depriving her of a childhood. However, what is there to be done? The only thing he could have done was serve his sentence. The only words he had for Dolly was for her to be good to her husband and their child, hoping that the child was a son.
Maybe redemption is impossible in this case, because what’s done is done. He can’t un-fuck up Dolly’s life.
Art and Crime
I picked this up in the Sparknotes analysis, but there was discussion on whether writing this book, a beautiful piece of art, would absolve Humbert of his crimes. Perhaps his thought process was that he wanted to show others how beautiful the fantasy of Lolita was in his mind. That is the part that perhaps humanizes Humbert. But suffice it to say, he did hurt Dolly in reality, even if it was out of a beautiful image (beautiful is subjective). And again this comes back to whether Humbert was truly sorry, or whether this was just him writing a story to earn points because he was on trial.
Overall
Excellent book. I found out about a podcast on this book and I’m going to listen to it. There was just so much packed into this relatively short story. As a crime novel, it was thrilling and fucked up to get inside Humbert’s brain. But I also thought that with so few characters, Nabokov was able to paint such a fascinatingly complex picture of abuse.
What was Nabokov’s purpose? I don’t think his purpose was to get people to sympathize with Humbert necessarily. I don’t know if he had a purpose other than to tell a story. But I think that this book did remind me that monsters are human, and we are all responsible for our actions.
Spoilers.
Story
The book was written as a memoir of a man who was to be on trial. However, he had requested that it only be published after the death of both himself and the girl he was in love with, so we can assume that both people are dead. The writer used the pseudonym of Humber Humbert throughout this book.
The first part of the book was something of a manifesto. Humbert explained to the audience his theories on his sexual attraction (pedophilia). He brought up historical examples, and he pushed forward his theories on what the perfect little girl was like. He deemed these girls ‘nymphets.’
Humbert was born in Paris to an English father and a Swiss mother. His first encounter with love and lust was in his childhood, with a friend called Annabel. They were deeply in love, and had tried to have sex on the beach but were unsuccessful. Annabel died soon after of typhus. We can imply that due to his unfulfilled romance with Annabel, Humbert was constantly stuck in the past and fixated on girls of this age.
Humbert was married once to a woman called Valeria. However, there was no love between them. He may have thought she was cute once, but they were ultimately incompatible and Humbert was not nice to her. She eventually had an affair with a driver.
Humbert moved to the US, and he described some of the work he did, including going on an Arctic expedition. He eventually decided to settle down. Humbert accepted staying at the house of a friend, as he found out that the friend had a 12 year old daughter. On the day of his arrival, it was revealed that the friend’s house had burned down, but he had arranged alternative lodging for Humbert. Humbert was very troubled, and his whole mood was soured because the only reason he had even wanted to move to the area was so that he could stay with the daughter of the friend. However, that changed when he stumbled upon Dolores Haze sunbathing and fell in love.
Humbert became the lodger of the Hazes, and he would sneak around to try to spend time with Dolly. He would chat with her, but he would also sneak affection, like kisses and such. The relationship between Dolly and her mom Charlotte was what you would expect of a mom and daughter. Charlotte was exasperated at her daughter’s behaviours, but in my opinion it was nothing extreme.
Dolly went to summer camp, and while Charlotte was taking her away, she had left a letter with Humbert, confessing her love for Humbert and giving him the ultimatum that he must leave or marry her. Humbert decided to marry Charlotte so that he could have full-time access to Dolly. There was a very short honeymoon period between Charlotte and Humbert. They went around and met other couples of the neighbourhood and such. However, Charlotte discovered Humbert’s diary where he expressed lust for Dolly and contempt for Charlotte. Charlotte rushed out of the house to mail letters to warn others of Humbert, but was killed in a car accident on the way. Later in the book, Dolly would accuse Humbert of murdering Charlotte. The situation was not portrayed that way from Humbert’s point of view, but I think that is something that can be debated. Humbert’s behaviour in the aftermath of Charlotte’s death was probably also pretty odd from onlookers. The man who had killed Charlotte had offered to cover funeral costs, and to his surprise, Humbert had accepted. The man was taken aback, and while I don’t think Humbert was necessarily wrong to accept, it was just another example of his selfish and unsympathetic behaviour at this time in his life.
Humbert went to summer camp to pick up Dolly, giving the reason that her mother was in the hospital. Humbert then went on a road trip all over the US. Humbert first tried to rape Dolly by giving her sedatives. However, the sedatives didn’t really work so he didn’t make a move. However, later Dolly told Humbert about her sexual experiences with other kids at the summer camp, and he took advantage of that to rape her. The day after, Dolly had talked about discomfort, talked about how she should tell the police that Humbert raped her, and Humbert was afraid that she would actually do it. For much of the road trip, Humbert was trying to appease Dolly in the short-term with gifts to keep her by his side.
During the road trip, Humbert also revealed to Dolly that her mother had died. Humbert did note that Dolly would sometimes cry at night, and he would pretend to be asleep. Dolly would come to him for comfort, because she had nothing else, and Humbert said nothing throughout all this. Humbert would also express frustration during this road trip at having to deal with Dolly. At one point, he said that he finally sympathized with Charlotte’s exasperation at Dolly. Humbert would try to scare Dolly with boarding school. This would not be known later, but during this road trip, Dolly would already have been in contact with Clare Quilty, the man she was in love with.
Humbert and Dolly settled in Beardsley, Dolly’s hometown, and Dolly was enrolled in the girl’s school there. The school prided itself on education girls who were fashionable and well-liked in society (over girls who were well-educated). They had noted Dolly’s odd sexual behaviour, in which she didn’t seem eager to mature sexually and showed little inclination to boys, but she had also showed sexual behaviour towards her female classmates. During this time, Humbert would occasionally spend time with a man who he suspected to also be a pedophile who liked boys. Humbert restricted Dolly’s behaviour a lot, not letting her hang out with her friends, only letting them come to the house where he could monitor them. He also showed paranoia towards Dolly possibly falling in love with a boy, to the point that Humbert had once rewarded Dolly with a gift when she said that she didn’t like any of the boys that had come to a party at her house. Only after being spoken to by a teacher, did Humbert allow Dolly to act in the school play.
Before the play was to be performed, Dolly suggested another road trip, which Humbert was more than willing to oblige. On this trip, Humbert felt that he was being followed. Dolly had fallen ill and was checked into the hospital. However, she was checked out by someone who was said to be her uncle.
Humbert tried to look for Dolly to no avail. He spent two years without her, though he was spending a lot of time with a woman called Rita. I thought it was interesting that Rita’s name was so close to Lolita and I wondered if it was meant to signify that Humbert tried to replace Dolly’s presence in his life, though that was likely impossible as Rita was a totally different person. She was an older woman who was more attached to Humbert than Dolly ever was.
Dolly eventually reached out to Humbert. She was seventeen years old, married and pregnant, and she asked Humbert for money. She did not give her address in case Humbert was still angry with her, but Humbert found their address anyway. He realized that her husband Dick was not the man who she had run off with. Dick was a pretty normal young man, and Dolly thought of him as a ‘lamb,’ probably to show that he was soft-hearted.
Humbert found out from Dolly that she had run off with Clare Quilty, who was actually a man, and the playwright of the play that Dolly was acting in. I don’t remember the exact details of their meeting, but I believe Dolly had met Quilty before, when she was still with her mother. But presumably they didn’t really have any kind of relationship until the first road trip. After Dolly ran off with Quilty, she lived with him on a ranch for a bit. However, he kicked her out after she refused to act in a porn movie. And that was how she found herself in the present day with Dick. Humbert asked Dolly to come with him, but she refused. Humbert gave Dolly her inheritance (whatever came from the house) and left.
Humber then sought revenge on Quilty. He tracked down Quilty and killed him. Weirdly enough, he was able to walk free out of the house as none of Quilty’s friends seemed to care that he was dead.
Prior to killing Quilty, Humbert stated to reflect on his love for Dolly. He seemed to understand that he had never taken the time to understand her as a person. He even observed himself able to resist his lust for little girls. However, while cornering Quilty, it seemed like Humbert was portraying himself as Dolly’s rightful father and protector and Quilty as the evil kidnapper. When in reality, Humbert was just as if not worse than Quilty as a guardian for a literal child. I thought that at this point in the book, Humbert wanted to make himself look repentant.
Humbert was eventually arrested, which was why he was writing this memoir in the psychiatric ward, awaiting trial. He understood that he had committed a grave crime, and that even if he was tried for only the rape, his sentence should have been 35 years. However, due to this memoir already having been published, Humbert was already dead and likely did not stand trial.
As a whole, I felt that this novel was almost like a crime thriller, written from the point of view of our criminal Humbert. Especially in the first half, until the end of the first road trip, Humbert’s thoughts were filled with how to extend the time he had with Dolly, how to keep her happy. Of course, the book was still filled with lots of commentary and themes at that point.
Even in the second half, it still felt very much like a crime novel, as Humbert tried to hide his secret to the world, and Dolly started to show rebellious behaviour like asking for money in return for sexual favours. Not to mention the whole part where Dolly ran away and Humbert was trying to find her.
In the last few chapters, the book settled to be more of a discussion on Humbert’s mindset, now that we’d learned of his life story. What is the verdict? I think that was one of the big questions Nabokov wanted to leave us with.
I didn’t expect this book to be so thrilling, and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that it was both thrilling and deep with discussion.
Writing
The only book I’d read by Nabokov prior to Lolita was Ada or Ardor. I felt that Ada or Ardor was more dense and more difficult for me to understand as it was rife with references and themes. Lolita was a little like Ada and Ardor, but a little lighter and more down to earth, as it was set in relatively regular neighbourhoods, as opposed to Ada or Ador that was more of a grander story.
The writing was similar in that like in Ada or Ardor, Nabokov used a lot of frilly flower language. Humbert always had his head in the cloud, always thinking about his fantasies with his nymphets. As well, Nabokov’s writing was witty and punny, using a lot of alliterations and rhymes. Honestly I was rather impressed with that first conversation between Humbert and Quilty, where Quilty was accusing Humbert of preying on Lolita, but constantly covering up his words with rhymes.
The only times I thought that Humbert was an unreliable narrator was perhaps regarding the death of Charlotte Haze, and also at the end when he was showing remorse. However, for much of the book, I felt that Humbert was not an unreliable narrator so much so as he was actually presenting the facts as they appeared in his head. It didn’t occur to him that he was selfish and unsympathetic to people, it was only us and other people who noticed it.
Anyway, I thought this book was well written but not too hard to follow.
Characters
Humbert Humbert
The main criminal, the pedophile (or hebephile). I think Humbert wanted the audience to think that he was a normal person, possibly even above average. Towards the beginning, when he had just met the Hazes, I remember Humbert insisting that he was actually quite good-looking, and that Dolly possibly thought that he looked like a movie star she liked. I wonder if this was Humbert’s wish, for us to think of him as a handsome, well-educated, desired man. Because it was clear to me as a reader that he was ugly on the inside. He was conniving, wholly focused on fulfilling his fantasy, and nothing else.
I found Humbert for much of the book to be self-absorbed and unsympathetic. His life revolved around having his fantasies achieved and nothing else. He didn’t care that he would hurt Charlotte in the process of marrying her to get to Dolly; it had not crossed his mind at all because he did not see Charlotte as a person. Related to that was the fact that Humbert was probably a misogynist of some sort. He always evaluated girls as whether they were nymphets or not, and he evaluated women as whether they once could have been nymphets. They were all sexual objects in his mind. When Humbert first raped Dolly, he told the reader that this was basically the defining moment of his life. It was something like “I shall not exist if you do not imagine me…” committing rape against Lolita.
Another way in which I found Humbert to be self-absorbed and fantasy-chasing was his habit of staying in the present, living in the now. He never thought in the future. He didn’t care about the long-term impacts of marrying Charlotte and taking Dolly as his ‘lover.’ He acknowledged that he wouldn’t like Dolly once she grew up, but he hadn’t thought of the consequences of that, only thinking of the possibility of Dolly having a daughter, and that daughter having a daughter so that Humbert could continue to abuse little girls.
At the same time, I think Humbert lived in the past as an excuse. He implied that his attraction to little girls was due to his unfulfilled romance with Annabel. Perhaps that might be true, but his decision to hurt them was his decision alone. As well, Humbert’s revenge on Quilty was entirely for selfish reasons. Dolly had already moved on. She had said that she had been crazy about Quilty, but she was with Dick now. So why did Humbert want revenge on Quilty? For taking away what he deemed to have been his all those years. Nothing to do with Dolly, all to do with himself.
Humbert was purposely ignorant of the harm inflicted on Dolly for much of the novel. He only chose to focus on the good things, none of the bad. He ignored all of the signs of trauma for Dolly. After she found out her mother had died, and that she had never gotten to bid farewell to her, she would cry, and Humbert would simply find it troublesome. Or in some cases, he would pretend to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to deal with her. He tried to appease Dolly in the short term so that she wouldn’t out them, and when angry, he would threaten Dolly with boarding school, claiming that it would be worse. It was only in these times that he ever ‘sympathized’ with Charlotte, if you could call it that. When Humbert was first booking a motel for him and Dolly, he said that it was awkward trying to think of how to announce themselves. Father and daughter? Man and child? At the time, he was talking about it in a humourous manner, but he was totally unaware of how this was only a problem for him and him alone, because he saw Dolly the way that he did.
As you can see, I have a very negative view of Humbert, so I never thought that this book was at danger of romanticizing Humbert.
Humanizing is a different story, because as much of a monster as Humbert was, he was human. At the beginning of the book, he was explaining his theories on pedophilia and his form of attraction. I felt that he spoke about that in the way that a normal person talks about their hobbies. He was very into it, very excited, he had examples to back up his theories. Yes, Humbert is human. Doesn’t mean he’s a good person though.
There was a bit of a redemption story arc at the end of the book, but only in the sense that it explored the possibility of redemption and not that Humbert was actually redeemed. He started to realize that he had never gotten to know Dolly as a person. Throughout the book, Humbert had tried to imbue his sense of art and style in Dolly but she wasn’t very receptive. There had been a conversation between Dolly and her friend, where she had said that people were all alone when they died, and it was then that Humbert realized he never understood her as a person, that he’d failed her if he was really to be a ‘lover.’ In the last chapters, Humbert started to realize that he had actually harmed Dolly, had robbed her of a childhood. Perhaps he had only realized that in the course of writing the book. Because when he was confronting Quilty, it didn’t seem that regret had gotten through Humbert yet. He had still considered himself as Dolly’s rightful guardian, and Quilty had to argue that he really wasn’t a good guardian at all.
Humbert had asked that his memoir only be published after both he and Dolly died, and perhaps that was where the idea of their relationship being romanticized comes from. Humbert asked that Dolly be happy with Dick, that they hopefully had a son (presumably so that their daughter couldn’t be abused like Humbert abused him). And Humbert asked that their relationship only be immortalized in this book.
I think the nature of Humbert being on trial already had me questioning his actual state of mind, whether he actually felt regret for abusing Dolly. Sure, he was able to understand why someone in his position would feel regret for their actions. Whether he actually believed and was sincere in them was a different story. But the deed has been done, and the man is dead now. So what justice is there? None at all.
Dolores Haze/Lolita
I’ve called Lolita “Dolly” for most of this review. I don’t want to call her Lolita because that was Humbert’s name for her. It was a name he called her in private, because she was his fantasy. It wasn’t even the true Dolores Haze that Humbert really coveted, but a version of her that would be his forever.
Dolly was a tomboy, a typical girl of that age, daughter of a single mom. There wasn’t much that suggested her behaviour to be out of the ordinary. Even her crush on movie actors or Humbert at first was not anything that raised red flags to me. Dolly mentioned that she’d had sexual experiences at camp. Now I don’t know if that’s normal lol. I was definitely not having sexual romps at age 12. But even then, she was exploring sexuality with her peers.
After Dolly was first raped by Humbert, she complained about it, she felt sore. She said that maybe she might tell the cops that she was raped. Later on, Humbert dropped the news on her that her mom had died. After that, we saw that she would cry sometimes, which is very natural. But at that time, she only had Humbert to rely on, and Humber took advantage of that. Dolly was isolated with her abuser without a permanent home. Add to that the fact that she was simultaneously being preyed upon by Clare Quilty. More on Quilty later. But Dolly was showing signs of trauma from all of these things, that Humbert just chose to see as annoying teenager things.
Things changed at Beardsley. I think this was when Dolly started to realize that something was not right, that Humbert was not on her team. That was when she started to ask for money in return for sexual favours. She would constantly hide the money away from Humbert. There was a scene in which Dolly and Humbert were with a friend of Dolly’s. The friend was hugging her father and Dolly had burst into tears. Humbert on realized in hindsight that she was perhaps crying over the fact that she did not have a healthy family relationship as this friend had. She had loving parents and several siblings and they all loved each other without anything in return. Humbert did not love Dolly, Humbert wanted sex from her.
The teachers had noted Dolly’s odd behaviour, that she had either excellent emotional control or none at all (probably meaning she would emote in very sudden and extreme ways), and that she wasn’t interested in sex, but exhibited sexual thoughts to other girls. All of this was undoubtedly the result of her having been abused from a young age.
Dolly asked to go on another road trip, and she was much more elusive this time, often hiding from Humbert. She eventually ran off with Quilty, and Humbert did not hear from her again until she wrote.
When Humbert visited Dolly, she called him dad, and she was fairly casual with him. She seemed settled and comfortable in her new life with Dick. She recounted her experience with Quilty very casually. And it was in this conversation too that Humbert realized that Dolly never loved him, never saw him as a love interest. He was just the person who was supposed to take care of her. And he didn’t. But Dolly was past that. She was focused on her life now. When Humbert asked her to come with him, she declined, wanting to stay with Dick and their unborn child.
Dolly said that Quilty was the only man she had ever been crazy about, implying love. However, we have to remember that she was around 15 years old here. Did she love Quilty, or was Quilty just an opportunity for her to get away from Humbert? Add to that the fact that Quilty had forced her to act in porn and Dolly had refused. At this point, Dolly had probably grown to understand that sex is something that she can refuse, thus recognizing that what she did with Humbert was inappropriate.
Dolly seemed surprisingly well adjusted when she saw her married and pregnant at the ripe old age of 17. But perhaps there’s a lot of trauma underneath that we won’t see because Humbert left soon after. I will say, the trauma that Dolly went through is extreme. No girl should ever be subject to that.
But Dolly was never Lolita. Lolita was Humbert’s idea of the perfect nymphet, his fantasy. Dolly was a girl who was hurt very badly by people who should be looking out for her. Speaking of which –
Charlotte Haze
Charlotte was Dolly’s widowed mother. She was constantly exasperated by Dolly’s behaviour, much like a mom of a teenager would be. At the same time, Charlotte was trying to catch the attention of Humbert. She would always try to spend one-on-one time together, annoyed whenever Dolly joined them though Humbert much preferred that. I was only mildly surprised that Charlotte was madly in love with Humbert as her behaviour had suggested it. As well, being a widow, she was likely lonely as well.
However, as a mother, she had failed to protect Dolly. She had been completely unaware of Humbert’s attraction to Dolly until after she had married him and had found his diary. Granted, Humbert had been discreet, but perhaps Charlotte should have done more research before demanding marriage from Humbert. She found out too late, and didn’t even manage to get her message out. And due to her death, Dolly fell into the hands of Humbert.
Later in the book, Humbert had noted that perhaps Charlotte and Dolly’s tough relationship was better than no family for Dolly, though I argue that Charlotte and Dolly’s relationship wasn’t all that tough but a normal one between mother and daughter.
Clare Quilty/Cue
I did some reading before writing this, and some called Quilty Humbert’s doppelganger. I think there is merit to that. Both of them were involved with Dolly, and kidnapped them away. Both of them wanted Dolly to act in their fantasy; for Humbert, Lolita was his fantasy, and for Quilty, he wanted Dolly in his porn movie. I read a comparison stating that Humbert was the side that worshipped Lolita, whereas Cue was the side that tossed her away, kicking her out for ever disagreeing.
So the act of Humbert killing Quilty was like Humbert killing the side of him that used people cruelly. Only after he did that, did he seem to start understanding remorse.
Themes
There was a lot going on in this book, so I’m just going to go through these themes in the order that they popped up in my head, and definitely not in order of importance or magnitude.
Misogyny
Humbert definitely held misogyny towards the various women and girls in his life. Whenever he saw a girl, his first thought was to determine whether she was a nymphet. They might as well be animals to be categorized to him. Whenever he slept with women, he did so trying to imagine them as possibly having been nymphets when they were young. That was it. The only value that female people had to him was whether they had nymphets.
Humbert had a fantasy that he and Dolly would move to an island somewhere, and that when Dolly grew old for his taste, then he would hopefully impregnate her so that she would have another daughter, Lolita the second. And then hopefully as Lolita grew too old, then she would have another daughter, so that Humbert would be able to continue to abuse Lolita the third. So other than nymphets, women were only valuable as being able to give birth to nymphets.
Fantasy
Humbert was constantly living in fantasy of abusing little girls. He used various different ideas to divide reality from fantasy.
For example, Lolita was his secret pet name for Dolly. Lolita was his, whereas Dolly or Dolores was just a girl. Humbert had once found a list of students in Dolly’s class, and he considered the list to be somewhat of a poem. Of course, his favourite part of the poem was “Haze, Dolores.” He said that it kind of masked the mystery of Lolita, again showing that Lolita was only his. His devotion to Dolly was only ever to Lolita the nymphet, not Dolores Haze the person. In addition to spending as much time with Dolly as possible, Humbert was committed to keeping Dolly innocent because that was what he was attracted to (e.g. keeping her away from boys, though that is also because of jealousy).
At the beginning, Humbert went into a lot of historical or mythological examples of pedophilia. I think there was a lot of exoticism in his ideas, which again was related to him having a fantasy of a world where nymphets were a normal taste.
I think the name of Haze was also a reference to fantasy, that Humbert could ever only think of the Hazes through the smokescreen of his own infatuation with little girls, and that was why he never saw them clearly as they were but only as nymphet and obstacle (Dolly and Charlotte respectively).
Another instance of Humbert being too caught up in fantasy was at the end of their first road trip, when he realized that he remembered nothing. Because his entire trip was spent focusing on abusing Dolly.
Past and Future
As I mentioned, Humbert seemed stuck in the present, only wanting to fulfill his fantasy. But I think he wasn’t the only one. After Charlotte and Humbert got married, Charlotte would want Humbert to recall his old loves and hate on them, seeming to want to erase them from Humbert’s past. The difference between Humbert and Charlotte, however, was that Charlotte was focused on the future and Humbert was not. Charlotte wanted a good future with a good family as Mrs. Humbert. Humbert wanted none of that, he just wanted to enjoy pedophilia right now. He didn’t care about how he was going to (and did eventually) ruin two lives, of Charlotte Haze and Dolores Haze.
Again, Humbert was also sometimes stuck in the past but as an excuse to be selfish. He implied that his romance with Annabel was why he loved little girls, almost blaming Annabel for his own transgressions. As well, his revenge on Quilty was very much rooted in the past, as even Dolly had moved on from the trauma that both men had inflicted on her. But Humbert couldn’t let his pride take a hit, even if it was all in the past.
Abuse and Trauma
Humbert initially intended to rape Dolly by sedating her. I think he believed that he wouldn’t hurt her if she was unaware of it, and it would keep her innocent. Even before all of that, when Charlotte was still alive, Humbert would sometimes play with Dolly and then give her kisses. They were just signs of normal affection to her, but to Humbert, they were something totally different. Due to that line of thought, I think Humbert realized to some degree that he was projecting onto Dolly. However, when Dolly related her sexual experiences to him, Humbert couldn’t resist and raped her. And that began the sexual abuse of Dolly. When Humbert first raped Dolly, he claimed that it was not sex, but the kind of activities that Dolly did with her peers. So he portrayed it as something playful, when it really wasn’t from his point of view. Again, he was kind of whitewashing the situation.
On top of rape, Dolly suddenly found out that her mother had died, and she hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye to her. Add to the fact that she was completely reliant on Humbert on their road trip. She must have been severely traumatized. But Humbert ignored as much of it as he could, feigning sleep when Dolly cried at night, seeing her mood swings as an annoyance.
When at Beardsley, signs of Dolly’s trauma became a little more apparent due to teachers observing her. A teacher said that Dolly either had excellent emotional control or none at all, that she had no interest in sex but also exhibited sexual thoughts to other girls and young women. It was all considered unusual compared to her peers, and was definitely because of her being sexually abused.
She was emotionally unstable as well. There was the example of Dolly bursting into tears when she saw that her classmate had a loving family. It reminded her that she did not have anyone looking out for her who did not want something from her. Both Humbert and Quilty wanted sex from her.
I think Dolly’s signs of abuse are an example of why this book did not romanticize the relationship between Dolly and Humbert. All the signs of trauma and hurt were there, only that Humbert chose to ignore them.
Parenting
Humbert thought of Dolly’s signs of trauma and abuse as annoying teenager behaviour. He ‘humourously’ sympathized with Charlotte during their road trip, realizing why she was always annoyed, except Dolly’s behaviour back then was definitely very different from Dolly’s behaviour on the road trip. Humbert ignored Dolly’s cries for help, because it was in his interest to have her reliant on him. He simply didn’t think anything of it when she cried, and whenever she was really acting up, he would get angry and threaten her with boarding school, portraying boarding school as a bad and unsafe place (as if being with him was better).
At Beardsley, Humbert appeared to be a very strict and conservative dad, with how he never let her hang out away from home or with boys. Only after pulling teeth did the teacher manager to convince Humbert to allow Dolly to act in the school play. He took nothing away from the conversation about her odd maturation. And then immediately after, he went to the study room where Dolly was studying, and asked her to masturbate him while he watched another girl. That scene made me so sick, made me realize that Humbert had no interest in this child’s wellbeing.
Romance
In Humbert’s eyes, Dolly was his lover. He constantly gave her pet names that invoked such a relationship. He even called Charlotte his mistress, seeing as how Dolly was his one love.
Humbert exhibited very jealous behaviour at Beardsley, constantly keeping Dolly away from boys. Part of it was so that Dolly wouldn’t run away. But it also came off as very immature, in the sense that Humbert was competing with literal boys.
When Humbert met up with a 17 year old Dolly, I felt like he almost loved her the way that people love an ex-partner. She was no longer a nymphet, but Humbert realized that he still held affection or her. After all, why would he ask for Dolly to come with him even if she wasn’t a nymphet anymore? And perhaps only after this did Humbert realize that if Dolly was his lover, then he was a poor lover because he never understood her as a person. Humbert also started to find himself resisting little girls when they were around him, and it also made him think if he was over that phase now, that his heart was now fully with Lolita.
Redemption
In the last chapters, Humbert showed that he had noticed times when Dolly was hurt, only that he chose to ignore them at the time, like when Dolly burst into tears at seeing her classmate’s relationship with her family. He realized he never knew Dolly as a person when she was talking about death.
At the time, I wonder if Humbert believed that killing Quilty would be redemption, because he would have killed a cruel man who abused Dolly. But he had failed to kill the man who worshipped Lolita and still abused Dolly. And the poem that he’d written and shown Quilty had still portrayed Quilty as the wrong party, and Humbert as her protector when he was anything but.
At the end of his memoir, Humbert expressed some remorse for having abused Dolly and depriving her of a childhood. However, what is there to be done? The only thing he could have done was serve his sentence. The only words he had for Dolly was for her to be good to her husband and their child, hoping that the child was a son.
Maybe redemption is impossible in this case, because what’s done is done. He can’t un-fuck up Dolly’s life.
Art and Crime
I picked this up in the Sparknotes analysis, but there was discussion on whether writing this book, a beautiful piece of art, would absolve Humbert of his crimes. Perhaps his thought process was that he wanted to show others how beautiful the fantasy of Lolita was in his mind. That is the part that perhaps humanizes Humbert. But suffice it to say, he did hurt Dolly in reality, even if it was out of a beautiful image (beautiful is subjective). And again this comes back to whether Humbert was truly sorry, or whether this was just him writing a story to earn points because he was on trial.
Overall
Excellent book. I found out about a podcast on this book and I’m going to listen to it. There was just so much packed into this relatively short story. As a crime novel, it was thrilling and fucked up to get inside Humbert’s brain. But I also thought that with so few characters, Nabokov was able to paint such a fascinatingly complex picture of abuse.
What was Nabokov’s purpose? I don’t think his purpose was to get people to sympathize with Humbert necessarily. I don’t know if he had a purpose other than to tell a story. But I think that this book did remind me that monsters are human, and we are all responsible for our actions.