Lolita

The beginning of Humbert Humbert’s confession is addressed to “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (9). He provides a list of his various nicknames for Lolita: Lo, Dolores, Dolly, Lola, explaining that, before Lolita, there was another girl he loved, a story he will now tell. 

Humbert provides his biographical information: He was born in Paris in 1910 to a Swiss father and a “photogenic” English mother. When he was 3, she died in an accident: “picnic, lightning” (10). Humbert was raised in the touristy French Riviera by his mostly absent father and his mother’s strict sister, Sybil, who died when he was sixteen. He attended an English day school and notes that his only sexual knowledge comes from French novels, art, and movies. He gains real knowledge from Annabel Leigh during the summer of 1923.

Annabel Leigh is 12 when Humbert meets her while she is traveling with her parents. Though he obsesses over for most of his life, Humbert admits he cannot remember her features very well since meeting Lolita. He knows she was half English and half Dutch and describes her broadly but not specifically. Regardless, he and Annabel become friends and then try unsuccessfully to fornicate on the beach; unbeknownst to them, at first, “two bearded bathers” watch from the water and shout encouragement. Annabel “died of typhus in Corfu” (13) four months later. 

Humbert believes his interest in young girls began with Annabel and suggests then that in “a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel” (14). He believes that today’s youth cannot understand the strong physical and spiritual connection he and Annabel had. For years, he obsesses over her and, especially, the aromas of one shared encounter in a mimosa grove, but Lolita breaks the spell Annabel had over him. 

In college in London and Paris, Humbert switches from studying psychology to studying English literature. As an adult, he writes essays and publishes several volumes of a manual of French literature for English students that he is working on when he is arrested. He takes teaching jobs and visits prostitutes but becomes obsessed with what he calls “nymphets,” girls between the ages of 9 and 14 who have a sexual charm even though they may not be the prettiest girls. Nymphets are girls who have a quality that only men decades older can understand. To, Humbert, Annabel was not a nymphet because they were the same age when they met, but Dante’s Beatrice was a nymphet, as were King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s daughters. Humbert cites other nymphets from literature, art, and history, complaining that it is unfair society that allows an older man to court a sixteen-year-old girl but not a twelve-year-old one, especially one who has already begun puberty. A handsome and successful bachelor, he states that females his own age find him attractive, but his encounters always end with him wishing he were with the young girls he watches from afar. Still, while in college and early adulthood, Humbert never acts on his fantasies.

Humbert wonders what happened to the various nymphets he admired in Paris and to nymphets as they age generally. Does the fact that he possesses them in his mind affect their lives? In Paris, he meets a prostitute named Monique who he thinks is 16. He has two encounters with her but stops seeing her once she ages out of her nymphet phase. Having tasted something close to what he desires, he seeks out a procuress who offers him a very young prostitute. She is not a nymphet, so he tries to leave the procuress’s home, but two men to threaten him. He takes the girl to her room but does not have sex with her. 

After that encounter, Humbert decides to settle down. He looks for a wife and easily finds one because he was and still is “an exceptionally handsome male” (25) even if he is “stupid” when it comes to sex. So begins his marriage to a Polish doctor’s daughter, Valeria.

Humbert says he was attracted to Valeria because she reminds him of a doll-like “little girl” though they are close in age. She loves him, but he quickly grows bored with her, finding her stupid and lacking in any intellectual interests. Throughout the period of 1935 to 1939, he rarely has sex with her but is instead tempted by the grocer’s daughter. His uncle, Sybil’s husband, dies in 1939, leaving him a few thousand dollars per year on the condition that Humbert move to the United States and take up the uncle’s business. Humbert is somewhat fascinated with America and tries to convince the reluctant Valeria to move by promising that America is full of “rosy children and great trees” (27) and a life much better than that promised by “dull dingy Paris” (27). Valeria confesses that she cannot move with him because she is in love with another man, a Russian taxi driver Humbert refers to jokingly as “Mr. Taxovich.” Humbert feels she has betrayed him and decides he will kill her, but the cab driver never gives him the chance; he stays with the two of them while she packs up her things and sobs with distastefully melodramatic flair. He claims the new lover even asks Humbert for advice on what she should read and wear while Valeria theatrically packs. They leave. Humbert notes that he later learns that she died in childbirth in 1945 after she and her lover were the subjects of a strange psychiatric experiment in California, an experiment he cannot read about in prison.

Humbert switches focus to a discussion of the lackluster selection of books available to him in the prison library. The library contains a Bible, an old collection of Dickens, and an encyclopedia for children (about which he is happy because the volume contains pictures of girl scouts); there is also a book called Who’s Who in the Limelight, featuring an entry on a playwright named Clare Quilty, playwright of The Little Nymph and Fatherly Love among other “notable” plays for children. There is also an entry for an actress named Dolores Quine, and he notes that Dolores is Lolita’s real name and that she might have appeared in a play titled The Murdered Playwright. He makes a series of puns about the words “quilty” and “quine” and states he is “Guilty of killing Quilty” (31) before complaining that he only has words to play with now.