Lolita

“Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes.” 

Humbert offers the reader a definition of a “nymphet.” To Humbert, nymphets are based on classical literature and myth; in reality, they are Humbert’s invention. These young girls mix childishness with womanhood, and Humbert is drawn to Lolita because she embodies this trait, not because she is attractive or graceful. Humbert’s definition evolves throughout the novel, which emphasizes the fact that the true definition of a nymphet is based entirely on the perceptions of a young girl’s abuser. 

“I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake ‘primal scenes’; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament.” 

Humbert describes his pleasure at toying with the psychiatrists at one of his sanatorium stays. This passage demonstrates both Humbert’s distaste for psychiatrists and Humbert’s narcissism, as he manipulates people for his own amusement. 

“All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’ in my tortured past.”

Humbert is immediately drawn to Lolita when he meets her because, to Humbert, she embodies the spirit of Annabel Leigh. By comparing Lolita to Annabel in this way, Humbert plays the victim and avoids responsibility for his pedophilia; rather than admitting he was attracted to a child, he attempts to blame his “tortured past” for making him the way he is.

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl”—that horror of horrors.” 

Humbert admits that the real cruelty of loving children is that they will age out of being children. For him, Lolita is merely an object to desire and one he must seize before time runs out. When Humbert sees the pregnant Lolita at the end of the novel, he recognizes that he loves her in a more sincere way, but by then it is too late, for he has already lost her.

“But if, after reading my ‘confession,’ you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal—worse than a kidnapper who rapes a child. You see, chéri.” 

In Charlotte’s confessional love letter to Humbert, she foreshadows Humbert’s marriage to her in order to kidnap and rape a child. The letter also reveals her writing style and her pretensions, as she attempts to use French. Humbert mocks her writing in his reconstruction of her letter; his mockery is ironic because Humbert’s own writing is full of similarly melodramatic lyricism and foreign phrasing.

“I had been always aware of the possessive streak in her, but I never thought she would be so crazily jealous of anything in my life that had not been she.” 

After marrying Charlotte, Humbert recognizes that she is a jealous person when she asks him to list every lover he has ever had. He assumes that she is jealous of his relationship with Lolita, perceiving her as self-obsessed. He becomes intolerant of her controlling behavior, which foreshadows his possessiveness of Lolita. 

“Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer. No, no, I was neither. Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do!”

After Humbert thinks about killing Charlotte at the lake, Humbert refers to worse crimes to dismiss his own desires. In doing so, he makes a veiled reference to World War II and the atomic bomb, arguing implicitly that his own actions are not so bad in the grand scheme of life and war. Humbert shows a revealing disregard for the world around him, seeing the war as an inconvenience.

“I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate—and its padded shoulder.” 

After Charlotte dies, Humbert convinces the Farlows that he is actually Lolita’s biological father; this deception allows him to take Lolita from camp and take her on the road. He ascribes his actions to fate, implying that they were not the result of his lies and actions but of some higher power. Here and elsewhere, Humbert uses fate to justify or dismiss his own actions and culpability. 

“Human beings, attend! I should have understood that Lolita had already proved to be something quite different from innocent Annabel, and that the nymphean evil breathing through every pore of the fey child that I had prepared for my secret delectation, would make the secrecy impossible, and the delectation lethal.”

Humbert employs foreshadowing to admit that he should have known better than to engage in sex with Lolita, while also suggesting that the difference between Annabel and Lolita enables him to go forward with his desires. Humbert suggests that Lolita was nefarious and that he is the victim of her seduction.  

“Frigid gentlewoman of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.” 

Humbert announces to his readers that Lolita is to blame for their affair. The references to time in the passage function as a metaphor for the speed with which young girls mature, in Humbert’s opinion; in this passage, he notes that Lolita has transformed from a girl into a seductress in mere minutes. 

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”

In Lepingville, Lolita joins Humbert in bed after she cries by herself in her own hotel room. Humbert announces that Lolita is wholly dependent on him, as they are nomads and she has no family. He considers this moment an act of personal triumph, as he believes her to be throwing herself at him. 

“Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl. Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things.” 

On their first road trip, Humbert sees Lolita as a sexual being, but he eventually recognizes that she is an American child who cannot appreciate art and culture the way he does. He contradicts himself later in the book by suggesting he loved her deeply, but lines like this one reveal what his true thoughts of her and his awareness that she is a child.

“And I was such a thoughtful friend, such a passionate father, such a good pediatrician, attending all the wants of my little auburn brunette’s body!” 

Throughout his time with Lolita, Humbert regularly plays the role of father, by pretending to be responsible for her upbringing in Beardsley and using fatherhood as his excuse for being with her on the road. By blurring the lines between lover and father, he justifies his actions to himself and to the reader, implying that, since he provided food and gifts and sent her to school, he cannot merely a sexual predator. 

“Perhaps my learned readers may perk up if I tell them that even had we discovered a piece of sympathetic seaside somewhere, it would have come too late, since my real liberation had occurred much earlier: at the moment, in point of fact, when Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta, had appeared to me, golden and brown, kneeling, looking up, on that shoddy veranda, in a kind of fictitious, dishonest, but eminently satisfactory seaside arrangement (although there was nothing but a second-rate lake in the neighborhood).” 

After Humbert explains that psychiatrists encouraged him to recreate the beach encounter with Annabel to get over his neuroses, he notes that he tried this approach but lacked desire for Lolita at the time. He states that his two lovers had fused into one and that she had looked like she was at a beach when they met, so the exercise is futile.

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinning today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep.”

Humbert describes his journey across America with Lolita. At times Humbert is critical of America in the book, believing it to be a country that lacks culture, but he also admits that he did not see the best parts of the nation. Lolita is a metaphor for the nation, as she is lovely and trustful, and he defiles her repeatedly and then ignores her own tears just as he ignores the splendor of the landscape around them.

“‘Can you remember,’ she said, ‘what was the name of that hotel, you know [nose puckered], come on, you know—with those white columns and the marble swan in the lobby? Oh, you know [noisy exhalation of breath]—the hotel where you raped me. Okay, skip it. I mean, was it [almost in a whisper] The Enchanted Hunters? Oh it was? [musingly] Was it?’” 

After Lolita starts rehearsals for The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert worries she will mock him for being sentimental and nostalgic about the title of the play. When she makes the connection, she laughs at Humbert’s expense, referring to it as the place where he “raped” her. 

“If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look.” 

Before reading letters in the post office in Wace, Humbert imagines a film version of his story, envisioning his face superimposed on the images of the men on the most wanted posters. Movies are important to Lolita, and this point suggests that she influences his thoughts. 

“To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man—free to trace the fugitive, free to destroy my brother.” 

After Lolita goes missing from the hospital, Humbert vows vengeance on the man he believes is responsible. He refers to him as his brother, recognizing that the man, eventually revealed as Quilty, is his double. 

“I have a memo here: between July 5 and November 18, when I returned to Beardsley for a few days, I registered, if not actually stayed, at 342 hotels, motels, and tourist homes.” 

Humbert traces all the journeys he took with Lolita and tabulates the number of places they visited. This third instance of the number 342 appears after a reference to the Haze’s address and to Lolita and Humbert’s room at the Enchanted Hunters. They encourage Humbert to believe that some higher power or fate is guiding him to Lolita. 

“Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.” 

After receiving John Farlow’s letter, in which he announces he is remarrying and moving to South America, Humbert realizes that people can change. In literature, though, he notes that characters are fixed; if John can do something so unpredictable, that means that change is not actually unethical but possibly a positive occurrence.

“She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds… but thank God it was not that echo alone I worshiped.” 

Pregnant and seventeen years old, Lolita is no longer a “nymphet.” Humbert claims that he loved her, and his apparent love offers a stark contrast to Quilty’s own actions toward Lolita. Humbert, however, is not reliable, and the truth of his attachment to Lolita will never be clear. 

“Unless it can be proven to me—to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction—that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.” 

After Humbert sees Lolita, he recognizes that he has robbed her of a childhood, but he does not admit the specifics of his crimes. By calling her Dolores, instead of Lolita, he also implies that what he did to “Dolores” was wrong but not what he did to “Lolita.” He argues that he cannot justify his actions, but he still attempts to do so by describing the novel as an attempt to create art from the pain he has inflicted on Dolores/Lolita. 

“Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protégée to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home.” 

Quilty explains to Humbert the real reason behind Lolita’s escape after Humbert accuses Quilty of kidnapping her and of ruining her life. It is a reminder to Humbert that not everyone in his life sees his actions the way he does. Lolita never recognized that he loved her, though she did love Quilty, who objectively treats her worse than Humbert ever did.