Rape and Regret
39
within the decade of its release has also spawned two film versions. One way or
another we cannot leave these little girls alone. Fascinated by the idea of a raped
girl child and her supposed perversions, we also seem to keep struggling with a
sense that somehow she is responsible for what is done to her. Perhaps this is
because this impulse to blame masks a smoldering rage that her continued
existence foments. As long as she stands center stage, she reminds her villains of
their guilt and the rest of us of our complicity in that guilt when these authors
propel her to center stage and create characters that revive this image.
Nabokov is said to have decried the notion of Lolita as a symbol. Novelist
Robertson Davies once described her story as that of “the exploitation of a weak
adult by a corrupt child” and he is not alone in this determination. A staggering
amount of public reviews, interpretations, and adaptations of this seminal work
assumes a sense of the child as the rapist of the monster who is forgiven because
he is a victim of his impulses (de la Durantaye). The fact that Lolita is a rapist’s
fictive justification for his sick work is often ignored as reviewers discuss how
they are delighted, intrigued, and amused by her adventures {The Complete
Review). Many other authors have noticed that the rapist is the only speaker in
the novel, but the power of the demon seed child corrupting the grown man,
thereby leading him into acts of perversion still seems to be the prevailing sense
of this story. Some, unable to cope with the crimes perpetrated in the text,
interpret Delores Haze as a symbol of America, they make her older, they make
Humbert younger, they make her punk, they make her hard-core but they can
never ignore her {The Complete Review). It is also possible that because
Humberts live among us in real life and because their existence is often in
cooperation with ours, we prefer to believe that the little girl is a willing
participant. But when a man who participates in murder, fraud, and kidnapping
tells us that his twelve-year-old stepchild is not a virgin and that she loves sex
with grown men, we have to consider the source. She wants him yet he needs to
drug his “doomed child” before he can rape her. He calls it, “Sparing her purity
by operating only in the stealth of the night” (Nabokov, 2045-53). But perhaps,
more precisely, he knows that if she sees the act she can name it and this would
sully Humbert’s view of himself Once Lolita is raped and she calls the act
“incest,” Humbert silences her with “the reformatory threat,” introducing us to
the process of overt revisionism in terms of Lolita’s history that makes the rape
more comfortable to remember and that makes the girl a criminal. In order to put
us as ease with his degeneracy, Humbert remakes the girl, divorcing the child
from herself He renames her then steals her from her life. He rewrites her
beginning. Lolita was not bom of woman, instead Humbert says Lolita “began
with Annabel,” his long dead amour, and turns Lolita into more of a ghost than a
little girl. In Humbert’s words, Lolita is not a young girl but a “nymphic
(demonic),” a “little deadly demon,” “my Riviera love,” a beauty, a “cinematic
still,” a “twelve-year-old flame,” his darling, wife, and bride. Nabokov fills his
protagonist’s mouth with new ways to shape Lolita’s character. He, and we, see
Lolita as a picture rather than a human being, which serves two purposes: