Popular Culture Review Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2011 | Page 43

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: