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Popular Culture Review
Humbert becomes an artist rather than a pervert and the girl becomes an
accomplice. These terms used to describe Lolita are not only possessive but they
also indicate a kind of free will Humbert is trying to impress on our view of his
captive. She is magic, ephemeral, a vision, and a grown-up. Nabokov creates the
virginal child as an empty vessel and then fills her up with a degenerate’s vision.
And for her part, without assistance, Lolita must learn, on the fly, how to use the
language of the man who would unmake her. She is not real to her rapist, not a
reproductive entity but the dead end dream of a nightmaring man who seeks
stasis. He creates a dead zone separate from life where the rules and
expectations of maturity and morality that he cannot accept do not exist. Except
that Lolita is a growing girl and does transform. Humbert cannot see her as a
whole human being. Lolita is a game to Humbert, and to his joy (as long as it is
a game there are no ramifications) and dismay (she learns to resist according to
the rules) she learns to play. But because the game is never between peers, she is
only allowed an impression of power. Remember that this story starts with an
impression of a caged ape. Humbert says Lolita negotiates the price of sexual
favors in order to create the impression that she is getting a fair shake. “. . . she
took advantage,” he says. When the specified allowance paid on the account that
she fulfills “her basic obligations,” does not suit her, he says, “She was . . . not
easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she earn her three pennies” (Nabokov,
2986-94). But kidnapped and carried from hotel to hotel, Lolita cannot
overcome her captor physically. All she has at hand is a studied resistance. She
can throw tantrums, she can bargain, she can threaten to scream, she can make
friends outside her corrupt family circle, and she can try to make her captor pay.
It is a strategy similar to that used by POWs trying to retain their identities and
maintain their will to live in situations where they were powerless and abused.
Nabokov gives us a girl fighting erasure, and he reaches for literary fellows to
craft this struggle, men also captivated by the trapped girl. Annabel Lee is the
lost love that Humbert says drives him to perversion, Poe’s lost love. Lolita is
described as pitiful and entrancing. In addition to the many textual references to
Poe’s works there are also references to Flaubert, Proust, Rabelais, Baudelaire,
and Balzac, to name a few. This is a work in conversation with other men (and
their readers) about masculine fears of passions that power a desire to offend. It
is a lecture about the hatred of the object of desire that seems to lie at the root of
the male imaginations that foster this paragon of helplessness. Most of the
writers referred to in this work are also famous for social observation. Many of
them claimed that they only reflected real world values in their works. And it is
telling that every adult female in Lolita, except for our heroine and her nymphet
friends, are fiercely ugly and demanding crones. They are fat, clumsy, mediocre,
hopelessly unattractive, sluttish, and worn out. Lolita’s mother is harping and
Humbert’s first wife is dumb, according to him. He cannot shape a grown
woman to his desires because she has a full will and identity of her own and in
Humbert’s distorted view this makes her ugly. A woman is out of place on the
sandy shores and bright beautiful islands Humbert imagines for Lolita because