AESTHETIC EXCUSES AND MORAL CRIMES:
THE CONVERGENCE OF MORALITY AND AESTHETICS IN NABOKOV S
LOLITA
by
JENNIFER ELIZABETH GREEN
Under the Direction of Paul Schmidt
ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the debate between morality and aesthetics that is
outlined by Nabokov in Lolita s afterword. Incorporating a discussion of Lolita s
critical history in order to reveal how critics have chosen a single, limited side of
the debate, either the moral or aesthetic, this thesis seeks to expose the
complexities of the novel where morality and aesthetics intersect. First, the
general moral and aesthetic features of Lolita are discussed. Finally, I address the
two together, illustrating how Lolita cannot be categorized as immoral, amoral, or
didactic. Instead, it is through the juxtaposition of form and content, parody and
reality, that the intersection of aesthetics and morality appears, subverting and
repudiating the voice of its own narrator and protagonist, evoking sympathy for
an appropriated and abused child, and challenging readers to evaluate their own
ethical boundaries.
INDEX WORDS: Nabokov, Lolita, Morality, Aesthetics, Ethics, Parody,
Appropriation, Solipsism, Abuse, Criticism, Exploitation,
Pedophilia, Genre, Convention, Allusion, Romance, Love
story, Doppelganger, Detective, Confession, Folklore
AESTHETIC EXCUSES AND MORAL CRIMES:
THE CONVERGENCE OF MORALITY AND AESTHETICS IN NABOKOV S
LOLITA
by
JENNIFER ELIZABETH GREEN
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
in the College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
2006
Copyright by
Jennifer Elizabeth Green
2006
AESTHETIC EXCUSES AND MORAL CRIMES:
THE CONVERGENCE OF MORALITY AND AESTHETICS IN NABOKOV S
LOLITA
by
JENNIFER ELIZABETH GREEN
Major Professor: Paul Schmidt
Committee: Marti Singer
Chris Kocela
Matthew Roudan�
Electronic Version Approved:
Office of Graduate Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
Georgia State University
May 2006
 iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & 1
Morality and Lolita& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & . 6
The Intersection of Morality and Aesthetics& & & & & & & & & & 27
Conclusion& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & ... 52
Works Cited& & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & 55
 1
Introduction
In a BBC television interview, Vladimir Nabokov explained the composition of
his work in terms of games and problems:  I ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like
composing riddles with elegant solutions (SO 16). Nabokov s novel Lolita is no
exception. Allusive, deceptive, and complex in design, structure, and narrative, frequently
Lolita is read by critics in terms of its aesthetic riddles. Yet, another riddle, one that
frames the body of the text and is introduced by John Ray Jr. in the foreword, implicates
more than the complex aesthetic features of the novel by introducing the question of
ethical importance from the outset as Ray emphasizes the moral implications of Humbert
Humbert s  Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male. Ray hails the
manuscript as a work detailing the  moral apotheosis of a murderer and a pedophile, a
man he calls  horrible,  abject, and  a shining example of moral leprosy (5). Still,
within Humbert s crimes and through Humbert s words, Ray discovers something more:
a deep sense of underlying morality in the form of:
a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting
maniac  these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn
us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils.  Lolita should make
all of us parents, social workers, educators  apply ourselves with still
greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation
in a safer world. (5-6)
Nabokov cements the riddle surrounding the text in his afterword, countering Ray
by writing,  I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray s
 2
assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow (314). Thus, Humbert s  confession is framed in a
riddle, one which has never ceased in dividing Lolita s critics into two distinct camps:
those who focus their attention, as Nabokov instructs, on the aesthetic dimensions of the
novel,1 and those who cannot resist discovering specific moral, or immoral, implications
in the text.2 The problem appears to contain a simple solution: as critics and even as first-
time readers, we are much more inclined to side with the artist, especially when the artist,
from his own authorial and authoritative voice, tells us that Lolita is purely aesthetic and
amoral. Furthermore, as we read and reread Lolita, we quickly discover that Ray is
simply another device used by Nabokov s authorial hand, another parody, another act of
deception by the author. As Linda Kauffman points out  The choice between Ray s
foreword (literature as a vehicle for social change) and Nabokov s afterword (literature as
self-referential artifice) involve seemingly irreconcilable differences, and, since Ray is
the butt of parody, readers seem willing to go to any length to avoid being identified with
him (153). Clearly, we should not simply dismiss Nabokov and believe John Ray and
1
For general aesthetic treatment of Lolita and Nabokov, see Andrew s Aestheticism, Nabokov, and Lolita;
Seidel s  Nabokov and the Aesthetics of American Exile; and Stegner s Escape into Aesthetics. For
theoretical treatments, see Emarth s  Conspicuous Construction; or Kriestva, Nabokov and the Anti-
Realistic Critique; Arora s  Cinematographic Narrative and Postmodern Fiction; Booker s neo-Marxist
critique,  Adorno, Althusser, and Humbert Humbert; Giblett s  Writing Sexuality, Reading Pleasure;
Packman s Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire; and Simonton s Baktinian approach,
 From Solipsism to Dialogue. For genre studies, see  Parody and Authenticity in Lolita by Frosch,;
Haegert s  The Americanization of Humbert Humbert; Jones s  Folk Characterization in Lolita;
LaFontaine s  Variations on the Detective Novel; Burch s  Nabokov and the Detective; and Shilston s
 The Courtly Misogynist.
2
Recent studies examining the moral implications of Lolita include Olsen s Lolita: A Janus Text;
Kauffman s  Framing Lolita: Is there a Woman in the Text; Alexandrov s  Lolita; Clifton s  Humbert
Humbert and the Limits of Artistic License; Moore s  Seeing Through Humbert; Rampton s  The
Morality of the Aesthete; Patnoe s  Discourse, Ideology, and Hegemony; and Dipple s The Unresolvable
Plot.
 3
his own projected and didactic sense of morality. Yet, should we repudiate all ethical
implications based on authorial instruction?
Over the past 50 years, Lolita has brought about an expansive body of criticism as
various in scope as Nabokov s text. But, as critics, we often rely on the language of
historical convention, theoretical movement, and genre convention. Through this
language, we hold the instruments to categorize, simplify, and magnify aspects of a novel
that will serve our own particular purpose. Much of the criticism on Lolita, as with most
other widely read, widely discussed texts, categorizes the novel by positioning it within
the modernist or postmodernist movement, detective, romantic, or confessional genre.
Nabokov s brilliance, though, the reason behind such a large body of criticism, is that he
ultimately resists simple categorization through the fusion of multiple forms and
conventions. Lolita is not just modernist, postmodernist, or romantic. Lolita is not simply
a detective novel, a romance, or a confession. Lolita encompasses each genre, each
theoretical movement, yet is easily encapsulated by none.
The question now becomes, how can a novelist who actively resists the
constraints of genre, the constraints of historical and theoretical convention, fall so easily
into the constraints of philosophical aestheticism or art-for-art s-sake? It is my contention
that Nabokov is not an art-for-art s-sake aesthete and that his work does not have to be
reduced to such simplification. When questioned about his aesthetic sensibility in
interviews, Nabokov refused to align himself with aesthetes such as Wilde and Pater;
and, although he stood fast behind his claim of never writing didactic fiction, never
weaving into his fiction a strong and singular social message, he spoke of his own art in a
 4
manner that blurs the line between the aesthetic and the moral. Immediately after
asserting the lack of moral meaning in Lolita, Nabokov explains,  For me a work of
fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall now bluntly call aesthetic bliss,
that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where
art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm (314-315). Complementing his
vision of art posited in Lolita s afterword, in his essay  Good Writers and Good Readers
Nabokov writes  great novels are great fairy tales and that  there are three points of
view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a
teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three storyteller, teacher,
enchanter but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major
writer (LL 2, 5). Accompanying the importance of aesthetic skill necessary in crafting
great stories or enchanting an audience, each of Nabokov s descriptions of art and artistic
value carries an innate moral sensibility: tenderness, kindness, instruction, and the
always-present and traditional moral of the fairy tale.
In this essay, I will examine the general moral and aesthetic features of Lolita, and
finally address the two together, illustrating how Lolita is neither immoral, nor amoral,
nor didactic. It is not the work of ethical fiction bearing a significant and tangible social
message that John Ray asserts. It is not the disgusting tale of a pedophile and criminal,
couched on poisoning the minds of contemporary youth. As Tony Moore aptly explains,
 It is not defiantly callous in promoting a flippant, joking response to these serious and
intractable matters. It is not an attempt to justify the unjustifiable by an increasingly
desperate narrator whose reductively narrow sexual self-absorption obliterates the
 5
interests and feelings of a young American girl (92). Neither is Lolita the total of its
aesthetic elements: parody, allusion, romance, love story, doppelg�nger, detective,
confession, and folklore. Lolita is a work that merges the  beastly and beautiful, the
aesthetic and moral, giving both significant weight and import (135). It is through the
juxtaposition of form and content, parody and reality, that the intersection of aesthetics
and morality appears, subverting and repudiating the voice of its own narrator,
protagonist, and anti-hero, evoking sympathy for an appropriated, damaged, and abused
child, and challenging readers to evaluate and recognize their own sense of ethics.
 6
Morality and Lolita
The trend of Nabokov scholars and critics toward focusing on the aesthetic
elements of Lolita is influenced not only by the richness and complexity of the text,
offering expansive critical possibilities, but also by Nabokov s frequent discussion of his
art in lectures, interviews, and the novels themselves. Critics addressing the problem of
morality and aesthetics in Lolita often cite Nabokov s disdain for didactic literature and
his warnings against reading a social or general moral into his text:  I have no social
purpose, no moral message (SO 16). Yet, just as Nabokov s blatant rejection and
criticism of Freudian theory seem to beg many critics for a psychoanalytic reading of the
text, so too does the rejection of artistic morality.3 Thus, despite Nabokov s repeated
repudiation of a general or moral message, several critics suggest otherwise, asserting
that Lolita is a deeply moral novel that introduces and examines the ethical issues of
criminality, social taboo, incest, child abuse, possession, solipsism, victimization, and
moral awakening.
Upon its initial publication by Olympia Press in 1955, Lolita met with critical
praise accompanying charges of obscenity, immorality, and pornography.4 Before finding
a temporary home with the Parisian publishing house, Nabokov s text was rejected by
four American publishers  based not on my treatment of the theme but on the theme itself
3
Recent psychoanalytic readings of Lolita include Alan C. Elms s  Nabokov contra Freud; Jeffrey
Berman s  Nabokov and the Viennese Witch Doctor; Brandon Centerwall s  Hiding in Plain Sight:
Nabokov and Pedophilia; J.P. Shute s  Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power.
4
Olympia Press, run, at the time of Lolita s publication, by Maurice Girodias, was known for printing
erotic novels, among them the erotic and widely banned Travelers Companion series, The Sexual Life of
Robinson Crusoe, White Thighs, and Until She Screams. As Andrew Field explains, Lolita was  probably
the most chaste book ever printed by Olympia (336). Yet, it should be recognized that Olympia was also
responsible for publishing work by such reputable authors as Beckett and Genet.
 7
[& ] Publisher Z said if he printed Lolita, he and I would go to jail (314). Given that
Lolita tells the story of a murderer and pedophile, and touches on the issue of incest, it is
no surprise that in the 1950s, a decade notorious for a sharp return to morality and family
values, the publication of the novel  clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a
number of its strongest taboos, and even resulted in a short-lived banning of Lolita in
England (Olsen 30). Furthermore, Olympia Press s reputation for printing erotic novels
did not help quell the controversy. What is surprising is that half a century and nearly a
thousand critical articles later, Lolita remains banned from many high schools and  has
developed in our culture s consciousness into the icon for the idea of transgression
(Olsen 30).
Despite the novel s subject matter, its publication by Olympia Press, or the
original title s,  Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male, mirroring that of
such 18th century erotic fiction as Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, as
John Ray Jr. announces in the foreword,  not a single obscene term is to be found in the
whole work (4). Lolita is not an erotic novel, nor does it treat the issues of pedophilia or
incest in an erotic manner. In fact, Lolita will utterly disappoint those seeking the sexual
between its covers. As Lance Olsen notes in Lolita: A Janus Text,  Lolita fails to deliver
on its promise. The first 13 chapters of the text, culminating with the oft-cited scene of
Lo unwittingly stretching her legs across Humbert s excited lap [& ] are the only chapters
suggestive of the erotic ; and by the time Humbert and Lolita reach the Enchanted
Hunters,  he slows the momentum of his story to a crawl. Meticulous scene replaces
speedy summary (30-31). Slowing the story through detailed description teases the
 8
reader searching for the sexual by heightening the tension and anticipation for the
inevitable scene to come. Humbert recreates the mundane details of the night: parking the
car, checking in, dressing for dinner, eating dinner, teasing Lolita with a sleeping pill,
dropping her off in the room, encountering Quilty, arriving back in the room, listening to
the noises of the hotel, capturing the movement in the bedroom,  the tremors and
gropings of that distant night; yet, his descriptiveness falls away and is replaced by
summary as he describes the events of the morning:  by six she was wide awake, and by
six fifteen we were technically lovers (131, 132). The changes in the pace of the novel
and the juxtaposition between description and summary in certain key moments reiterate
the fact that Lolita does not follow the form or contain the content of an erotic novel and
that Humbert, as he mentions, is  not concerned with so-called  sex at all (134).
Although Humbert does not concern himself with the portrayal of explicit sexual
details in erotic scenes and Nabokov s text does not contain a single obscene word, the
novel centers around the story of a pedophile, rapist, and murderer, a man not only guilty
of multiple crimes and violating social taboos, but a man who contradicts social
stereotypes of a criminal. Eloquent, cultured, and humorous, Humbert challenges our
acceptance of strict taboos by becoming the likable protagonist of his  confession.
Although Humbert repeatedly warns us against his own words, calling himself a liar,
taking vast liberties with the recreation of events and correspondence, and proving
himself skilled at the art of intellectual manipulation, we often discover ourselves being
swept away by his elegant and stunning prose, and taking pity on a deplorable man as he
begs readers to feel and even participate in his enslavement to a torturous, foul-mouthed,
 9
and greedy child. We are moved by the shaky justification for his crimes consisting of
cultural difference and the comparison of himself to artists such as Poe, Dante, and
Petrarch, thereby constructing the claim that as an �migr� artist, a debatable title in itself,
he exists in a realm outside of social and American mores.
The impact of Humbert s eloquence on readers becomes most clear when
surveying the scholarship it has driven over the past 50 years. At the time of Lolita s
publication, many critics rushed to Nabokov s side to defend the novel against the undue
charges of immorality and obscenity, and, in so doing, illustrated how easy it is to defend
a man of eloquence and education and twist the story in such a way to make it more
socially acceptable, more comfortable for the average reader. In her article  Sex
Without the Asterisks, Dorothy Parker lightly describes the novel as  the engrossing,
anguished story of a man, a man of taste and culture, who can love only little girls (9).
In contrast to Humbert s  taste and culture, she depicts Lolita as  a dreadful little
creature, selfish, hard, vulgar, and foul-tempered who  leaves him, of course, for a
creature even worse than she is (10). In a similar portrayal of the novel, Robertson
Davies writes that Nabokov s theme is  not the corruption of an innocent child by a
cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child (qtd in Boyd 230).
While it is tempting to align these critics with those who simply fall victim to Humbert s
eloquence, this is unlikely. Appearing immediately after the publication of Lolita, Parker
and Davies s assessments of the novel most likely represent the rallying of artists and
critics around one of their own in an attempt to defend the novel against a societal uproar
of immorality charges and possible censorship. Yet, through their biased defenses of the
 10
text, they blatantly ignore the crimes of the adult and place emphasis on the corruption
and seductiveness of a 12-year-old girl.
A similar impression of Nabokov s novel continues to exist in contemporary
society. The term  Lolita has come to represent something beyond a  girl s name or  a
character in Vladimir Nabokov s novel. According to Webster s Collegiate Dictionary,
the word Lolita means  a precociously seductive girl. And, in pop and news culture, we
witness this terminology being used to describe troubled young women who engage in
relationships with older men. Amy Fisher became known as the  Long Island or
 Lethal Lolita when, at the age of 17, she entered a relationship with an older man and
attempted to murder his wife. Our culture, therefore has appropriated the name, but,
ultimately, has misconstrued the content of Nabokov s novel as well as the
characterization of Lolita. In our current definition of the word, as in Parker and Davies s
assessments of the novel, all emphasis is taken off the man attracted to the child, and
placed upon the seductive nature of the child.
Thus, as formerly noted, there are two distinct camps in the criticism of
Nabokov s novel which mimic the puzzle already set forth in the novel s foreword and
afterword: those who attack the text for its lack of morals, and those, in the aesthetic
camp, who defend the novel against these charges by overlooking the moral implications
of the text. The problem is that critics often either wholly condemn the novel for
exposing that which is only discussed behind closed doors or altogether ignored, thereby
equating literary excellence with thematic morality, or misrepresent it by transforming
 11
the novel into the portrayal of something much more socially acceptable: a seductive
young girl willingly entering a sexual relationship with an older man.
While Nabokov also defended his novel against immorality charges, he did not
simply dismiss Humbert s crimes. In an interview, appearing in the Paris Review, 1967,
Nabokov responds to George Plimpton s claim that  Humbert, while comic, retains a
touching and insistent quality that of the spoiled artist, writing  I would put it
differently: Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear  touching. That
epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl (SO 94). He
further describes Lolita in a letter to Edmund Wilson as  a pure and austere work as well
as  a highly moral affair (DB 330, 331). Reading carefully though Nabokov s text, we
discover an underlying sense of morality through the tenderness with which Lolita s
carefully crafted voice quietly permeates the text, and as the nature and impact of
Humbert s crimes are subtly integrated into his confession and never overlooked,
ignored, or validated by Nabokov.
Although Humbert may be eloquent, cultured, and educated, Nabokov refuses to
equate these qualities with goodness, morality, or truth. For the critics, like Robertson
Davies, who claim that Nabokov s theme is  the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt
child or that Humbert s relationship with Lolita is a metaphor for young America s
corruption of the Old World, Nabokov assures that readers recognize the full extent of
Humbert s obsession. Long before setting foot on American soil or eyes on Lolita,
Humbert steals surreptitious glances at young girls from park benches, wanders European
streets seeking out nymphet-like prostitutes, and marries Valeria, not only  for safety,
 12
but for  the imitation she gave of a little girl (24, 25). Humbert also demonstrates his
awareness of the strict social taboo surrounding his obsession:  While my body knew
what it craved for, my mind rejected my body s every plea. One moment I was ashamed
and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts
wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibideos (18). Humbert is not an innocent
victim to the wiles of cunning nymphets. Struggling between the constraints of body and
mind, society and self, superego and id, Humbert recognizes the discrepancy between his
desires and those deemed appropriate by both European and American society.
Our glimpse of Humbert s pre-Lolita life also reveals his propensity toward
cruelty, violence, and solipsism. In his relationship with Valeria, one he has formed for
 safety and thus one he considers an act or a play, he silences her, forcing Valeria into
the mold of wife; yet, when she deviates from his limited perception, showing herself to
be an individual, he claims that she fails to keep  with the stock character she was
supposed to impersonate (27). Upon discovering Valeria s affair, he commends his own
 superhuman self-control for not beating her in the street, wonders if she is even  worth
shooting, strangling, or drowning, and instead strikes her on the knee in the taxicab and
commits simply to  hurting her very horribly as soon as we were alone (27, 29). In one
of many stays in a sanatorium, Humbert discovers an  endless source of robust
enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists, bribing nurses, and applauding his own
intellectual ability and cunning (34). In his short-lived marriage to Charlotte, a marriage
formed as a means of remaining close to her young daughter, Humbert rummages
through old pictures, seeking the likeness of Lolita in Charlotte in order to  evoke the
 13
child while caressing the mother (76). And when Humbert discovers Charlotte s
intention of sending Lolita straight from camp to boarding school, he dreams of the
perfect murder:  tread[ing] his wife underfoot in Hourglass Lake (86).
The difference between Humbert s character before and after entering a
relationship with Lolita is not the sudden corruption of a weak man by a child, but
Humbert s sudden accessibility to a child on whom he can bring his fantasies to fruition.
With Valeria and Charlotte, Humbert s fantasies about control and violence rarely come
to pass; but with Lolita kidnapped and removed from society, he is able to enact his
fantasies of pedophilia, solipsism, cruelty, violence, and intellectual manipulation on a
single, nearly silent individual. Through Humbert s eyes, Lolita is not a person, but an
object, both sexual and aesthetic. The opening and closing lines of the novel express
ownership over a child who has been renamed and claimed by her author. In the
beginning she is the  Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul and, despite his
moral apotheosis, Humbert closes the novel with the words  my Lolita, indicating his
refusal to release her from his grasp (9, 309). Humbert categorizes Lolita as a  nymphet:
a  little deadly demon with  fantastic power (17). By assigning to Lolita that which is
otherworldly and demonic, Humbert thereby strips her of her humanity and childhood
and attempts to make his pedophilia more morally and socially acceptable. Humbert
further objectifies Lolita through his refusal to represent her as a fully formed individual,
and instead relegates his description of her to that of the fragmented body. When first
encountering Lolita, he takes inventory of her features, noticing  frail, honey-hued
shoulders,  supple bare back,  juvenile breasts, and  puerile hips (39). Two years
 14
later, he still views her as a fragmented object with  apricot colored limbs,  pristine
armpits,  burnished arm,  gleaming teeth (230,231). He judges her as a critic would
evaluate a work of art, calling her tennis game  an absolutely perfect imitation of
absolutely top-notch tennis (231).
Humbert s description of Lolita in terms of ownership, aesthetics, and the
fragmented body performs a dual function in the text; while it points to his representation
of Lolita as an object, it also undermines his ability to control and allows Lolita to enter
the text as an autonomous individual. A significant theme of Nabokov s novel is
possession: Humbert s striving to capture and contain that which is living, breathing,
thinking, and feeling. We see this theme not just in his relationship with Lolita, but in his
other relationships: Valeria did not conform to her  stock character set forth by
Humbert; and Charlotte s will was  unthinkable and  frightening to Humbert (83). As
Humbert attempts to control and hold on to Lolita in life, he repeatedly reveals frustration
with his failure. Although Humbert isolates Lolita from the world, manipulates her with
false promises, and devours her sexually, he is unable to devour all of her:  My only
grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious
lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her
lungs, her comely twin kidneys (165). Pieces of Humbert s child are left unknown,
untraversed, and guarded. As Jen Shelton notes,  Humbert reveals that although he
possesses the child physically an ownership he originally thought would satisfy him
he still does not have her in the way that matters most. That is, he still cannot control her
will, her desire or her speech (281). Humbert realizes that  I simply did not know a
 15
thing about my darling s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clich�s,
there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate dim and adorable region
which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and
miserable convulsions (284).
Humbert s inability to know and hold Lolita in life gives way to other attempts at
confinement. Humbert laments the fact that he did not film her, and trap her figure and
movement in technology. Finally turning to language as his only means of freezing her,
 fix[ing] once and for all the perilous magic of nymphets, Humbert again fails as the
actions and voice of the child continue to penetrate the text, emphasize her suffering,
contradict Humbert s words, and reveal the impossibility of imprisoning individuality in
language (134). Lolita is never  safely solipsized as Humbert pronounces (60). From the
moment she jumps off Humbert s lap on the Davenport,  and blinked, cheeks aflame,
hair awry, to her own Independence Day when she abandons Humbert with Quilty,
Nabokov emphasizes Lolita s acute awareness of the crimes being committed against her
(61). In the car on the way to the Enchanted Hunters, Lolita announces  wouldn t Mother
be absolutely mad if she found out we were lovers? and proceeds to call Humbert a
 dirty old man (114, 115). Inside the motel room, before their first sexual encounter,
Lolita anticipates and names Humbert s intentions, interrupting his mumbled justification
for sharing a room by revealing,  The word is incest (119).
Lolita s words leading up to the evening illustrate a child strattling the adolescent
and adult worlds. She recognizes and plays up to Humbert s obsession because of her
newfound entrance into sexual experimentation. As Tony Moore relates,
 16
She is troubled by ambivalent and conflicting feelings resulting from her
first penetrative sexual experiences with Charlie Holmes at the camp and,
unable to make much sense of the turbulent mixture of furtive excitement,
pride, enjoyment, curiosity, and guilt stimulated by her initiation into this
part of the adult s forbidden world, she looks repeatedly for adult
guidance. (98)
But, do her teasing and flirting words reveal compliance with Humbert s criminal
actions? Humbert complicates this question by placing Lolita in the role of the seductress,
claiming,  it was she who seduced me (132). These are possibly the most controversial
and contested words in the novel. While many critics stake their argument for Lolita s
seductive and corruptive powers on this statement, others blatantly reject Humbert s
words. In her monograph Escape into Aesthetics, Page Stegner defends Humbert, writing,
 While Humbert is a sexual pervert and a murderer, he is not a rapist; not a seducer of
adolescent girls in dark alleys [& ] Judging from the come-on that Lolita gives him while
he is a boarder in her mother s house, his statement that it is she who seduced him seems
very possibly true (109). Though Stegner espouses a common argument, many
contemporary critics passionately disagree with her. In her widely reprinted article
 Framing Lolita: Is there a Woman in the Text?, Linda Kauffman dismisses Humbert s
words, writing  In view of his unreliability, it is doubtful his claim that Lolita seduced
him is true; more important, it is unverifiable (154). Elizabeth Patnoe, in her work  The
Double Dramas in and Around Lolita, goes to great length to disassemble Humbert s
justification, writing  the collective effects of Lolita s perspective and Humbert s
 17
commentary suggests that her lesson, her goal, her game, her  stark act is not to have
intercourse, but only to kiss and perhaps fondle (123).
Even if we discount the validity of these latter critics and believe Humbert in spite
of his ultimately unreliable narrative, we must also pay close attention to his recognition
that  While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared
for certain discrepancies between a kid s life and mine (134). Lolita s entrance into a
sexual relationship with Humbert marks her pre-mature entrance into Humbert s adult
world, an entrance she is neither physically nor mentally prepared to make. Thus, despite
Lolita s possible, though questionable, seduction of Humbert, her physical and mental
suffering, alienation, and resistance quickly replace her complacence in fulfilling
Humbert s sexual desires. Yet, as Humbert is such an impressive wielder of words, the
damage Lolita suffers in his hands often is shrouded in poetic language or turned against
her, thereby forming and reiterating the false impression of Lolita as a brat, a
conventional and unintelligent American child, and Humbert as a suffering and exploited
adult.
The description of their first sexual act is one such moment. Kauffman notes,
 The first act of coitus is rendered so poetically as to camoflage what is being described
(160). Humbert paints the scene as he would a work of art, explaining:
There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied,
as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to
clime a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules
of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There
 18
would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the
intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside
sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There
would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last
throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing
child. (134-35)
Clouding the scene with aesthetic, natural, and fragmented images, Humbert distances us
from Lolita s pain, her enslavement, bleeding, and wincing (Kauffman 160). Her pain is
reiterated twice more immediately following the scene. Leaving the Enchanted Hunters,
Humbert notices  in the act of getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted
across Lo s face. It flitted again, more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me
(140). And as they stop  in the gay town of Lepingville, Humbert buys Lolita  four
books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, [and] a manicure set
to assuage his own guilt for breaking a child whose fate has just been cemented through
the discovery that her mother is dead, that she will never return to her friends or an
adolescent life, and that she has  nowhere else to go (141, 142). However, by concealing
Lolita s pain in a lengthy list of gifts, Humbert diverts our attention from her physical and
emotional suffering to his own generosity.
Although Nabokov hints at the isolation and pain Lolita suffers in Humbert s
hands, it is not until Part Two that the full extent of his abuse or the damage Lolita incurs
is revealed, despite Humbert s effort to portray himself as the victim. The major shift that
occurs between the first and second part of the novel is a shift in Humbert s role to both
 19
lover and father; and, by taking on the role of father, Humbert s impression of Lolita also
changes from that of  enchanting nymphet to  exasperating brat and  disgustingly
conventional little girl (148). But, the transition in Humbert s attitude toward Lolita is
one that readers should traverse carefully, for we have seen a similar shift before. Lolita
is a conventional child, but one who is denied the benefits and pleasures of a
conventional childhood. She finds enjoyment where she can; and, because she finds no
outlet in friends or family, she escapes the reality of her life by dreaming of a better life
through the images on movie theater screens and photographs of brides in the local paper.
However, Lolita s fascination with pop or low culture is one that Humbert was already
aware of: in Ramsdale he took note of her dashing out of his room to examine the  dead
something discovered in the basement, and her affinity for ripping out magazine ads and
tacking them to her walls (49).
The transition in Humbert s impression of Lolita arises, not from her enjoyment
of advertisements or movies, pop and low culture, but from his newfound inability to
control her. Similar to Humbert s frustration in Valeria s ceasing to impersonate her
stock character, Lolita stops fulfilling the role of willing nymphet, shrilly telling Humbert
to  Drive on rather than stop for sex on the side of the road, and  sob[bing] in the
night every night, every night the moment [he] feigned sleep (141, 176). Humbert
therefore resorts to bribery, manipulation, and force for sexual fulfillment. He brings
Lolita coffee only to deny it  until she had done her morning duty, threatens her with
reform school and the Department of Public Welfare, revokes promises made  in a
moment of blind passion, and raises her weekly allowance before searching her room
 20
and stealing it back (165, 169). While Lolita falls victim to Humbert s false promises and
bribery, she also rages against his unwanted advances and unsuccessfully attempts to
fight him off. Her victimization appears in the marks of resistance and rape carried by
Humbert s body, wounds that others mistake as cat scratches. Their sex becomes forced
and  violent, as Humbert relates the disturbing image of a father traversing the
boundary between familial and sexual love:  thrusting my fatherly fingers deep into Lo s
hair from behind, and then gently but firmly clasping them around the nape of her neck, I
would lead my reluctant pet to our small home for a quick connection before dinner
(160, 164).
Although Lolita is unable to overcome the physical strength of an adult man, and
her verbal threats of going to the police with rape charges fall flat against Humbert s
threats of the Department of Public Welfare, her observant eye grants her a power
unmatched by Humbert s solipsism. For two years, Lolita watches Humbert s strategic
shape shifting as he transforms himself for various audiences, moving between the roles
of adoring husband, grieving widower, intellectual aesthete, concerned parent, and
jealous lover. Lolita observes and learns Humbert s tactics of deceit, manipulation, and
role-playing while forming an understanding of the power she holds as the object of
desire. Through this newly discovered sense of empowerment, Lolita enters Humbert s
game and finds the ultimate resistance as she begins to reverse the system of give and
take. Because she cannot fight him off physically, she begins to make deals of her own,
bargaining for increases in her allowance and freedoms appropriate for a child of her age.
Playing on Humbert s insatiable desire, she also withholds sexual favors in return for
 21
adolescent rights:  she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was in her power to
deny me certain life-wrecking, strange, slow paradisal philters without which I could not
live more than a few days in a row (184).
While Humbert recognizes Lolita s newfound manipulative abilities, equating her
actions with a  definite drop in Lolita s morals, his unwillingness to view her as a
thinking, intelligent individual causes him to underestimate her capabilities (183).
Fearing that she  with a mere fifty dollars in her purse, might run away from him, he
steals her hoarded allowance money (185). Yet, Humbert focuses his fear in the wrong
place. Through her  cruel negotiations, Humbert provides her outlets, allowing her to
form friendships and participate in school activities, believing only that, through these
friendships, she could share his secret and  ruin him. Humbert, solitary and arrogant,
repeatedly ignores the strength of human relationships and the great length people go to
in times of desperation, thereby blinding himself to Lolita s lies about strange phone
calls, letters, and her absence from piano lessons, and falling victim to Lolita s own role-
playing when, after a violent fight, she returns to his arms feeling  romantic and
carefully crafts their next cross-country road trip and Humbert s eventual defeat. Thus, it
is Humbert s solipsism, that in which he once found strength and justification for his
crimes against Lolita, and that through which he turned Dolores Haze into  my own
creation, another, fanciful Lolita perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing
her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness indeed, no life
of her own, that ruins him (62). It is his refusal to see beyond his own desire and view
 22
her as an individual that equips Lolita with the ability to escape, and in his flaws,
arrogance, and weakness that Lolita finds strength.
Therefore, it is not until Humbert releases his solipsistic vision of the world that
he is able to view himself, Lolita, and his crimes clearly. As Olsen notes,  Increasingly
clear is that Humbert gradually comes to understand what he has done to Lolita, to know
that it is wrong, and to feel genuine remorse for it (56). The unique aspect of Humbert s
narrative voice is that it is confessional; he must recreate his actions, thoughts, and crimes
long after their actual occurrence. While he attempts to reproduce his state of mind, he
often interrupts the narrative with his current voice, a voice that is jailed, alone, and
remorseful. In the scene in the Enchanted Hunters, key dangling between his fingers,
staring at the door of the hotel room, Humbert writes,  my only regret today is that I did
not quietly deposit key  342 at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent,
the hemisphere,--indeed, the globe that very same night (123). Looking back on their
first cross-country journey, Humbert recognizes in stark honesty  We had really seen
nothing. And I catch myself thinking 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 (175-76).
Humbert s retrospective and remorseful voice surfaces most clearly and
powerfully in the final pages of the novel: the pages on which John Ray Jr. concentrates
and discovers Humbert s  moral apotheosis. Separated by several years, Humbert finds
Lolita, pregnant, poverty-stricken, old beyond her 17 years, no longer a nymphet, and is
 23
forced to see her for the woman she has become. Gazing at her he writes,  I insist the
world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with
another s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still
Carmencita, still mine (278). This passage is problematic because Humbert appears to
recognize Lolita as an individual separate from himself, calling her  this Lolita as he
does earlier in the novel when he picks her up from camp yet, he immediately sees
within her the Lolita he knew, loved, abused, and created for himself, countering her
individuality with the possessive word  mine. Therefore, while his moral awakening
may begin with this moment, it is not until Humbert suffers his final rejection and leaves
Lolita forever that he truly comes to realize the impact and brutality of his crimes, and the
wrongful abuse Lolita suffered in his hands.
Traveling back to Ramsdale in an effort to locate Quilty, Humbert begins to
conjure up short, fragmented moments with Lolita which force him to look, not at himself
or his relationship with Lolita, but at Lolita the individual and the sadness she was forced
to carry. He recalls Lolita turning to her friend Eva Rosen in the midst of a lighthearted
and adolescent conversation, saying  You know, what s so dreadful about dying is that
you are completely on your own (284). In remembering this moment, Humbert realizes
his failure in never attempting to know the child behind his nymphet creation. He also
recalls watching Lolita s smile slowly disappear as she gazed upon her friend Avis
embracing her father, noting that  even the most miserable of family lives was better than
the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif (287).
Furthermore, in the same scene, Humbert turns his gaze inward, calling himself a
 24
 pentapod monster,  despicable and brutal, and turpid,  and juxtaposing this judgment
against his vision of Lolita:  my poor, bruised child,  Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller
(284, 285).
Through these passages, we can begin to trace a slow but distinct transformation
in Humbert s vision of the world, of himself, and of Lolita: first by interjecting on his
own narrative and contrasting his perception of his actions at the time with his current
remorse, by feeling and expressing a deep love for Lolita beyond sexual pedophilia, and
then by acknowledging moments which reveal the stark contrast between the Lolita he
created and the individual will and life that he repeatedly refused to recognize. Finally,
after murdering Quilty, defeating his double, bringing to a close his enchanted hunt, and
awaiting his fate in the hands of the police, Humbert stands on the side of the highway
and recalls a moment after Lolita abandoned him for Quilty when he heard:
a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town
that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley[...] What I heard was but the
melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that
within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and
magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic one could hear now and
then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter [& ] and
then I knew the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita s absence from
my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. (307-8)
In his annotated edition of Nabokov s text, Appel notes,  with these words, it is clear that
H.H. has transcended his solipsism (451). For the first time, Humbert places Lolita s life
 25
above his own happiness, realizing that through his desire and flawed perception he
stripped Lolita of her childhood.
By the end of the novel, Humbert condemns himself for his crimes against Lolita,
writing,  Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years
for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges (308). Yet, despite the slow progression
toward a moment of moral clarity and his outright condemnation of himself, many critics
contest Humbert s moral awakening, claiming that these moments in the novel simply
add another dimension to an already unreliable narrative, that Humbert s sense of
morality remains unchanged, and that Dolly Schiller remains forever frozen and
solipsized in the pages of a text,  only exist[ing] insofar as she can reflect him, magnify
his stature (Kauffman 164). Alfred Appel reflects this problem in his own criticism of
the text, writing in an annotation that Humbert transcends solipsism, but also noting in his
introduction to the text that  If one responds to the author s  false scents and  specious
lines of play [& ] and believes, say, that Humbert s confession is  sincere and that he
exorcises his guilt, [& ] then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely
is not fairing too well in the  game of worlds, one s own unscrambling of pictures (xxi).
Thus, as reflected in the multi-faceted criticism on the text, there is little left to the
readers of Lolita in terms of morality alone beyond interpretation. What is clear, as Olsen
states, is that  While Humbert longs to immortalize his love for Dolly in language, the
language he sculpts also happens to immortalize his crimes, his rampant immorality, even
his ability to jest at the most somber and inappropriate moments, thereby throwing his
definition of love, not to mention the seriousness of his objectives, into question (87).
 26
Therefore, because Nabokov s text deals with moral issues, but posits no singular and
overt moral, readers face the task of addressing their own moral boundaries as they
negotiate between the contradictory forces of judgment and sympathy, love and violence,
and comedy in the midst of tragedy, thereby transforming Humbert s moral struggle into
one which transcends the pages of the novel.
 27
The Intersection of Morality and Aesthetics
The moral and ethical implications of Lolita surface in the plotline of the text, and
in the actions, thoughts, and intentions of characters who struggle against themselves,
each other, and the constraints of society. Nabokov renders the inner psyche of
Humbert s mind with such consistency and detail, and paints such a stunningly realistic
portrait of the 1950 s American culture and landscape, that we often discover ourselves,
as readers, responding to the text and characters, cringing at Humbert s actions and
thoughts while sympathizing with his rejection, and arguing with ourselves as we attempt
to resist the artful rhetoric of a pedophile. Yet, although Humbert appears to have full
control over his and Lolita s story with a voice that urges readers to participate, respond,
resist, and judge his behavior, we cannot forget that it is Nabokov, rather than Humbert,
who weaves the complex, multi-layered novel and exerts full narrative control over the
text. By examining the novel through a realistic perspective, we gain an understanding of
the moral issues that drive the characters actions and thoughts, but, at the same time, we
also achieve only a limited vision of the novel as a whole. Thus, we must look at the
aesthetic features of the text in order to attain a deeper appreciation for the narrative, the
characters, as well as the craft within which Nabokov constructs the action and
characters.
Whether through the anagram of his own name in the character Vivian
Darkbloom, the allusions to his other fictional works, or the numerous references to his
lifetime passion lepidoptera, Nabokov never allows us to forget that we are witnessing a
 conjurers show: a work of fiction constructed by a gifted author rather than the true
 28
confession of Humbert Humbert (Olsen 90). Yet, if we fail to read carefully, it is easy to
overlook many of the aesthetic elements that Nabokov incorporates into the text. Unlike
morality, appearing in the surface drama, aesthetic importance falls into a much deeper,
and, as Nabokov would say,  difficult realm: in the narrative design, structure, and
metaliterary and self-referential artifice of the novel.
Based on his discussion of art in lectures and interviews, Nabokov leaves little
doubt about the value he placed on aesthetic beauty, complexity, and achievement over
and strong and singular social message. In an interview conducted for BBC-2 by
Nicholas Garnham, Nabokov wrote in response to Garnham s question about the function
of Nabokov s novels,  I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to
compose it. I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete
possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work hard in his turn so much the better.
Art is difficult (SO 115). Lolita is no exception. Falling in line with allusive modernist
artists such as Joyce, Nabokov keeps even the most highly educated readers working to
achieve meaning while navigating layer upon layer of allusion, verbal texture, and the
evocation of literary history and tradition through the use of aesthetic convention. Given
Nabokov s repeated statements concerning the importance of aesthetic value, and the
aesthetic richness of the novel itself, it is no surprise, as Appel states in the preface to
Lolita, that  Many readers are more troubled by Humbert Humbert s use of language and
lore than by his abuse of Lolita and the law, and that the implications of the story itself
and Humbert s crimes against Nabokov s poor little girl often get lost in the attention that
readers must devote to Nabokov s use of language (xi). Thus, 50 years after its initial
 29
publication, and the first annotated edition of a modern text ever crafted and published
within the lifetime of its author, Lolita continues to draw a seemingly endless stream of
criticism dealing exclusively with the aesthetic elements of the text ranging from the
discussion and discovery of allusion to the use of novelistic convention and the
connection of the text to various theoretical and historical movements.
The problem with such an expansive body of exclusively aesthetic criticism is that
the critics often cast a blind eye over the larger moral implications of Nabokov s
deliberate aesthetic choices. Just as the bulk of the criticism arguing the morality or
immorality of Lolita often leaves behind the important aesthetic choices made by
Nabokov in the composition of the text, thereby substituting and sometimes abandoning
close textual analysis for theoretical claims that rest their arguments on trauma theory,
incest theory, psychoanalysis, feminist tenants, and personal experiences of child abuse,
those arguing aesthetic claims often choose to ignore, dismiss, or overlook the moral
complexities of the text, thereby achieving only a limited vision of the novel as a whole.5
Undoubtedly, each type of scholarly analysis is valuable, contributes to the diversity of
5
In Elizabeth Patnoe s  Lolita Misrepresented, Lolita Reclaimed: Disclosing the Doubles, the author
discusses the reaction of abused women and incest victims to Lolita, writing that  While many of us
celebrate the personal nature of literature, criticism has historically denied the subjective. For a long time
women s voices in general, but especially women s voice of anger and pain, have not be sounded or heard
[& ] For many people [Lolita] represents some aspect of their reality, what has happened to them or their
loved ones or what they fear might happen [& ] While a few critics have expressed charged sympathy for
Lolita s trauma, most neglect to confront the trauma Humbert inflicts on Lolita, and none contend with the
trauma the book inflicts on readers (116). Linda Kauffman takes a materialist feminist approach to the
novel, discussing the incest narrative and how  the inscription of the father s body in the text obliterates the
daughter s (152). Jen Shelton examines how Humbert s narrative encourages  critics to overlook the
incest in the text as the ally themselves with the clever, sophisticated author against the forces of the
simplistic moralism which Ray represents (273). Elizabeth Dipple argues for a distinct moral in Lolita,
claiming that  In the late 1980s when the misuse of children is so much before us, the plot of Lolita causes
uneasiness and many readers stubbornly deny its higher forum of aesthetic excellence. In other words,
Nabokov should perhaps, at least on one level, have a more exacting moral in tow (74).
 30
scholarship on Lolita, and reflects the impossibility of covering the entirety of such a
complex text is a single article or monograph. Yet, just as I remain unconvinced by both
the extremes of John Ray s  unswerving didacticism and Nabokov s supposed
aestheticism, I remain unconvinced by the oppositional camps that dominate the criticism
of the text and choose to side either with the moralist or with the aesthete. By examining
the juxtaposition of form and content, parody and reality, we discover that moral values
are not incompatible with those associated with art. In fact, it is through these holes and
contradictions, the gap between Humbert s aesthetic line of defense and that which is left
unsaid but understood, that the intersection of morality and aesthetics is found.
Humbert s text betrays its own author by highlighting the contrived artificiality of his
justification and folding in upon itself to reiterate the side of the story that is not told, and
the voice of an appropriated and abused child that is not heard.
In the introduction to the annotated edition, Appel describes Lolita as  surely the
most allusive and linguistically playful novel in English since Ulysses (1922) and
Finnegans Wake (1939) (xi). As the novel contains both subtle and overt references to
over 60 writers, allusion hunting and explication has become a favorite pastime of
Lolita s critics6 (Olsen 94). Yet there is no singular reason for Nabokov s wide use of
references in the text. As Olsen explains, besides keeping readers busy, alert, and
intellectually stimulated, Nabokov s intent with allusion was  to create complex
juxtaposions between the original subject and the allusion to it, ironic dismantlings,
6
My discussion of Nabokov s use of allusion does not pretend to exhaust the critical possibilities or offer
an extensive examination of allusions incorporated into the text. Instead, my intention is to touch on the
major patterns of allusion and highlight the most oft-cited critical arguments dealing exclusively with
Nabokov s allusive strategies. For thorough discussions and annotations to allusions in Lolita, see Appel s
Annotated Lolita and Proffer s Keys to Lolita
 31
serious tributes, multiple perspectives, playful parodies, and interesting expansions with
which to view Lolita s characters, plot, setting, and themes (95). Although many
allusions within the text simply reflect and expand upon Humbert s learning, others bring
Humbert s credibility as a narrator directly into question by revealing his desperate
attempts to construct a tenable defense for his relationship with Lolita.
Given Humbert s repeated tactic of audience address, Humbert defines his work
as a defense for his upcoming murder trial. In the opening chapter of the novel, Humbert
addresses his readers as  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and continues to use such
terminology, calling his readers  winged gentlemen of the jury and  Frigid
gentlewomen of the jury (4, 125, 132). As Appel explains, Humbert  addresses the
reader directly no less than twenty-nine times, either as a jury member or as a reader
(lvii). Furthermore, Humbert ends his manuscript by explaining,  When I started, fifty-
six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in
this well-heated, albeit tombal seclusion, I thought I would use these notes in toto at my
trial, to save not my head, of course, but my soul (308). Thus, as Humbert situates his
text as a legal defense and caters to a specific audience for a specific purpose, that of
defending his  inner essential innocence, Humbert comes to readers with a personal,
high-stakes agenda (300). Humbert therefore appears as an artist in search of a literary
form strong enough to sustain his defense, and as a man trying on defensive strategies
and voices through aesthetic means in an attempt to justify his moral crimes.
A repeated method of defense utilized by Humbert is his appropriation of  expert
testimony through allusion. As Humbert represents himself as  an artist and a madman
 32
he takes on the voices of other artists in order to defend his own innocence (17). Among
the most oft-cited references in the novel are those to Edgar Allan Poe, who is both
explicitly named and alluded to more than 20 times throughout the course of the novel.
Fragments of Poe s poem  Annibel Lee appear frequently in Lolita, beginning with the
opening lines of the novel:  light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul (4) which
echo the final stanza of Poe s poem:  my darling, my darling, my life, and my bride
(39). Furthermore, Humbert repeatedly refers to Lolita as  my darling, calls the jurors
 winged gentlemen of the jury (125), playing on Poe s  winged seraphs of Heaven
(11), and recalls loving a young girl  in a princedom by the sea (9). The most obvious
references to Poe s poem are the name of Humbert s childhood love, and the relationship
between Poe s life and the content of his poem to the content of Nabokov s novel. As
Carl Proffer notes in Keys to Lolita,  One of the reasons why it is entirely apposite for
Humbert to employ citations from  Annibel Lee relates to the biography of the poem s
author: Poe married his cousin Virginia Clem when she was only thirteen years old (37).
Thus, for Humbert, Poe s relationship with Virginia, coupled with the relationships of
Dante and Beatrice and Petrarch and Laura, becomes an example of socially accepted
sexual deviance comparable to Humbert s own obsession with young girls. Humbert
repeatedly draws parallels between his own life and the lives of these artists, writing  Oh
Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe s and Bea Dante s (107). Through these
allusions, Humbert attempts to represent his relationship with Lolita as a long-standing
and formerly appropriate type of relationship for an older man and artist to have with a
young woman. Yet, as he enters the Enchanted Hunters with Lolita and signs the hotel
 33
registry,  in the slow clear hand of crime [& ] Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, he
acknowledges his criminal intentions, thereby directly contradicting and undermining his
aesthetic defense by revealing his clear understanding of right and wrong and the
difference between his and Lolita s relationship and that of Poe and Virginia (118).
A further problem of Humbert s repeated use of allusion is that it calls his
narrative credibility into question. Appropriating Poe s biography and his marriage to 13-
year-old Virginia Clemm as a method of defending his passion for Lolita, Humbert posits
that in other eras, a relationship between a grown man and a young girl was not frowned
upon. Humbert integrates lines from Poe s  Annibel Lee into the text and names his
own first love  Annibel Leigh in order to emphasize the moment of childhood trauma,
the death of a young girl, that later resurfaces and results in his life as pedophilia. As
Appel points out, Humbert  immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own
specific  trauma by projecting it in fragments of another man s verse; literary allusions,
after all, point away from the unique, inviolable, formative  inner reality of a neurotic or
psychotic consciousness  (333-34). Annabel Lee is a figure who does not exist beyond
the realm of the literary. Therefore, Humbert s use of the name and the poem to represent
a real, emotional, and traumatic event in his own life, distances readers from the actual
experience that he is attempting to portray, and forces readers to question his intentions,
sincerity, and reliability.
Just as Humbert emulates the voices of other artists in order to formulate a
tenable, albeit aesthetic defense for his moral crimes, he also plays with the aesthetics of
literary convention through his integration of multiple forms and genres within the text.
 34
Because it includes such widely varied forms, Lolita breaks the silent pact between reader
and writer as conventions, normally providing a sense of stability and security for the
reader, appear and disintegrate in Nabokov s hands. As Olsen explains  Lolita is a
veritable Mulligan stew of allusive genres. It shape-shifts as it proceeds, calling forth a
wealth of fictional forms, sometimes for the brief space of a sentence or three, sometimes
for chapters on end (100). Yet as none of these literary forms is sustained throughout the
entire novel, and as none is able to excuse his victimization of a child, all disintegrate into
parody, thereby subverting Humbert s narrative and reiterating his criminal culpability.
The first major genre we encounter, or anticipate encountering, in the novel is the
confession.7 This association immediately is drawn in the opening line of the novel as
John Ray reveals the manuscript s full and original title:  Lolita, or the Confession of a
White Widowed Male, thereby conjuring a connection to other works within this
tradition including Saint Augustine s Confessions, Rousseau s eighteenth century
Confessions, and Thomas DeQuincey s Romantic  Confessions of an English Opium
Eater. The confessional genre is a mode that addresses and intellectualizes the personal
and private life of the author. Tied directly to the confessional genre are those of
autobiography and memoir which differ in that the autobiography, like the confession,
places some stress on introspection whereas the memoir incorporates the public persona
of the author and handles public events and prominent individuals other than the author.
While Lolita contains elements of each genre, the novel aligns more closely with the
autobiography and confession than with the memoir.
7
For critical discussions of Lolita as a confession, autobiography, or memoir, see Bergenholtz s
 Nabokov s Lolita; and Olsen s Lolita: A Janus Text.
 35
Undoubtedly, Humbert s story is both highly personal and intellectualized as it
not only examines Humbert s private life, his candid crimes against a child, and breaks
the silence of social taboo, but it does so while maintaining an interest in the ideological
realm through discussions of art and culture. Humbert s voice, although often arrogant,
exaggerated, and agenda-ridden, exhibits moments of introspection as it folds in upon
itself, interrupting memory, questioning motive and action, and revealing the movement
and irrationality of a troubled inner psyche.
Yet, though the confessional genre initially appears to be the prominent genre of
Humbert s story, Nabokov repeatedly complicates and contradicts the conventions of the
genre because of the unreliable narrative voice through which we receive the confession.
In a confession, readers should not be forced to sift through the real and the fabricated.
Although he attempts to defend the accuracy of his diary by informing readers that he has
a  photographic memory, he contradicts himself, admitting that what he is presenting to
readers is not a faithful representation, that he has forgotten  unimportant details, and
that he has  amended many sections of the diary (40,42). Even a discerning eye may not
catch Humbert s manipulation and falsification of facts throughout the novel in an
attempt to justify his crimes. For instance, his use of Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and
 Laureen as relationships comparable to his own with Lolita is misleading. The age of
Petrarch s Laura cannot be identified as historical documents about her do not exist; and
Dante was nine when he met the eight-year-old Beatrice. Furthermore, their relationship
was never romantic or sexual. Given the vast liberties that Humbert takes with the
portrayal of events and the recreation of documents, cemented by his own condemnation
 36
of himself as a liar, Nabokov not only calls into question the validity of Humbert s
confession, but, as Olsen posits,  problematizes the very notion of autobiography, the
capacity to honestly and accurately record one s life in words. At the same time he
reminds us of the fictional dimension to all history including the local history of the
self (101). Thus, through the use, or misuse, of the genre, Nabokov questions whether it
is ever possible for anyone to record the events, memories, and dialogue of one s life in a
manner that is honest and without a specific intent that would cause falsification,
justification, omission, and exaggeration. Through the construction of the text, Nabokov
also asks if it is ever possible to discover and express a singular, well-defined identity
given the limitations of language.
The conventions of the confessional genre are also called into question through
Humbert s loose use of the term  confession throughout the novel. As he recounts
Charlotte s love letter, he mocks her choice of words, placing quotations around her use
of the word  confession. After marrying Charlotte, Humbert claims,
Never in my life had I confessed so much or received so many
confessions. The sincerity and artlessness with which she discussed what
she called her  love-life, from first necking to connubial catch-as-catch-
can, were, ethically, in striking contrast with my glib compositions, but
technically the two sets were congeneric since both were affected by the
same stuff (soap operas, psychoanalysis and cheap novelettes) upon which
I drew for my characters and she for her mode of expression. (80)
 37
Here, Humbert uses the word confession to depict lies plucked from popular culture that
are presented to Charlotte as undeniable truth. Humbert s actions, therefore, should make
readers question the validity and sincerity of  the Confession of a White Widowed Male.
Armed with the knowledge of his false confessions to Charlotte, why should we believe
the confession Humbert puts forth in print?
A further dimension of Humbert s narrative is its affinity with the spiritual
autobiography or religious confession. Because Humbert s initial purpose in constructing
a confession is to present it at trial for his own defense, the act of having to relive his
actions through language and the mind, and sharing those actions with readers or jurors
for the purpose of judgment and forgiveness creates the connection of Humbert s written
confession to that of a religious confession or cathartic act, reiterated through his
supposed movement from solipsism to recognition, immorality to morality. In the
tradition of such works as Saint Augustine s Confessions and Bunyan s Pilgrim s
Progress, the most significant episode in the spiritual autobiography or religious
confession, as Rita Bergenholtz notes,  is the religious awakening that, presumably,
results in a  conversion or  change of heart  (232). For years, critics have debated the
question of Humbert s supposed moral apotheosis. As most choose to believe Humbert s
change of heart, they essentially dismiss moral issues, claiming that because Humbert is
repentant for his crimes, the moral problems of the novel are reconciled. Yet, as
previously noted, we should all question Humbert s repentant voice for reasons beyond
the fact that throughout the novel he is an unreliable narrator.
 38
When critics discuss Humbert s moral change, they highlight one of two moments
in the novel. The first appears when Humbert visits Lolita in Coalmont, finds her  pale
and polluted, and big with another s child, but continues to announce,  I insist the world
know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita (278). The other appears in the novel
when, after murdering Quilty, Humbert remembers a time soon following Lolita s
disappearance that he heard children playing and announces  and then I knew that the
hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita s absence from my side, but the absence of her
voice from that concord (308). As I stated in the previous chapter, one reason why we
should question the sincerity of Humbert s moral transformation is that he ends the novel
with the words  my Lolita, thereby extending his failure to view Lolita as an individual
and continuing to solipsize the child. A further reason why Humbert s moral apotheosis
starkly contrasts that of a religious confession or spiritual autobiography is that these two
incidents to which critics gravitate occur prior to Quilty s murder. Thus, according to the
logic of many critics, Humbert commits murder after he transforms himself into a
morally reputable man. Clearly, there is a problem here. The act of murder directly
contradicts the idea that Humbert is a changed man and that he has undergone a
conversion from immorality to morality.
Humbert also attempts to justify his murder of Quilty by framing the events in
two different storytelling modes: the detective novel and the doppelganger.8 Yet, both
8
For critical commentary on Lolita s participation in the detective genre, see Boyd s Vladimir Nabokov:
The American Years; Burch s  Nabokov and the Detective; LaFontaine s  Variations on the Detective
Story; Packman s Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire: 23-45; and Williams s  Maps,
Chronologies, and Identities in Three Novels of Vladimir Nabokov.
For commentary on Lolita s participation in the doppelg�nger, see Dale s  The Double in Three Twentieth-
Century Novels; Olsen s Lolita: A Janus Text: 75-78.
 39
sets of conventions turn against Humbert and, rather than attesting to his innocence,
condemn his failing morality. In the tradition of such works as Poe s  The Murders in the
Rue Morgue, or Doyle s Sherlock Holmes, the conventional detective story unravels the
mysteries surrounding a crime as a detective follows logical clues to track and unveil the
identity of the criminal. In this sense, both Humbert and the reader take on the role of the
detective throughout the course of the novel. Gathering information from such a limited
and unreliable first-person source as Humbert, readers participate with Humbert in his
cryptogrammic paper chase as he attempts to assemble the clues left behind in motel
registries by Quilty. Yet, unlike the typically astute sleuth of detective stories, Humbert
fails to put the pieces together, identifying Quilty as the kidnapper only after Lolita utters
his name three years later.
While Humbert plays the role of the detective in Quilty s game of words, readers
are forced to take on the role of the detective in unraveling Nabokov s layered word
games to discover both the identities of Humbert s victim and Lolita s lover. Although
Nabokov plants many clues highlighting Quilty s identity, most readers remain as
clueless as Humbert in an initial reading of the novel. Among the clues provided by
Nabokov is Humbert s recording of an entire page of Who s Who in the Limelight that
includes the entry:
Quilty, Clare, American dramatist. Born in Ocean City, N.J., 1911.
Educated at Columbia University. Started on a commercial career but
turned to playwriting. Author of The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved
Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The
 40
Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love, and others. His many plays for
children are notable. Little Nymph (1940) traveled 14,000 miles and
played 280 performances on the road during the winter before ending in
New York. Hobbies: fast cars, photography, pets. (31)
Nabokov fills this entry with telling information that readers are expected to retain in
order to put a name on Humbert s double. Here, the titles The Little Nymph, Fatherly
Love, and Dark Age reference pedophilia. The Lady Who Loved Lightning refers to
Humbert s mother who  died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) years earlier (10).
The name Vivian Darkbloom is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. And the references to
Quilty s hobbies point to the fast red convertible sports car first spotted in the parking lot
of the Enchanted Hunters that proceeds to trail Humbert and Lolita through much of the
second half of the novel. Furthermore, the entry that follows Quilty s is that of a female
playwright sharing Lolita s first name, Dolores, and author of such plays as Never Talk to
Strangers and The Murdered Playwright.
Adding another dimension to his textual game, as Olsen explains, Nabokov
integrates  a staple of the detective story, the red herring or false clue, thereby leading
readers down false paths in the struggle to uncover the identity of Humbert s victim
(103). For instance, both Appel and Proffer have pointed out that the numerous allusions
to Merimee s novella Carmen, especially those that equate Lolita with the character
Carmen  serve as a trap for the sophisticated reader who is led into believing that H.H.,
like Jose, will murder his treacherous Carmen (Appel 358). Besides the many fantasies
Humbert envisions and considers about murdering Charlotte in order to gain access to
 41
Lolita, Humbert also allows readers to continue following their false hunches that
Humbert s victim is either Lolita or her husband almost until the end of the novel.
Humbert teases readers in the scenes leading up to his final meeting with Lolita: toting a
gun in his pocket, rehearsing  Mr. Richard F. Schiller s violent death, stopping by  10
Killer Street in his search for the Schillers, and finally explaining how, pulling up to the
house,  My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next [& ] My gun had migrated to my
right trouser pocket (267, 268, 269). However, Humbert identifies and even mocks the
reader s building anticipation as he teases,  Then I pulled out my automatic I mean, this
is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do
it (280).
While Nabokov participates heavily in the detective genre by working criminal
acts including murder into the plotline, following alongside a detective-figure as he
attempts to piece together the disappearance of his daughter/lover, teasing the reader with
false clues, and adding further complexity to the genre by placing the reader in the
position of a textual detective, Nabokov diverges from the conventions of the genre by
naming the murderer on the opening page of the novel. What this means in terms of our
reading of the novel is that we know, from the outset, that Humbert is the bad guy. Rather
than being preoccupied with witnessing the immoral act in the beginning and then trying
to track down the killer, our attention shifts from the identity of the man to the moral core
of the man and the numerous licentious acts that lead up to his final immoral act of
murder. Thus, this inversion of the detective genre turns on Humbert as the emphasis is
placed on his repeated moral failures as an individual.
 42
Nabokov also integrates the conventions of the doppelg�nger, or double tale into
the novel in order to reveal Humbert s attempts to justify the murder of Quilty, thereby
turning a literal murder into a metaphorical murder. In the tradition of Poe s  William
Wilson, and Wilde s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Humbert is haunted by the image of a
mysterious double throughout the novel. Quilty is a shadow through much of the text, an
elusive representation of Humbert s sinister self who Humbert often refers to as his
 shadow,  brother, or  double (215, 247, 236). In the standard doppelg�nger tale, the
shadow self is the evil, perverse, or enemy self that must be exorcised through a literal or
metaphoric death. Yet, Nabokov fails to fulfill the conventions of the genre as Humbert
and Quilty parallel one another more often than they stand in opposition to one another.
Besides Humbert s references to Quilty as his brother or  another Humbert, they are
both figured (or want to be figured) as  artists in some sense of the word (217). Humbert
calls himself an artist throughout the novel and Quilty is an established playwright. Both
are aesthetes with a propensity for word games and the creation of complex allusions;
they are portrayed as possessing similar features, similar tastes and wardrobes, as well as
the same sexual perversion for nymphets. Furthermore, in the murder scene where
Humbert finally discovers, confronts, and attempts to purge himself essentially of
himself, the entanglement of the two characters during their struggle becomes an
entanglement in print as their identities are merged into a single self:  We fell into
wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other s arms, like two huge helpless
children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over
me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us (298-
 43
299). Thus, through his complex treatment of the two characters and their interaction
with one another, Nabokov resists the simple binaries of good and evil, right and wrong
that appear so frequently in the doppelg�nger. Similar to the inversion of detective novel
conventions, traditional doppelg�nger conventions fail in Lolita because Quilty is not the
immoral or demonic double of Humbert. Instead, they stand side-by-side in terms of
criminal culpability. The use of the doppelg�nger convention, therefore, condemns
Humbert s actions rather than succeeding in justifying Quilty s murder.
Turning away from Humbert s failed aesthetic attempts to justify his crimes
against Quilty, Humbert also employs aesthetic means to condone his relationship with
Lolita, calling forth the conventions of the love story, romance, and fairy tale. Yet, as
with the integration of the confession, detective novel, and doppelg�nger, Humbert
merely succeeds in undermining his own narration by pointing up the gaping disparity
between his representation and the actual events, thereby reiterating the moral issues that
lie at the heart of the novel.
Although few critics attempt to tackle Lolita s affinity with the traditional love
story in depth, many claim, in passing, that the novel is a great love story. Lionel Trilling,
for instance, explains,  Lolita is about love [& ] not about sex, but about love. Almost
every page sets forth some explicit erotic emotion or some overt erotic action and still it
is not about sex. It is about love. This makes it unique in my experience of contemporary
novels (19). Even my 1997 Second International Vintage Edition of the novel lures
readers in with a quote from Vanity Fair on the cover claiming that Lolita is  The only
convincing love story of our century. Although Humbert may love Lolita, unlike the
 44
traditional love story, it is an unrequited love. Humbert s story, therefore, resembles that
of a violent obsession more closely than a love story as readers are granted passing and
often obscured glimpses of Lolita s  sobs in the night every night and her attempts to
forcibly remove Humbert from her body and her life by clawing at his face and chest
(176). Furthermore, Lolita s direct rejection of Humbert at the end of the novel as she
admits that she  would sooner go back to Cue, the man who  was all drink and drugs
and who wanted to film her participating in  weird, filthy, fancy things, reveals the
degree to which Humbert permanently damaged her life (279, 276). Therefore, by calling
Lolita a love story, critics fail to acknowledge important aspects of the novel including
the emotional and sexual abuse inflicted on a child.
In addition to Trilling s early claim of Lolita s connection to the conventions of
the love story, in his 1958 review of Lolita,  The Last Lover, Trilling was among the
first critics to explore Nabokov s integration of romance and medieval romance
conventions.9 Many contemporary critics have used Trilling s argument as a stepping-
stone for developing their own theses concerning Nabokov s ties to the genre. Summing
up the parallels between Lolita s plot and the conventions of romance, Thomas Frosch
explains:  The plot itself is composed of a series of typical romance structures, each one
a version of the quest or hunt and each one an embodiment of a specific type of suspense
or anxiety (39). In Humbert s depiction, Lolita takes on the role of the elusive and
ultimately unattainable object of Humbert s desire. In his quest to possess Lolita,  we
9
For discussions of Lolita as a romance or love story, see Trilling s  The Last Lover; Walter s  Romantic
Parody and the Ironic Muse in Lolita; Josipovici s  Lolita: Parody and the Pursuit of Beauty; Hollander s
 The Perilous Magic of Nymphets; Masinton s  What Lolita is Really About; and Frosch s  Parody and
Authenticity in Lolita.
 45
have a story of jealousy and possessiveness, and Humbert is beset by fears of rivals and
by Lolita s own resistance (Frosch 39). Furthermore, after Lolita abandons Humbert for
Quilty, a second hunt begins, one in which Quilty becomes the object of Humbert s
obsession and desire for revenge.
A further convention of romance, as expressed by Northrop Frye in his work
Anatomy of Criticism, is that the romance is situated in a position between myth and
mimesis. Thus, the characters in romance possess powers greater than men but lesser than
gods. Because Humbert categorizes Lolita as a  nymphet, he places her in a position that
is otherworldly and demonic. Even the word nymphet is suggestive of a status that falls
just short of the gods. Thus, in Humbert s portrayal, Lolita exerts a  fantastic power over
nympholepts such as Humbert (17). At the same time, Humbert s depiction of himself as
a nympholept fulfills the same purpose as assigning to Lolita otherworldly characteristics.
Because he is a nympholept,  an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy,
Humbert, unlike normal men, is able  to discern at once, by ineffable signs the slightly
feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which
despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate the deadly little demon
among the wholesome children (17).
A final way in which Lolita employs the romance genre as a literary mode is
through the elevation of the ordinary to the extraordinary. Clearly, men, women, and
children are bestowed powers and strengths beyond the ordinary or everyday. Yet, a
mythic status is also granted to inanimate objects, places, actions, and events. By infusing
 46
the text with elements of myth, mystery, and suspense, even a standard American
roadside motel takes on a supernatural quality:
The Park was as black as the sins it concealed but soon after falling
under the smooth spell of a nicely graded curve, the travelers became
aware of a diamond glow through the mist, then a gleam of lakewater
appeared and there it was, marvelously and inexorably, under spectral
trees, at the top of a graveled drive the pale palace of The Enchanted
Hunters. (117)
Saturating the entire text with such loaded and elevated language, Nabokov reveals
Humbert s attempt to obscure reality by transforming the story of a depraved adult s
obsession with and crimes against a conventional American adolescent girl into one
which fuses the mundane with the exotic, heroic, and passionate.
Complementing the conventions of romance, Nabokov introduces fairy tale and
mythical elements into the text.10 Most easily identifiable are the numerous direct
allusions to notable fairy tales including The Little Mermaid, Bluebeard, Hansel and
Gretel, The Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor s New Clothes, and Beauty and the Beast. Yet
Nabokov integrates more subtle references to myth, fantasy, and fairy tales through the
incorporation and repetition of such words as  nymphet, referencing the immortal Greek
and Roman nymphs, and  Elphinstone and  Pisky, playing on the words  elf and
 pixie. Furthermore, Humbert repeatedly refers to Lolita as an enchantress and a demon,
10
For discussions of Nabokov s use of fairy tale and myth conventions, see Steven Swann Jones s  Folk
Characterization in Lolita; and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney s   Ballet Attitudes : Nabokov s Lolita and
Petipa s The Sleeping Beauty.
 47
and therefore justifies his attraction to her through references to spells, magic, and the
supernatural.
As Appel explains, Nabokov also introduces aspects of fantasy and fairy tales into
the plot of the novel, writing  The simplicity of Lolita s  story, [& ] and the themes of
deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis are akin to the fairy tale; while the
recurrence of places and motifs and the presence of three principal characters recall the
formalistic design and symmetry of those archetypal tales (346). In his article  Folk
Characterization in Lolita, Steven Swann Jones presents a compelling and thorough
expansion of Appel s argument, discussing in detail the parallels between Nabokov s
novel and European fairy tales. Prominent in his discussion is Nabokov s use of stock
characters including  the jealous mother, the fairy princess, the prince charming, the ogre
father, and the hunter (68).
Charlotte Haze takes on the role of the  jealous mother (or stepmother) who is so
frequently the villain in folktales such as  Cinderella,  Cap o Rushes,  One Eyes, Two
Eyes, Three Eyes, and  Snow White (Jones 69). Emphasizing Charlotte s jealousy of
her daughter, Humbert writes in his journal,  I was aware that mother Haze hated my
darling for her being sweet on me (54). Charlotte is repeatedly referred to as the
 obstacle of Humbert s intentions, an obstacle that he fantasizes about violently and
permanently removing from his life (71). Casting Charlotte in the role of the villian,
Humbert obscures any real, loving, mother-daughter interaction that Charlotte may have
with Lolita. Readers can assume that Charlotte wishes to protect both herself and her
daughter from Humbert after finding his diary, discovering his true intentions, and
 48
confronting him as she exclaims,  You re a monster. You re a detestable, abominable,
criminal fraud. If you come near I ll scream out the window (96). Yet, because of
Humbert s biased portrayal, we catch only sidelong glimpses of a woman with moral
principles. Lolita is cast by Humbert as the fairy princess, an enchantress, a nymph, and
an elf. She is the fairy princess, abandoned in the wilderness (Camp Q) by her jealous and
wicked mother. Depicted throughout the novel as a  nymphet living in an  enchanted
island of time, Lolita possesses a power that Humbert categorizes as  demonic to
bewitch and enchant. Finally, Lolita is also the reincarnation of Annabel, the  initial
fateful elf (18). Unlike Charlotte and Lolita, Humbert plays contradictory roles
throughout the course of the novel. In his incestuous desire to marry his daughter, and his
fantasies about conceiving a litter of Lolitas so that he will always have a young girl at
his disposal, Humbert takes on the form of the ogre father. As Humbert attempts to send
Lolita into a deep sleep by drugging her at the Enchanted Hunters, he displaces Charlotte
by playing the role of the wicked stepmother. In his pursuit of both Lolita and Quilty, he
transforms into the enchanted hunter. Finally, when he meets Lolita for the last time, he
appeals to her:
Lolita [& ] this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is
very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of
twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five
steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily
ever after. (278)
 49
Here, Humbert uses the conventional fairy tale ending in his attempt to represent his role
as Prince Charming, coming to the rescue of a princess.
Yet, despite Humbert s efforts to mythologize and romanticize his love affair with
Lolita, a thin artistic fa�ade cannot disguise that which lies beneath it. When we lift the
veil off of Humbert s elegant and elaborate depiction of individuals and events, what we
discover is a far cry from a romance or fairy tale. Instead, it is the story of a conventional
American girl s victimization and tragedy. Beneath Humbert s fantasies of Lolita as a
princess and enchantress lies a  conventional little girl who speaks in such crude
adolescent phrases as   revolting,  super,  luscious,  goon,  drip (148, 65). As
Humbert s relationship with Lolita ages, he occasionally sees through his own romantic
construction to the normal child standing before him:
Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who
applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an unwashed face and
does not mind what soiled texture, what pustulate epidermis comes in
contact with her skin. Its smooth tender bloom had been so lovely in
former days, so bright with tears, when I used to roll, in play, her tousled
head on my knee. A coarse flush had now replaced that innocent
fluorescence. (204)
The fact that Humbert represents himself in such contradictory terms as the ogre
and Prince Charming immediately undercuts the world of fantasy that he is attempting to
weave with words. Humbert often describes himself as physically resembling a Prince
Charming figure:  I was, and still am [& ] an exceptionally handsome male; slow-
 50
moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of
demeanor (25). Upon meeting Lolita, Humbert reemphasizes his physical features,
claiming  I have all the characteristics which, according to writers on the sex interests of
children, start the responses stirring in a little girl: clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep
sonorous voice, broad shoulder (43). Yet, in contrast to Humbert s depiction of himself
as handsome and charming, he also refers to himself as  a brute, and  a pentapod
monster, (193, 284). In his relationship with Lolita, Humbert clearly fails as a Prince
Charming. Rather than rescuing Lolita and living  happily ever after once her rival, her
jealous mother, is killed, Humbert instead begins  terrorizing the child through isolation
and abuse (151).
Moreover, the traditional fairy tale ending is undercut by tragedy. If Lolita were
truly a fairy tale, Dick Schiller, rather than Humbert, would play the role of Prince
Charming as he has rescued Lolita from Humbert (and Quilty) and has helped her make a
normal life for herself, complete with the prospect of motherhood. Yet, even Lolita s
would-be Prince Charming cannot help her live  happily ever after. Though Dick
Schiller is initially described handsomely, with  Arctic eyes, black hair, ruddy cheeks,
unshaven chin, upon closer inspection Humbert notes the  blackheads on the wings of
his perspiring nose, his  large and hairy Adam s apple, his  black and broken
fingernails, and his  lumbering walk (274, 273). Furthermore, as we discover in John
Ray s foreword,  Mrs.  Richard F. Schiller died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn
girl, on Christmas Day 1952 in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest (4). As
Jones notes, the ending of Lolita s life  is an ironic reversal of the Christian myth of the
 51
Nativity. The bright and guiding star of Bethlehem has become the cold, gray half-light
of the modern world, and the symbolic day of rebirth and regeneration has instead
produced two deaths (73). Yet, Lolita s death, coupled with the death of her daughter
provides fitting closure to the real story beneath Humbert s romanticized version,
reiterating the tragic, mortal side of her life and undercutting Humbert s attempts to
justify his abuse. Lolita s death, such a blatant inversion of the fairy tale genre, serves
many purposes in the novel. Because readers learn of her death not just in the novel, but
in the foreword, before the novel even begins, Lolita s mortality undermines Humbert s
final words as he expresses his intent to immortalize her enchanting youth through art.
The death of Lolita s daughter represents the end of nymphet enchantment for Humbert,
bringing Humbert s fantasies of a  Lolita the Second to a close (174). Finally, Lolita s
death in childbirth reiterates the moral issue of abuse that lies at the center of the novel.
Not only did Humbert, as he readily admits,  break [her] life and steal her childhood, he
also broke her body through years of sexual abuse (279).
 52
Conclusion
Picking up a copy of Nabokov s American masterpiece, readers face many
challenges. We must abandon our pre-conceived notions of the meaning of  Lolita
handed down to us by pop culture and PAX TV reruns of The Long Island Lolita starring
Alyssa Milano as the seductive, lethal, and vengeful 17-year-old Amy Fisher. We must
see through our contemporary cultural constructions to the Lolita, both the novel and the
character that Nabokov intended for us to see. We must negotiate through layer upon
layer of verbal play, allusion, genre shifting, and the evocation of literary history through
the complex use and parody of convention. Furthermore, as patterns and puzzles of
textual complexity emerge through a veritable chorus of voices and the repeated
appearance and subversion of numerous genres and conventions, responsible readers
must begin to ask why, thereby opening the door to the exploration of the seemingly
irreconcilable puzzle in which Nabokov deliberately chose to frame his text.
Nabokov opens Humbert s narration with the famous lines  Lolita, light of my
life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of
three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta (9). Readers are
immediately thrust into a novel that hypnotizes and seduces through language. Even John
Ray, the unswerving moralist praises Humbert s ability to manipulate words, writing
 But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for
Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author (5). Humbert is
a narrator with an aesthetic obsession: the desire to lock an individual life within the
artifice of language. Yet, the same opening lines that introduce Humbert s linguistic and
 53
aesthetic obsession also introduce a physical, sexual, and emotional obsession with a
young, flesh and blood girl who refuses to be held within the confines of a text. Thus,
while Nabokov provides readers with a seemingly unlimited supply of aesthetic riddles,
like Humbert s dueling obsessions, there exists a further dimension to the novel that
needs to be acknowledged. What this means is that through an analysis of the text that
goes beyond a simple recognition of the various aesthetic puzzles, an analysis that asks
why, and an analysis that looks toward addressing the achieved and combined effect of
Nabokov s aesthetic choices, we must be prepared to direct our attention to both aspects
of Humbert s obsession and locate the intersection of aesthetics and morality.
Throughout the past 50 years, critics have gone to great lengths to disassemble the
intricacies of morality, aesthetic convention, and parody in Lolita, often focusing their
attention on one rather than all of these elements. Yet, the true intricacy of Nabokov s
novel lies in the way in which he interweaves all three elements and achieves what
Humbert strives to accomplish through his narration. Weaving the beauty of aesthetic
richness with the brutality of Humbert s behavior, Nabokov locates the borderline of
 The beastly and beautiful (135). Nabokov s integration of aesthetic games fulfills a
particular moral purpose in the novel. Because Nabokov conjures a wealth of artistic
voices and conventions, yet sustains none throughout the entirety of the novel, all become
parodies of voices and conventions. Furthermore, as Nabokov hands the narrative over to
Humbert, and presents the novel through his perspective, parody undermines Humbert s
narration through its mocking quality and thereby reiterates the moral issues lying at the
center of the novel. Humbert is searching for a form in which he can justify his actions.
 54
Trying on the hats of allusion and convention, Humbert attempts to obscure the truth by
burying the literal in the metaphorical and by shrouding Lolita s tears, unhappiness, and
victimization with an artistic fa�ade. Yet, each time Humbert discards one form or voice
and replaces it with another, Nabokov exposes the contrived artificiality of Humbert s
narration and reminds readers that no aesthetic tricks can possibly erase the reality of
abuse inflicted upon Lolita.
 55
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