Honors AP English III (Mr. Jennings)

MacKenzie Bernard

Honors AP English III (Mr. Jennings)

Honors AP US History (Mr. Esselman)

May 17, 2013

Lolita and the 1950s

A pedophile is disgusting; “happy days” is the perfect way to describe the 1950s. Right? Or is it possible that there could be more to it? Could a pedophile be a romantic? Could the 1950s have had serious problems? The easy answer would be no. Many people don’t want to look beyond the surface of these words; it’s easier just to agreeto their socially accepted definitions than to look for something deeper. However, the struggle to see more is exactly what Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the 1950s have in common.

It’s nearly impossible to convince people who haven’t read Lolita to look past Humbert Humbert’s “pedophile” label. You tell people a book is about a middle aged man lusting over a 12-year-old girl and they will generally assume that man is despicable. However, Nabokov deliberately attempts to force his readers to overlook their likely moral aversions to pedophiles in order to see Humbert as a literary genius. Through gorgeous prose, Lolita turns pedophilia into art and develops the idea that love is tragic, yet simultaneously beautiful. To see the beauty and depth of Lolita, Nabokov forces you to get past the pedophilic surface of Humbert’s love.

Many people also have trouble looking closer at the 1950s. The 1950s are supposed to be the “good old days,” a time that reflects an image of happy families, a booming economy, suburbia, cars, and the absence of problems. However, beyond the idyllic surface, the 1950s had serious economic, social, and political problems such as consumerism, racism, and McCarthyism. In reality, “the happy days” held little truth beyond the incredibly popular sitcoms of the decade. To see the actuality of the 1950s, you have to look beyond the apparent “good old days.”

Lolita and the 1950s are both complicated subjects that people have the tendency to dumb down. It’s easy to assume Lolita is nothing more than a pedophile or that the 1950s are nothing more than “happy days.” It’s only when you get beyond the surface that you can fully see either for the complexities that they really are.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the fictional narrative of Humbert Humbert, a middle aged hopeless romantic passionately in love with Lolita, a 12-year-old girl. Humbert writes of his passion for Lolita which, after he becomes her stepfather, turns into a sexual relationship. Lolita eventually escapes from him with Clare Quilty, another older man with a striking resemblance to Humbert. Three years after losing Lolita, Humbert murders Quilty and ends up in the prison where he writes his memoir. Through distinctively beautiful prose, Nabokov turns what might ordinarily be regarded as the disgusting musings of a sexual psychopath into an engaging romance where Humbert comes off not as a disturbing pedophile, but as an endearing protagonist. Through Humbert’s poetic spin on his eccentric love, Lolita develops the idea that love is inevitably tragic, but at the same time, love (even a pedophile’s love) is beautiful.

Lolita shows that love is a devastating, heartbreaking experience. Humbert comes to realize his obsessive love led to tragedy not only for himself, but also for Lolita:

Nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me – to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction – that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art (249).

It’s reasonable to assume that a relationship between a middle aged man and a 12-year-old girl is going to result in emotional damage for the child. The pedophilic context of Humbert’s love was bound to deprive Lolita of her childhood. “What I heard was but the melody of children at play […] 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 (271).” Humbert realizes that his love robbed Lolita of her innocence and ultimately caused just as much pain in her life as it did in his, if not more. In “’Lolita’ and the Dangers of Fiction,” noting Humbert’s realization of the harm he’s done to Lolita, Mathew Winston claims:

He gradually learns that he knew nothing about her thoughts or feelings and, in fact, carefully avoided any recognition of her personality which might interfere with the satisfaction of his own physical and psychological needs. He is able to feel for the first time the full pathos of “her sobs in the night—every night, every night.” He discovers, in short, that Dolores Haze is a person and not a character (Winston).

Though Humbert is heartbroken, he realizes the damage he caused Lolita: “She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life”) (245).” Humbert’s uncontrollable love essentially ruined Lolita’s childhood. The deprivation of Lolita’s innocence shows just one example of the tragedy that unavoidably results from love.

While Humbert acknowledges the damage his love caused Lolita, the ultimate focus of his memoir is the tragedy love caused for him. Perhaps the biggest example of the tragedy in Humbert’s life can be found in his statement “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style (3).” Humbert’s jealousy-inspired murder of Clare Quilty led him to a life in prison, or what Humbert refers to as “well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion (272).” While a prison sentence and being titled a murderer are great losses, for Humbert the real tragedy is losing Lolita. Humbert ends his story with “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita (272).” Humbert isn’t concerned with having to deal with a life in prison; his concern is living a life where his only way to Lolita is through his writing. He’s heartbroken, and a well-heated prison can’t compare with that. Had Humbert not loved Lolita, or even if he hadn’t been driven to pedophilia at all, he might have had a happy, relatively normal life. “I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces (4).” Humbert’s happy childhood, and possibly happy life, was destroyed the minute he met Annabel. From the moment Humbert fell “madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love (6)” with Annabel, Humbert was predestined to love Lolita “at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight (237).” “In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child (3).” Because he was fated to love Lolita, he was destined to lose her, murder Quilty and ultimately live a miserable life not just because of his prison sentence, but because of the incurable heartbreak that love rewarded him. From the loss of Lolita’s childhood, to Humbert’s prison sentence, to every bit of sorrow underlying Humbert’s “fancy prose style (3)”, the tragedy evoked in Lolita’s and Humbert’s lives shows the idea that love inevitably leads to agony.

While Lolita shows that love is catastrophic, Nabokov develops the theme that love is simultaneously beautiful. Upon learning Humbert is a pedophile, it might normally be reasonable to indict Humbert as nothing more than a disgustingly evil child molester. However, Humbert’s eloquent narration makes his pedophilic love appear beautiful. “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 (3).” Humbert’s introductory paragraph, charged with alliteration, assonance, and metaphor, reads like poetry. In “Lolita: Overview,” Chester E. Eisinger writes:

The apparent subject of the novel is Humbert Humbert's perverted passion for a nymphet. But we come closer to the real subject if we perceive that his passion is his prison and his pain, his ecstasy and his madness. His release from the prison of his passion and the justification of his perversion is in art, and that is the real subject of the novel: the pain of remembering, organizing, and telling his story is a surrogate for the pain of his life and a means of transcending and triumphing over it; art, as it transmutes the erotic experience, becomes the ultimate experience in passion and madness (Eisinger).

As Eisinger claims, the “art” Humbert creates through his prose changes Lolita from a story about pedophilia into a story about love. Because of Humbert’s style, it doesn’t matter that Lolita is 12 years old. What matters is Humbert’s love, which he articulates in such a way that shows his love as being as real and painful as any love he would have experienced had he been capable of loving someone remotely close to his own age. No matter how appalling Humbert’s feelings may be, he still has the ability to turn his love into something beautiful: “I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, maisje t'aimais, je t'aimais (250-251).” Lolita is not really about how horrible Humbert’s love is, but about how beautiful Humbert can make that love appear. Eisinger further claims “The problem Nabokov deliberately sets for himself, however, is to persuade the reader to transcend the erotic content and eschew moral judgment in order to perceive his novel as an artistic creation and not as a reflection or interpretation of reality. Lolita is not immoral or didactic, he has said; it has no moral. It is a work of art (Eisinger).” Lolita is not about what is morally wrong with Humbert and Lolita’s relationship, but everything that’s artistically right with it. The love story between a grown man and an adolescent girl should be downright disgusting, but no matter how debauched Humbert and Lolita’s relationship is, Humbert manages to transform it into something beautiful: “I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else (244).” Humbert’s prose trumps the fact that Lolita is just a child. He can articulate his feelings as being poignant, even if moral standards would argue that they shouldn’t be. Humbert’s poetic narration shows that love, even in its most deplorable form, is beautiful.

On the surface, it might appear that Lolita is about little more than the repulsive life of a pervert. But Nabokov’s prose turns Lolita into so much more. Lolita is a love story, and a tragic one at that. Nabokov takes a pedophile, someone who should ordinarily be regarded as a despicable human being, and turns him into a romantic, heartbroken poet. When Nabokov accomplishes that, the fact that Lolita is only 12 years old isn’t important. What matters is the idea that love is a paradox, a beautiful disaster. Love ruined the lives of both Humbert and Lolita, but their love story remains entrancing. Lolita shows love as being an awful, heartbreaking experience that leads to absolute sorrow (even if that love is the love of a pedophile) and, simultaneously, love, even pedophilic love, is beautiful (it might just take Vladimir Nabokov to prove that). According to Lolita, it doesn’t matter the context of love. Whether love is for a 12-year-old or a 112-year-old, if it’s real love, it will lead to inescapable, beautiful agony.

Many people like to believe that the 1950s are America’s “happy days,” a time when dysfunctional families were unthinkable, the economy was immaculate, and the biggest problems were nothing that good morals couldn’t solve in the time it took to air an episode of Leave it to Beaver. After all, if Leave it to Beaver wasn’t on, there’s a good chance that The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Make Room for Daddy, or I Love Lucy was. David Halberstam wrote:

One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was),but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television. It was the televisionimages of the era that remained so remarkably sharp in people’s memories, often fresher than memories of real life. Television reflected a world of warm-hearted, sensitive, tolerantAmericans, a world devoid of anger and meanness of spirit and, of course, failure (Halberstam514)

The sitcoms of the 1950s were constantly broadcasting the idea of happiness to the rapidly increasing number of American television viewers (by 1954, 50 million people were watching I Love Lucy alone (Halberstam 199)). Millions of people could plaster their eyes to a TV screen and become convinced that the decade they were living in was as fun and happy as the smiling white people on their television screen made it out to be. In real life, the ‘50s just couldn’t meet the standards “invented by writers, producers, and directors (Halberstam 508).” The 50s were not invincible, but people didn’t want to accept that. David Wright and Elly Petra Petras claimed: “When the young men who fought in Europe and the Pacific for four years returned home to their sweethearts, they wanted to get on with their lives and forget about the death and destruction overseas. It only makes sense that the focus was on fun and innocence, on “I Love Lucy,” rock ‘n’ roll, backyard barbecues, and being part of the status quo (Wright & Petra Press 728).” While perhaps the 1950s were not the utter hell Americans had experienced during the Great Depression and World War II, they were also a long way off from being the “happy days” nostalgia has claimed them to be.

After World War II, many Americans were determined to move on and live in prosperity. “A booming postwar economy gave middle-class Americans more money than they ever had before (Wright and Petra Petras 728).” The 1950s saw a substantially better economy than either the ‘30s or ‘40s. For instance, during the Great Depression and World War II, housing suffered more than any other industry, with the number of housing starts falling from around one million per year to less than 100,000; 50,000 people were living in Army Quonset huts and it’s estimated over five million new houses were immediately needed for underprivileged families (Halberstam 134). In contrast, by the end of the ‘50s, more than nine million Americans became homeowners (Wright and Petra Press 729). An estimated 1.7 million houses were built in 1950 (Halberstam 134) and modern, suburban homes sold for as little as $6,000 (Wright and Petra Press 737). In some respects, the “booming” economy improved the country.

Nonetheless, capitalistic America had its downsides. Americans became relentless consumers, buying anything advertisers convinced them was necessary to live. Industries such as the automobile market became wildly successful, with more than twenty-one million cars sold by the end of the 1950s (Wright and Petra Press 729). Cars traveled 458 billion miles in 1950 and 7.9 million cars sold in 1955 alone. The rapid success of the automobile industry led to the passing of the Interstate Highway Act in 1956, which created over 40,000 miles of highway (Wright and Petra Press 736). Americans became obsessed with the fancy new automobiles taking over suburbia. Harley Earl, the head of General Motors design, remarked to his employees, “”General Motors […] is in business for only one reason. To make money.In order to do that we make cars. But if we could make money making garbage cans, we would make garbage cans (Halberstam 127).”” For many Americans, it became more important to have the newest, sleekest car than to consider the financial consequences. Fins, the most popular automotive detail of the 1950s, “represented no technological advance; they were solely a design element whose purpose was to make the cars seem sleeker, bigger, and more powerful (Halberstam 127).” “”It gave them [the customers] an extra receipt for their money in the form of visible prestige marking for an expensive car,” Earl said, summing up the essential thrust of the industry during the decade (Halberstam 127).”

Americans were gradually forced to realize that even if the economy was better than the previous two decades, their newfound wealth wasn’t infinite. By the end of the 1950s, consumer debt more than doubled, from $73 billion to $196 billion (Wright and Petra Press 740). Paul A. Carter wrote, “In Detroit, a retailer confessed that “after a certain point, there’s nothing you can do. You tell them to buy, but they haven’t any money.” “There is no use expecting a man to buy an automobile he does not have to have,” columnist Walter Lippman warned, “if he is worried about whether he may lose his job (Carter 37).” It’s estimated that 50 million people were living near or below the poverty line (about $3,000 for a family of four) (Wright and Petra Press 748). The 50s saw two recessions, the first lasting from July 1953-May 1954 and the second from August 1957 – April 1958, when the unemployment rate peaked at 7.5% (Labonte). More than five million lacked jobs by the spring of 1958 and 75,000 workers were unemployed in St. Louis alone (Carter 35; 39). The economic doldrums of the 1950s can’t compare with that of the 1930s or ‘40s, but it would be a stretch to say the ‘50s economy, riddled by recessions, unemployment, and debt all of its own, was a representation of “happy days.”