MacKenzie Bernard
Lolita Literary Analysis
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is the fictional narrative of Humbert Humbert, a hopeless romantic passionately in love with Lolita, a 12-year-old girl. Humbert writes of his obsession with Lolita that eventually turns into a sexual relationship once Humbert becomes Lolita’s stepfather. As Humbert becomes increasingly possessive of Lolita, she rebels against him and runs away with another older man, whom Humbert eventually kills, which leads him to 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 an endearing protagonist. Through Humbert’s poetic spin on his eccentric love, Lolita develops the idea that love is a paradox. Lolita shows love as not only being inevitably tragic, but at the same time incredibly beautiful.
Lolita shows that love is a devastating, heartbreaking experience. Humbert’s obsessive love led to tragedy not only for Humbert, but for Lolita as well:
Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, 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 a relationship between a middle aged man and a 12-year-old is going to result in emotional damage for the child. The pedophilia behind Humbert’s love was bound to deprive Lolita of her childhood. Humbert realizes his love caused Lolita just as much pain in her life as it did in his, if not more. In “’Lolita’ and the Dangers of Fiction,” claiming Humbert’s realization of the harm he’s done to Lolita, Matthew Winston writes:
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’s pain is the backbone behind his entire memoir, he realizes not even the loss he feels can compare to the tragedy he inflicted upon Lolita. “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, 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).” Whether or not Lolita reciprocated any of Humbert’s feelings, Humbert’s uncontrollable love essentially ruined her childhood. The deprivation of Lolita’s innocence shows just one example of 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. The biggest example of the tragedy in Humbert’s life might be found in his statement “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style (3).” The possessive love Humbert felt for Lolita led him to murder Clare Quilty, which Humbert attempts to justify, “And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations (272).”, but whether or not Humbert was by any means just in killing Quilty, Humbert’s crime still led him to a life in prison. Had Humbert not loved Lolita, or even if he had not been driven to pedophilia at all, he may have had a happy life. “In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child (3).” Humbert’s life was not only affected by his love for Lolita, but his love for Annabel. From the moment Humbert fell “madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love (6)” with Annabel, Humbert was fated to love Lolita “at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight (237).” Because he loved 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 and Humbert’s lives shows that love inevitably leads to nothing but agony.
While Lolita shows that love is catastrophic, Nabokov develops a 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. In point of fact, that just might be a pretty accurate description of Humbert. 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 assonance, consonance, and metaphor, reads like refined 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 completely changes Lolita from a story about pedophilia into a story about love. Because of Humbert’s passion, 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 anywhere 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, mais je t'aimais, je t'aimais (250-251).” Lolita is not so much 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 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, despite its context, trumps the fact that Lolita is just a child. Humbert’s poetic narration of his love 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 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 captivating. Lolita shows that love is an awful, heartbreaking experience that leads to absolute sorrow, even if that love is the love of a pedophile, and, at the same time, 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 beautiful agony.
Works Cited:
Eisinger, Chester E. "Lolita: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2013.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. The United States of America: The Olympia Press, 1955. Print
Winston, Mathew. "Lolita' and the Dangers of Fiction." Twentieth Century Literature 21.4 (Dec. 1975): 421-427. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 64. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 Mar. 2013.