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The Story:
After the death by heart attack of Humbert Humbert, before he was to be tried for murder, his lawyer asks John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., to edit the accused murderer’s last manuscript. It is titled “Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male.” Dolores Schiller, the girl Humbert calls Lolita, dies giving birth to a stillborn daughter a few weeks after Humbert’s fatal heart attack. Ray defends the manuscript against charges of pornography and claims it will become a classic in psychiatric circles.
Humbert’s confession begins with a summary of his life from his birth in 1910 until his discovery of Lolita in 1947. He was born in Paris to an English mother and a Swiss father, who ran a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. At thirteen, he fell in love with Annabel Leigh, who was close to his age, and experienced unfulfilled lust. Four months later, Annabel died of typhus. He had been haunted by her memory until he found her essence reincarnated in Lolita. After studying English literature in Paris, Humbert became a teacher and discovered himself drawn to certain girls between the ages of nine and fourteen, whom he calls “nymphets.” Trying to lead a conventional existence, he was married to Valeria from 1935 until 1939, when she left him for a White Russian taxi driver; she later died in childbirth.
Humbert then relates how, at the start of World War II, he moves to the United States. After his second stay in a mental institution, he seeks refuge in the small New England town of Ramsdale, where he rents a room from Charlotte Haze, a widow, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter, Dolores, known as Lo to her mother and Dolly to her friends, and also sometimes called Lolita. The darkly handsome Humbert soon discovers that he resembles some singer or actor on whom Lolita has a schoolgirl crush. When the girl goes away to summer camp, Humbert decides that he cannot live without her. Then Charlotte leaves a note for Humbert in which she confesses her love for him and orders him to marry her or leave her home. They marry, and afterward he hints to her friends that he and Charlotte had had an affair thirteen years previously, and he begins to regard Lolita as his child. Humbert decides that he must somehow get rid of her mother, his wife, but he cannot bring himself to kill her.
Humbert’s problem is solved when Charlotte breaks into his locked desk to read his journal and discovers his disdain for her and his lust for Lolita. As she is crossing the street, in an emotional turmoil, to mail some letters incriminating him (for protection, having read of his desire for her death), she is struck and killed by a car. Humbert recovers the letters, plays the role of a grieving widower, continues planting suggestions that he is Lolita’s real father, and announces plans to take the girl on a trip west.
Humbert retrieves Lolita from her summer camp on the pretext that her mother is ill and takes her to a hotel called the Enchanted Hunters. As Humbert relates it, before he can break the news of her mother’s death to her, Lolita seduces him and afterward reveals that she lost her virginity to the son of the camp director. Humbert is immediately consumed by guilt but continues to have sexual relations with her. When Lolita demands to call her mother, Humbert tells her that Charlotte is dead.
Humbert and Lolita begin traveling from motel to motel across the United States. Seeing how other adult men are attracted to the young girl, Humbert is constantly on his guard. He is also aware of the repercussions that await him if his criminal treatment of Lolita is discovered.
After a year and some twenty-seven thousand miles on the road, they return east to Beardsley, where Lolita attends a private girls’ school. Miss Pratt, the headmistress, convinces Humbert to let Lolita play the lead in the school’s production of a new play, The Enchanted Hunters . Just before the play is to open, Lolita announces that she hates school and the play and wants to travel again. Humbert has been told that the playwright, Clare Quilty, a man whom Lolita has falsely identified as “some old woman,” has been raving about the young actress. Humbert and Lolita set out again, and Humbert takes with him a gun once owned by Harold Haze, Lolita’s father. He feels he might need it after he notices they are being followed by a red convertible and he discovers Lolita talking to a stranger who resembles Gustave Trapp, Humbert’s cousin.
In the town of Elphinstone, Lolita develops a high fever and is hospitalized. Humbert becomes incapacitated by fever as well, and while he is ill, Lolita is checked out of the hospital by “her uncle, Mr. Gustave.” Humbert spends the next four months searching for her and her abductor, tormented by the taunting clues left by his nemesis. In a northeastern bar, he meets Rita, an alcoholic, suicidal young woman; the two then travel together for two years. Eventually Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, and he goes to see her. She is living in the dismal town of Coalmont, pregnant and married to a young Korean War veteran. He is surprised at how much he still loves the haggard, seventeen-year-old housewife.
Lolita tells Humbert the identity of her abductor, Clare Quilty, and tells him how Quilty had wanted her to perform in pornographic home movies and had thrown her out when she refused. Humbert gives her four thousand dollars so that she and her husband can move to Alaska, and then he sets out to find Quilty. After returning to Ramsdale to sign over all his money and possessions to Lolita, Humbert tracks Quilty down in the town of Parkington and, after a lengthy confrontation, shoots and kills him.
Critical Evaluation:
Before the publication of Lolita , the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov was not widely known in English-speaking literary circles; most of his early work had not yet been translated from Russian. After Lolita was rejected by four American publishers, Nabokov’s French agent sent it to Olympia Press in Paris, which quickly published it. Although Olympia published many controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, it was notorious for cheap editions of pornographic books, a fact of which Nabokov was ignorant at the time. The novel went virtually unnoticed until novelist Graham Greene praised it in London’s Daily Express . When Putnam published the first American edition in 1958, it became a best seller. Many readers, expecting salacious fun, were disappointed by the book’s lack of overt sexual content and dismayed by its demanding style. Still others attacked it as immoral. Nabokov’s fiction is not for passive readers who resist being drawn into the author’s linguistic games. Lolita is considered one of this highly acclaimed writer’s two greatest novels—Pale Fire (1962) is the other—and a masterpiece of American comic fiction.
Lolita is a highly literary work, filled with allusions to famous and little-known novels, poems, and plays. Many of the allusions are to Edgar Allan Poe, who, at twenty-seven, married his thirteen-year-old cousin. Poe wrote “Annabel Lee” (1849), a poem about a child love dead by the seaside. He also wrote “William Wilson” (1839), a tale of a psychological double, and invented the detective story. Nabokov works these and other allusions to Poe into his novel. There are also many references to Carmen (1845; English translation, 1878), not the Georges Bizet opera but the Prosper Mérimée novella about love, loss, and revenge and an imprisoned narrator. Another strong influence is James Joyce, whose ornate, self-aware, stylistic whimsy is reflected in Lolita . Joyce pioneered heavily allusive fiction, full of word games, and Lolita is full of puns, coinages (such as “nymphet”), neologisms, and foreign, archaic, and unusual words. It also features jokes such as the appearance of Vivian Darkbloom, the letters of whose name may be rearranged, changing one o to an a , to spell Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita is drunk on language; a typical sentence reads, “I spend my doleful days in dumps and dolors.” In his afterword, Nabokov says the novel is about his love affair with the English language.
Lolita can be seen as a parody of such literary forms as autobiography, the confessional tale, the Romantic novel, the tale of the doppelgänger or double, and the detective story. As for the last of these, the reader knows from the beginning that Humbert has murdered someone but does not know more. Hints of the victim’s identity are scattered throughout the novel, and Humbert even warns his readers to keep their eyes on the clues. Nabokov has fun with the detective element by having Quilty appear to Humbert wearing a Dick Tracy mask.
The doppelgänger device is central to the novel. Humbert Humbert sees the old lecher Clare Quilty as his evil double. Lolita has her double in Annabel Leigh (herself a reference to another and a joke about the youth of Edgar Allan Poe’s wife). Humbert Humbert has two wives, both, in his eyes, contemptible. One dies in childbirth, as does Lolita. The three main characters have a multitude of names. Humbert thinks of the mysterious stranger as Trapp and McFate, Quilty’s friends call him Cue, Humbert calls him Punch (as in Punch and Judy), and Lolita tries to convince Humbert that the playwright is a woman. Dolores Haze is Lo, Dolly, Lolita, Lola, and Mrs. Richard F. Schiller. She is a girl and a woman, a victim and a manipulator. Humbert’s name is a double; he uses it for wordplay. It is mispronounced numerous ways by those he encounters (and once by him), and he is frequently called “Mr. Haze.” His calling himself Edgar H. Humbert is typical of Nabokov’s jokes within jokes. Humbert’s editor is another double: The initials of John Ray, Jr., are J. R., or Jr. Beyond the gamesmanship, however, the novel conveys the pain the protagonists suffer.
One of the main targets of Nabokov’s satire is Freudian psychology. Humbert admits, but glosses over, his mental instability and refuses to see himself as a stereotype or a case study. Lolita is thus a parody of the psychiatric simplicity of a case study, with Humbert sneering at those who would see his affair with Lolita as an attempt to rid himself of his obsession with Annabel, laughing at those who interpret the incestuous relationship in Oedipal terms. Humbert’s attacks on Sigmund Freud can be taken seriously, for Humbert is not just a comic figure but also a tormented, guilt-ridden soul.
Humbert is a complex figure because he changes from a self-centered sexual pervert to something of a caring father. Even as Lolita loses her nymphet charms, he falls more deeply in love with her. Pregnant by another and worn out by poverty, she remains his ideal. His moral growth is shown by his lament over his having robbed Dolly Haze of the stable family life to which every child is entitled and having stolen her childhood for his selfish pleasures. He must kill Quilty, his double, to destroy the evil side of his nature. His confession, far from being pornography, is an attempt at a moral cleansing and illustrates the healing power of art.
This double-edged approach can also be seen in Nabokov’s treatment of his adopted country. He satirizes the vulgar, commercialized side of American life through Lolita’s love of junk food, trashy movies, and bland popular singers. Humbert writes of Lolita, “She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.” Nabokov makes fun of such topics as American progressive education: “What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life,” says Miss Pratt. Humbert is more amused at than appalled by these excesses and sincerely loves the American landscape, the West in particular. Lolita was partially inspired by the summer trips Nabokov and his wife took over several years through forty-six U.S. states in pursuit of rare butterflies (the writer was also a prominent lepidopterist). The novel is a comic valentine to “the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country.”
Further Reading
Bloom, Harold, ed. Lolita . Edgemont, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1993. Collection of nine essays addresses such topics as the effect of America on Humbert, necrophilia, the novel’s attacks on Sigmund Freud, its parodic elements, and Nabokov’s treatment of women.
Connolly, Julian W., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Collection of essays offers a good introduction to Nabokov’s life and writings. Topics addressed include Nabokov as a storyteller, a Russian writer, a modernist, and a poet; also covered are his transition to writing in English and the reception of Lolita .
De la Durantaye, Leland. Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. Focuses on Lolita but also looks at some of Nabokov’s other works to discuss the ethics of art in Nabokov’s fiction. Asserts that although some readers find Nabokov to be cruel, his works contain a moral message—albeit one that is skillfully hidden.
Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov . 3d ed. New York: Crown, 1986. Critical biography recounts the events of Nabokov’s life and places his works within personal and historical context. Includes discussion of Lolita , Pale Fire , The Gift , and other works.
Grayson, Jane, Arnold B. McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer, eds. Nabokov’s World: Reading Nabokov . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
_______. Nabokov’s World: The Shape of Nabokov’s World . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Two-volume collection of essays written by an international group of Nabokov scholars provides comprehensive discussion of his work. Presents analyses of individual novels, including Lolita , as well as coverage of topics such as intertextuality in Nabokov’s works and the literary reception of his writings.
Maddox, Lucy. Nabokov’s Novels in English . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. Interprets Lolita as an anatomy of an obsession, with Humbert romanticizing Lolita and America and discovering that both are flawed yet still endearing.
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated “Lolita.” Edited by Alfred Appel, Jr. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Presents the text of the novel accompanied by notes explaining the allusions and translating the French passages, with occasional comments by Nabokov. Also offers an informative editor’s introduction.
Pifer, Ellen, ed. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”: A Casebook . New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. An interview with Nabokov and a collection of essays provide a range of approaches to the reading of Lolita , including discussions of the novel and the art of persuasion, the Americanization of Humbert Humbert, and Lolita and the poetry of advertising.
Vickers, Graham. Chasing “Lolita”: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All over Again . Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008. Analyzes the sources of the Lolita character, the impact of the novel, and misunderstandings surrounding the character and the work. Examines film, stage, and other adaptations of the novel.
Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Close readings of Nabokov’s works show the power and beauty of his language and the subtlety of his art. Chapter 5 examines the language of Lolita .