Monday, December 18, 2017

Interpretations of Nabokov's "Lolita"

My book club’s selection for November 2017 was Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. It recounts the story of a love affair between a forty year old male, Humbert, and Lolita, a thirteen year old girl. Many readers may be inclined to condemn Humbert for exploiting and abusing Lolita, but others will recognize that their relationship is actually complex, contradictory, and nuanced and therefore not reducible to single dimensional and morally charged interpretations.



Their fates aligned in 1947, when Humbert traveled to America to collect the estate of a deceased relative. The house he planned to lodge in unexpectedly burned down, an event which led him to Lolita’s household.  The latter’s God-fearing and attractive mother, Charlotte, rented Humbert a room and, shortly after, fell in love with him, perhaps because Humbert was a good looking, charming, youthful, and multi-lingual European scholar and writer. Under different circumstances, they might have made a good couple, but Humbert has a morbid attraction to “nymphets”, which are defined as girls in the pubescent phase of development, that brief period when the budding of their womanhood commences. “Nymphets”, according to Humbert’s voice in Lolita, also exude health, precociousness, vibrancy, agility, and maturity. Thus not all girls at this stage of development fit the bill; nymphets are a distinct category even among their peers. 

When Charlotte expresses her love to Humbert, he is faced with the choice of marrying her or leaving the household. He chooses the former because of the overriding desire to remain close to Charlotte’s daughter. For several months after the wedding, he fulfills his conjugal duties with Charlotte while secretly wanting Lolita, and deals with the resulting internal turmoil by expressing his feelings in a personal diary (which he tries to secure). One day, Charlotte finds his notes and Humbert’s dark secret is revealed. Unsurprisingly, she is outraged and demands he leave immediately, but she dies in a tragic accident shortly after, meaning that now, Humbert is Lolita’s legal guardian and hence in the awkward position of being in love with his step-daughter.

The text makes it clear that Lolita wanted Humbert, even before the tragic death of her mother. When the three lived together, Lolita and Humbert would often play but in ways that were lusty and sensual. In one scene, she is sitting on his lap, and looking at him with anticipating eyes; he could have kissed her right then and there, but did not. After the tragedy, he goes and picks her up at the boarding school, and as they are driving away, she explicitly expresses sexual interest in him; when they embrace, it is she who plants her lips on his. The relationship is consummated shortly after, but the text does not reveal the carnal details. Rather, the emphasis is on the emotional and social aspects of the illicit affair.

Humbert is madly and genuinely in love with Lolita. She does not feel the same; my reading of the text is that her desire for him was brief and superficial, perhaps motivated by a sense of adventure or competition with her mother (with whom she had very frosty relations). The love affair between them occurs while engaging in the all-American pastime of driving around the country, staying in motels, and visiting tourist attractions. During this period, she is unfaithful, which is further evidence that Lolita was in it for the adventure rather than any genuine passion for Humbert. She eventually completely loses interest and runs away. Subsequently, Humbert spends two years searching for her, and at this point descends into madness. Meanwhile, Lolita, a conventional American girl, has begun to build a conventional 1950’s American life—marriage, household, and family. Humbert finds her when she is 17, married, and expecting a child, and, in one of the more contradictory parts of the text, he is still madly in love with her even though she is no longer a nymphet; he even asks Lolita to leave her husband and run away with him, fetus in tow, but she refuses. At this point, one expects a murder-suicide to occur—during his maddening search for her across the country, he behaved in ways that suggest the onset of psychosis: he purchased a gun, became an alcoholic, and befriended outcasts and degenerates. Instead, he gives her over $4000 to fill a hole in her family’s finances (which is probably ten times that in today’s money), and then leaves her house with his tail between his legs, morose and dejected, never to see her again.

As mentioned in the intro, the text is complex and can be read in several ways. One common approach is to project our own contemporary and Western assumptions about sexuality onto the story, namely, that a sexual relationship between a thirteen and forty year old can never be consensual, and is therefore rape, or child abuse, and psychologically traumatic. This morally charged interpretation could lead one to condemn Humbert and see Lolita as a victim. Another interpretation is that she was, at least initially, a willing and enthusiastic participant, meaning that a degree of consent was present; this approach challenges the notion that Humbert is an evil pervert. Those adopting the second interpretation would also consider the fact that had he been born in another civilization or another epoch, his love for an adolescent would not have been objectionable (before the industrial revolution, and in pre-modern Arab and Indian civilizations, marriage between older men and pubescent girls was common). But, as fate would have it, he finds himself in a context and culture—20th century Western civilization—where such practices are forbidden.

Readers will find evidence for both interpretations, and, as my book club discussion showed, may even vehemently disagree about which is correct. Personally, I try to approach texts in a detached manner while understanding the author’s intent. From this perspective, I think the weight of the evidence supports the second interpretation. Nabokov wanted the reader to see the world from Humbert’s perspective while challenging some of the core assumptions about sexuality in modern Western life. One effect is that readers are forced to recognize how fluid and context-specific their beliefs about sexual morality actually are.  Following this reasoning, one might also take account of the fact that only fifty years ago, homosexuality was viewed as pathological and abnormal, even by the scientific community. Yet most Westerners now accept and even embrace the fact that gay people feel love like anyone else. The same logic applies to other sexual practices, such as polygamy, that most Westerners decry as immoral, but which would be deemed fully appropriate in cultures and contexts different from their own. These examples, like the illicit affair between Humbert and Lolita, reveal that our assumptions of sexual morality are not necessarily the result of abstract, detached, and independent moral reasoning. Rather, they are indissolubly tied to things unchosen, particularly the civilization and historical epoch we are born into and socialized by.

When one’s unchosen desires chime with their unchosen cultural and temporal context, it is perhaps much easier to equate one’s own sexual beliefs with universal morality. But mismatches often happen, as Lolita eloquently shows. Humbert finds himself in the unfortunate predicament of living in a civilization that forbids his sexual drives. He tries to escape many times—he goes to the Arctic, enters a stultifying conventional marriage, and leaves Europe for America’s greener pastures, but they only provide a temporary reprieve. When unforeseen circumstances lead him into Lolita’s arms, he finally feels the bliss of quenched desire, but at the cost of madness. Surprisingly, he discovers that he still loves Lolita even when she is no longer a nymphet, opening the possibility for a future relationship with someone closer to his own age and which would be deemed appropriate by his peers and society. His passion and madness for Lolita, it appears, ultimately leads to his redemption.