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.
No comments:
Post a Comment