Lolita Isn't Subtle

Humbert Humbert may be the protagonist, but he's also very much the villain

Content Warning: Discussion of CSA

Lolita. You hear the name, and a certain image appears in your mind. A sexually precocious girl. A seduced older man. A forbidden romance. Perhaps you even picture one of the infamous covers of a child in heart shaped glasses, sucking on a lollipop. The name Lolita is invoked whenever a young woman or girl is involved with an older man - with the implication that she was at least as responsible for the relationship as the man.

The term, of course, comes from Victor Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, infamously described as “the only convincing love story of the century” in a review by Vanity Fair. There’s a defense you’ll hear of Lolita - it’s subtle. Yes, Humbert is a charmer, hiding his crimes in flowery prose and dense metaphor, but read between the lines and it’s there. The novel’s problem is that it’s too subtle, and too many people missed the point, leading the term Lolita to languish beside ugly American and Uncle Tom in the halls of misappropriated literary epithets.

Except it’s not. It’s not about a man seduced by a sexually mature young woman - it’s about a man who kidnaps and rapes a child. And it is not subtle about that fact at all. Humbert Humbert is the narrator and protagonist of the novel - and is very explicitly its villain. Humbert is erudite and articulate, yes - he’s also a liar, a rapist, a pedophile and a murderer. And we are told half of these things by Humbert himself.

The text itself should be immediately suspect - Humbert is not its narrator, recounting events as they happen, but is diegetically its author - within the frame of the novel, the text was written by Humbert while he was in an asylum and then a prison, and later edited by a friend of his lawyer’s after his death. The very first piece of information we receive about Humbert - his name - is a falsehood. The foreword’s (fictional) author, John Ray, Jr, says “its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask - through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow - had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish.” The narrative we are about to read is very much a narrative, controlled by Humbert.

And Humbert admits, very early on, to being a liar. After a stint in an asylum, he says “I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake "primal scenes"; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual predicament.” Humbert is willing to - and apparently rather good at - lying to psychiatrists, and the state of that field in the early 20th century notwithstanding, we shouldn’t assume that he isn’t going to try to lie to us. And there’s another key phrase embedded in this confession: “never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament.” When Humbert tells us the reasons for his attraction to Dolores, we shouldn’t believe him; he’s already said he enjoys lying about it!

Humbert’s desire for a prepubescent child is not new when he meets Dolores - she does not spark within him something that didn’t exist before. At the start of the novel, he regales us with a story of adolescent love (a story which is itself suspect) that allegedly morphed into his lifelong love of what he terms nymphets - girls between the ages of nine and twelve. Dolores herself is twelve - not the fourteen to fifteen she is usually portrayed as in adaptations. Before he immigrates to America, Humbert repeatedly attempts to find underage girls to have sex with - and he does eventually visit one underage sex worker, who he is later repulsed by when she displays a newfound confidence that makes her seem more mature. Much later in the novel, after Dolores has escaped him, Humbert says “I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that the shock of losing Lolita cured me of my pederosis.” It was never just Dolores; it was always young girls.

And Dolores is very much a child when Humbert meets her. Any maturity she displays is the maturity of a twelve year old trying to act older than she actually is. Maturity on her part would not, of course, justify Humbert’s actions - the point is that Humbert was under no misapprehension about Dolores’s age or sophistication. She reads comic books and attends a sleepaway camp; Humbert later even complains of her interests being “sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines, and so forth.” Her body is immature as well - Humbert speculates as to whether Dolores has started to menstruate yet. Later, after Humbert has raped and kidnapped her, he finds the thought of her physically maturing repulsive. He has one of his most explicitly monstrous thoughts at this time. As Dolores has aged, Humbert has grown less attracted to her, and is wondering what to do with her - he considers impregnating her with the hopes of her having a daughter who he could rape - and perhaps, eventually, even a granddaughter he could do the same to.

After Humbert and Dolores have sex, Dolores explicitly describes it as rape, saying “you chump […] you revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you've done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man." And while she is described as “smiling sweetly” when she says this, Humbert immediately suspects that her words are meant literally. Dolores is clearly injured - she starts “complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said [Humbert] had torn something inside her.” And he obviously considers what he did rape, given that soon afterwards he threatens her, saying that if he were to be arrested then she would be sent to an orphanage or juvenile detention. 

Dolores proceeds to spend the rest of her time with Humbert making her unhappiness perfectly clear. Their relationship is purely transactional: Humbert bribes her with money when he wants to have sex. He has to constantly watch Dolores for fear that she will escape. Dolores is very aware of his predatory nature during this time, keeping a school friend away from him when she realizes that Humbert is interested in her. Eventually, Dolores does escape him, fleeing with a man who had been following them for some time before ending up married and pregnant in a nameless industrial town (called “Coalmont” in the novel, but admitted by Humbert to not be her actual address).

Then there’s the murders. Humbert thinks about murder a lot, starting with his first marriage in France to a woman named Valeria. When Valeria admits to having an affair and requests a divorce, “Humbert the Terrible deliberated with Humbert the Small whether Humber Humbert should kill her or her lover or both or neither.” After recalling an incident where he remembers “once handling an automatic belonging to a fellow students, in the days (I have not spoken of them, but never mind) when I toyed with the idea of enjoying his little sister, a most diaphanous nymphet with a black hair bow, and then shooting myself,” he decides not to, though he still considers assaulting Valeria or her lover.

And he kills at least one person over the course of the novel - Clare Quilty, a playwright who Dolores escaped to during her sojourn with Humbert. The whole of the novel can be read as Humbert attempting to defend his murder of Quilty; in the denouement, Humbert says “had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.” Which is, at least, a confession of a kind. But the entirety of the novel has featured Humbert trying to downplay what he did to Dolores, and this is arguably more of the same. Even though Quilty abused Dolores as well, Humbert’s murder of him was more of a way to strike back at the man who had taken Dolores away from him rather than punish someone who harmed her. Quilty wasn’t even his original target - initially, he wanted to kill Richard, her fiance, who he believed was the one responsible for her abandoning him.

And Humbert elides the fact that according to Dolores, Quilty was preferable. When he speaks with her at her new home, Dolores says that Quilty “[...] was not a hog. He was a great guy in many respects.” She then proceeds to describe how Quilty, who she refers to as “Cue,” also sexually abused her and other children. She describes how Quilty’s friends were his “slaves” and how Quilty finally kicked her off of the ranch he had taken to her when she refused to participate in creating child pornography. After Dolores describes this story, Humbert proposes that she leave her fiancee, Dick, and run away with him. Dolores demurs, saying she “would sooner go back to Cue.” It raises the question: how much worse were Dolores’s experiences than what Humbert described, if her time at Cue’s ranch, where she was essentially a sex slave, was preferable?

This might not even be the only murder that Humbert commits. Most pivotal is the possibility that he murdered Dolores’ mother, Charlotte. Humbert initially meets Dolores when he rents a room from her mother; Charlotte is clearly rather infatuated with him, and Humbert plays along, as this gives him greater access to Dolores. However, after they marry, Charlotte makes plans to send Dolores to a boarding school. Humbert immediately contemplates murdering her, as he does not believe he will be able to convince her to let Dolores stay without giving away his sexual attraction or upsetting her so much she leaves him. He plans to drown her in a lake on a swimming trip, but decides against it, concluding with a monologue that pedophiles don’t murder - which we know is a lie, and Humbert knows as well, as he will go on to murder Quilty. Later, Charlotte discovers Humbert’s journal, in which he details his contempt for her, his attraction to Dolores and other crimes. He tries to gaslight her, saying “it all your hallucination. You are crazy, Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers were put in by mere chance.” Charlotte does not believe him, and runs from the house, where she is struck by a car. By Humbert’s version of events, he is uninvolved in her death. But Humbert is, by his own admission, a liar, and was just planning on how to murder her. At one point, he describes an incident in which a man beat his wife to death and attempted to hide the murder by faking a car accident; Humbert ends this anecdote by saying “I did better.”

There are, of course, parts of the novel that are more subtle than these examples, undergirding their explicitness. For example, I’ve referred to the titular character as Dolores - because that’s her name. No one except for Humbert ever refers to her as Lolita; Lolita is the idea of her that Humbert has constructed in his head. Humbert even speaks for her, on occasion. After he retrieves her from summer camp, Dolores relates a story of having a sexual encounter with one of the camp owners’ thirteen year old son. At no point does Dolores indicate that this was not consensual, but later, when defending his own actions, Humbert calls the boy a rapist.

And there’s Annabel, the girl who allegedly inspired Humbert’s love of “nymphets.” I don’t think she was real. Humbert describes his prepubescent love affair with a girl around his age, in a hotel by the sea in the south of France. Their love affair is half-consumated but goes interrupted, and Annabel dies, four months later, of typhus. Part of Humbert’s defense of his pedophilia is that it trait he shares with many a great man of letters - men like Dante, Petrarch and Virgil. And though not explicitly named: Edgar Allen Poe, who married his wife when she was thirteen and later wrote a poem, “Annabel Lee,” that takes place in a kingdom by the sea and ends with the death of another Annabel. Humbert is a liar - and with no one left alive to confirm any aspect of this story, one way or the other, why should we assume Annabel existed at all?

Humbert is charming. He’s witty. He’s articulate. He’s still a pedophile, just as many pedophiles in the real world are charming, witty, or articulate. Nabokov, I think, expects you to be able to see through that.

And yet - and yet, there are many who have read this novel and found Humbert sympathetic and his relationship with Dolores aspirational. Why? Both movie adaptations soft focus some aspects of the novel, doing away with Humbert’s narration or parts of his backstory, and as Jamie Loftus notes in her podcast about the book, the 1997 movie seems to have played a key part in the formation of the modern fandom. But the sentiment was always there - take the infamous Vanity Fair quotation, for example, or Nabokov’s publisher’s belief that the book was “not only admirable from the literary point of view, but also might lead to change in social attitudes toward the kind of love described in Lolita.” Neither of these writers had the movies in mind when they said these things - and there was no broader cultural conversation about Lolita at all to influence their words. But they still found Humbert sympathetic because we live in a rape culture, where the words of abusers are believed over the words of victims. Hollywood’s versions of the story are particularly onerous because many people in the film industry simply are a version of Humbert and saw themselves in his narration, but even people who would never contemplate hurting a child themselves are all too willing to defend the innocence someone who did if they are charming and witty enough - as charming and witty, as say, Humbert Humbert.