The most brutal part of the book for me - and it doesn't often seem to be discussed - is how Humbert covers up Dolores' mother's death until after he has sex with her. If Dolores or the camp had known, then none of the rest of the book would have happened. Because of this, if we accept Humbert's account* of the initial encounter, Dolores is tricked into wanting and 'consenting' to sex with Humbert, and after revealing Charlotte's death he is able to blackmail Dolores into allowing him to continue to rape her. Because of our modern doublethink about consent, it's tricky to express the nuance here. The modern understanding is that she wasn't consenting, when the true understanding is that she was consenting, but her consent is irrelevant to the criminality of Humbert's act. Someone with this faulty view of consent would be unable to see how Humbert used Dolores' initial consent to manipulate her, which he would not have been able to do if he had just raped her cold.
*I am accepting Humbert's account of this part as true-in-story, partly because Humbert was already planning to rape her cold, so there's no difference in intent, but mostly because it makes the book better. If this part is taken as false, then the point of the book just becomes "haha, you took the words of a paedophile at face value and became a rape apologist, gotcha!", which is stupid, because none of the characters or events are real, so the book would actually be just "I, Vladimir Nabokov, used my literary genius to trick you into being sad about a rape that never happened".
The most brutal part of the book for me - and it doesn't often seem to be discussed - is how Humbert covers up Dolores' mother's death until after he has sex with her. If Dolores or the camp had known, then none of the rest of the book would have happened. Because of this, if we accept Humbert's account* of the initial encounter, Dolores is tricked into wanting and 'consenting' to sex with Humbert, and after revealing Charlotte's death he is able to blackmail Dolores into allowing him to continue to rape her. Because of our modern doublethink about consent, it's tricky to express the nuance here. The modern understanding is that she wasn't consenting, when the true understanding is that she was consenting, but her consent is irrelevant to the criminality of Humbert's act. Someone with this faulty view of consent would be unable to see how Humbert used Dolores' initial consent to manipulate her, which he would not have been able to do if he had just raped her cold.
*I am accepting Humbert's account of this part as true-in-story, partly because Humbert was already planning to rape her cold, so there's no difference in intent, but mostly because it makes the book better. If this part is taken as false, then the point of the book just becomes "haha, you took the words of a paedophile at face value and became a rape apologist, gotcha!", which is stupid, because none of the characters or events are real, so the book would actually be just "I, Vladimir Nabokov, used my literary genius to trick you into being sad about a rape that never happened".