At first glance, Nabokov’s “Lolita” and the documents we had to read in conjunction had no apparent correlation. “Lolita” is through the perspective of what we would usually call a pedophile; whereas the text in “Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality” was commenting on the formation of heterosexual and homosexual standards and norms. However on closer inspection, we can utilize the historical analytical process used to understand homosexual and heterosexual standards and apply it to how a simplified identity such as “pedophile” can have a much more underlying complexity than the binary forms of “normal” and “abnormal” behavior associated with it.

In Katz’s essay on Heterosexuality, Katz argues that Heterosexuality, though commonly thought as the unchanging universal gold standard of sexuality, is actually a social construct of the late 19th and early 20th century. Katz states that: “the concept of heterosexuality is only one particular historical way of perceiving, categorizing, and imagining the social relations of the sexes” (349 Peiss). This particular historical way of perceiving, over time has become the predominant way of analyzing, but Katz tries to remind us that even though it is the dominant method of categorizing and interpreting sexuality, we should still recognize that it is only one particular method. Katz claims that: “the category heterosexuality continues to be applied uncritically as a universal and analytical tool. Recognizing the time-bound and culturally specific character of the heterosexual category can help us begin to work toward a thoroughly historical view of sex” (349). With a historical approach to how to analyze the formations of categories in sexuality, we are able to follow the ways in which definitions and categories originated and how they were applied to a more broad culture.

Katz continues to argue that there was shift from the Victorian work ethic to the pleasure ethic embodied by consumer culture. Following this cultural movement, Dr. Krafft-Ebing’s Pschopathia Sexualis was translated and published in the United States, where Katz states that: “[Dr. Krafft-Ebing’s definition of heterosexuality as other-sex attraction provided the basis for a revolutionary, modern break with centuries-old procreative standard…[his] heterosexual offered the modern world a new norm that came to dominate our idea of the sexual universe, helping to change it form a mode of human reproduction and engendering to a mode of pleasure” (352). The offering of a new norm rather than an imposition is important here, since Katz towards the end clarifies that it is: “important to affirm that heterosexuality (and homosexuality) came into existence before it was named and thought about. The formulation of the heterosexual idea did not create a heterosexual experience or behavior…but the titling and envisioning of heterosexuality did play an important role in consolidating the construction of the heterosexual’s social existence.” (355). The gradual change towards consumer culture, with the availability of categories that were continually being reassessed and refined by the medical field all helped popularize the normative connotation of heterosexual and homosexual behavior.

In Lolita, we are thrown into the perspective of Humbert Humbert who struggles to simultaneously differentiate and reconcile his internal and insatiable hunger for nymphets, all the while participating in society as a moral character. This back and forth blurs the boundaries between what the reader would associate with “normative” behavior and “abnormal” behavior. Through Humbert’s perspective, we are shown the full complexities of his identity, and his struggle to construct or compromise it while being barraged by social norms.
Even from the very beginning, Humbert attempts but fails to explain to the reader what a nymphet is. It seems that Humbert already understands that his extremely figurative and personal description makes it almost impossible for a reader to distinguish a nymphet, as he states: “A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessary choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy…in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs…the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power” (17). This ambiguous criteria—though a criteria—makes it difficult to quickly judge Humbert as a “pedophile” or a “pervert” or any definition commonly associated as abnormal by societies standard. The reader’s struggle to understand Humbert almost becomes an obsession to understand to understand, and this obsessive quality of categorizing and judging is demonstrated by Humbert’s consciousness of how others tries to categorize him: “one moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations and psuedolibidoes…other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children” (18).

Humbert’s obviously complex situation is even more confusing when we realize that Humber may be projecting qualities of nymphet onto young girls when he tries to describe his love for Lolita: “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever’ but I also knew she would not forever be Lolita…the “forever” refereed only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood” (65). Here, it is important to remember Katz statement, that though labels and categories may help us understand the possibilities of prepackaged values and behavior that an individual has access to, it does not limit an individual to them. Humbert demonstrates one who is aware and acts within society’s norms, but also has definitions he must solve for himself not covered by the “normative definitions.”

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