Sexuality and American Culture 2011

It’s a funny coincidence that this week’s readings feature Joe, a gay Mormon, and outsports.com just posted an essay by a gay ex-Mormon volleyball coach. Like Joe, she thought getting married would fix her homosexuality. Also like Joe, she tried to escape the “Mormon bubble,” by going to college at UCLA. Although she moved back to Utah to try to live in the closet, she ultimately fell in love with a woman, left her husband, and moved to California start a new life with her girlfriend.

Joe’s lack of a similar happy ending is all the more striking when compared to the other characters in Angels in America. Harper gets to escape, “go exploring” (Perestroika, Act 5, Scene 9), Louis, Prior, Belize and Hannah get the “more life” blessing of the epilogue, and even Roy gets to carry on in all his corrupt glory representing the “King of the Universe” (Act 5, Scene 7) in his abandonment lawsuit. Joe certainly isn’t as nasty a character as Roy, and I don’t even think what he did to Harper is much worse than what Louis did to Prior. So why does he get the short end of the stick?

The last time we see Joe, Harper slaps him and asks him for his credit card. He pathetically begs her to call, even after using his marriage to her to live a lie and then deserting her to spend a month in bed with Louis. Joe, with one foot in the gay community (“Louis…I am in love with you” – Act 3, Scene 3) but unwilling or unable to give up his fantasy of having a “normal,” straight family with Harper (“I don’t know what will happen to me without you…I have done things, I’m ashamed. But I have changed. I don’t know how yet, but…Please, please don’t leave me now” – Act 5, Scene 9), ultimately can have neither.

What’s even more interesting to me, however, in light of Kath Weston’s essay, “Gay Families as ‘The Families We Choose'” is the relationship between Joe and Roy. For the majority of the two plays, the relationship has a nonerotic, father-son dynamic. But, in an example of what Weston describes a “family-centered discourse that bridged the erotic and the nonerotic” in Act 5, Scene 4, Roy’s ghost kisses Joe. This puts their relationship right in the center of Foucault’s discussion of incest in the deployments of alliance and sexuality.

According to Foucault, “The family, in its contemporary form…ensures the production of a sexuality that is not homogenous with the privileges of alliance;” additionally, “its role is to anchor sexuality and provide it with permanent support” (108). This is apparent in the “chosen families” Weston discusses in general, and in Roy and Joe’s relationship, in particular. Their kiss, incestuous as it is within a father-son relationship, breaks the rules of the traditional system of alliance. Incest “is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden in the family insofar as the latter functions as a deployment of alliance; but it is also a thing that is continuously demanded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement” (Foucault 109).

If gay relationships within the community function as kinship networks (as Weston argues), but without the prohibition against incest, they are doing so outside of the deployment of alliance. Could this be one of the reasons the gay community earned a reputation for being immoral and promiscuous, especially when compared to heterosexual society, which is still constrained within the rules of alliance?

To start off, I accidentally read the essay on the Tuskegee study before reading the other two. It was very informative and a fine addition to the context with which I understood the primary source readings. In this weeks readings, I found my focus clearly on the alliance and kinship relationships in both Angels in America and the second essay. Of course, it is also evident in the other readings, but I found there to be a prominent relationship with the Weston essay and Kushner’s second part.

First of all, in both the parts of Angels in America, the technical blocking in the play lends itself to a blurred perception of the lives of the characters, and the overlap and intermingling of characters, which becomes more pronounced in Perestroika, highlights the ideas in “Families We Choose.” In the essay, Weston talks about how some people in the gay “community” (I put this in quotations because of the lengthy discussion of the application of the word) identify with their blood-relatives, while others do not. Subsequently, those who are related biologically may or may not be considered family. This consideration translates into the relationship Joe has with his mother throughout Angels in America, through the complex inferences about Joe’s past, but also the evolution of Ms. Pitt once she joins the characters in New York. The supportive role she takes on with both Harper and Prior illustrate this. As an in-law, she is a traditional extension of Harper’s family, but with her son’s departure from the marriage, she takes on a different kind of maternal role; one that is not compulsory. With Prior, she also takes on a somewhat maternal role, comforting and staying with Prior through his vision and sickness.

Another aspect of this is the overlap in actors and characters. Because actors in the performance play more than one role, they cement the theme of continuity between people. With Belize as Harper’s travel agent, and all the characters save Prior playing the angels, and Prior’s nurse also playing the angel, the play itself reflects the sameness among different people, and the roles that they may play in one anothers lives.

The idea of the chosen family comprised of lovers, friends, children, and myriad other people, whether they are loved dearly or not (500), is also illustrated in the last scene. With all the characters sitting around the statue Bethesda Fountain, the audience sees the total package of connected people. Though Louis and Belize have some tension (both also past lovers of Prior), they remain his family, brought together through time and suffering. Weston mentions how chosen families would sometimes disintegrate after tragedy, and how others would prevail to be stronger (501).

The scenes with references to the Ramble in Central Park were also interesting to me, when comparing them with the essay on the debate over the bathhouses. It is certainly a difficult undertaking to attempt to regulate the sexual behavior of people in the public setting, and the private is impossible, without question. The uncertain benefits of closing the bathhouses in San Fransisco, and the uncorroborated ties between attendance and contracting HIV/AIDS is a reminder of that difficulty. The question then is in the worth or value of the pursuit to do so, and whether the ends justify the means. A thoroughly heated debate, especially because of the divide within the institutions making the “final decision.” The Ramble was well-known as a meeting place in NYC for people to meet and engage in activities with one another, or for people to go see said activities taking place (as Joe mentions when he explains where he goes watching/walking). The overlap between individual liberty and the public forum is one that is continuously mired in contention and precariousness. There were a number of references to the libertarian point of view, which I think is interesting, as it has not been a prominent one in the American psyche since the rise of neo-conservatism. The rise of importance in this culture of social issues in the political forum has also muddied the ability to differentiate between discourses, and has been a platform where there is a divide within one or another. This divisive tendency coincides with the Deployment of Sexuality and the blurred ideas of family. It seems that within the great endeavor to shake oneself clean of the conventional “values” and “morals,” be it conscious or not, there is socially and culturally a lack of clarity in what direction the divergence is moving. This lack of understanding creates the need for a backlash and a clinging to the traditions of yesteryear, be they useful to the population or not. I digress…

In both “Angels in America Part two: Perestroika” and the essay by Bayer, we are given the complexity of coping with a disease that blurs the boundaries between personal freedom and state obligation, separation and community, and ultimately, the freedom to live and a dignified death. Compared to syphilis in the Piess introductory paragraphs, AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease inherently carries a host of symbols, stereotypes, and public health concerns. We are able to witness a deployment of sexuality to cope with these very symbols and stereotypes through social workers, doctors, researchers, lawyers, and political activists all trying to understand and in turn shaping what it means to be “infected” with AIDS. How one tackles the rapidly growing “problem” is a reflection of the power relations that proliferate within this controversial subject.

Bayer’s essay on the bathhouses in San Francisco focuses on the sensitive topic of personal freedom and state intervention. However, Bayer’s essay penetrates the surface level of the oversimplified “public health” vs. “gay liberation community,” and reveals to the reader the extremely complex and sometimes ambiguous intentions of those that want to create awareness for public health while preserving individual freedom and happiness. Bayer goes on to investigate a range of parties and individuals who all had different ways of seeing the situation, including Larry Littlejohn, a prominent gay figure who surprisingly fought for the closure of public bathhouses. Larry Littlejohn, as the essay states, believed that the educational programs ran by the city were ineffective. By using the evidence of the city’s previous failures of increasing the use of seat belts or decreasing drunk driving, Littlejohn wanted to transform the usual “passive educational” route of government intervention to one that draws “ a sharp distinction between public settings and the homes” (475) in order to impose regulations and rules of conduct that can possibly protect one’s personal health. Where the gay community, who saw the closure of the bathhouses as a violation to their right to engage in sex, saw Littlejohn’s actions as a “betrayal,” Littlejohn defended himself by saying: “I care more for my gay brothers. I care enough to speak out even if that should make me unpopular with some persons” (475).

On the other side, one would be just as shocked to find that public officials such as director of department of health Silverman represented those that did feel the closure of bathhouses was necessary. Silverman wanted to create a trust and understanding between the gay community with the state, and by backing an approach that stressed education, awareness and choice, Silverman was able to “win for him the admiration of most politically vocal elements in the gay community” (473). Bathhouse owners also joined in, and to support their case to preserve the running of bathhouses, included “declarations from epidemiologists, public health officials, physicians associated with the care of AIDS patients and the defense of gay rights, as well as a social historian” (481). The argument that the closing of bathhouses would not necessarily prevent or reduce the prevalence of aids, but instead harmfully act as a symbolic violation of personal freedom became an argument that clearly shows the deployment of sexuality and institutions it borrows justification from in order to legitimize itself. The complexity of the AIDS situation is reminiscent of the many facets of the deployment of sexuality suggested by Foucault, intermixing not only the much-discussed pyschiatrization of perverse pleasure, but the socialization of procreative behavior as well.

The ways in which characters cope with AIDS in Angels in America show not only the complexity of the response carried by the government or by the heterosexual community to “contain” or “cure” the problem, but the conflicts that arise within the homosexual community. From the deep hate between Roy Cohn and Belize, Louis, and the Gay community in general, the notions of the “one homosexual community,” is shattered immediately. Within the community, factors such as religion and faith, moral attitudes, and even job occupation or social standing all play a central role in determining how individuals accept the reality of AIDS, and the stereotypes the disease attaches to one’s personal identity and self-image. In the case of Roy, the prominent lawyer, AIDS serves as a brutal reminder that he, in the eyes of the public, is seen as a “homosexual.” Roy, in his monologue to the doctor, describes the way in which he has shaped his identity in order to account for this discrepancy, between his activity and his identity:
“On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”… Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order… To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. A homosexual is someone…who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me? No. I have clout. Lots. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.

As Roy Cohn sees it, homosexual is not merely a categorization of sexual preference, but social standing. The AIDS epidemic, as shown in Bayer’s essay and Angels in America, forces the reflection and solidification of identities, and ironically also generates the proliferation of more diverse institutions to help assess and shape, and possibly confuse the very solidification of identity as well.

To me, Sula is the only work so far that I believe can be analyzed beside all the other works we’ve read and examined thus far, plus the readings. The Scarlet Letter, like another student previously mentioned, is ripe with parallels to Sula in regards to the perception of adultery, sensuality, sexuality, child-rearing, and more. The essay about Addie and Rebecca and their complex, changing relationship recalled to me the vast differences between the ways in which Sula and Nel both handled growing up, sex, marriage, and family. Lastly, the article on the families, marriages and sexualities of slaves shaped the way I viewed the novel in the end, and reminded me of the origins of the town of Bottom in the first place – land given to a slave by his own, a trick played on him and his future community.

In Hansen’s essay, as I read I found myself continually noting similarities between Addie and Sula. Addie was described in the essay as singular, assertive and contentious, while Sula’s actions proved her to be just that, as well. Addie, throughout the correspondence and the essay as well, is more vocal in regards to her dissenting opinions – just as Sula was vocal in her rebuttals to those in the community who saw her as evil.

In regards to The Scarlet Letter, the most obvious similarities are between the way adultery is handled and perceived within the two communities. In Bottom, Hannah Pearce is known to be able to break up a marriage before it has even really begun, but there is not a great deal of animosity towards Hannah because she has a very sexual “aura”. When it comes to Sula, however, her promiscuity and nonchalance in the face of the norms for sexually active young women, in addition to a slowly building myth that she is a bringer of bad luck, causes the town of Bottom to reject her when she returns in adulthood. Hester is rejected by her community, as well, shunned and outcast, made to literally wear her sin on her outer clothing, but she does maintain a position of importance to the others in regards to her needlework.

Intimacy and sexuality are handled in particular ways in The Scarlet Letter and Sula. The two works both show the prudish side, the ‘normal’ side, represented by the community at large (Bottom, the colony) as well as the more impassioned, seemingly volatile and consequential side by the two protagonists in question. Adultery literally becomes Hester’s identity in The Scarlet Letter, whereas in Sula, adultery is the sin that makes up Sula’s identity to the other residents of the Bottom – that is, they know there is more to her than simply her sleeping with more men than the other women in the town, they know what a strange past she has, but her sexual activity is the lynchpin of people’s critique of her. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester as well as her daughter Pearl possess strange qualities that set them apart from other women in the town and they are described as especially beautiful, fair and powerful. Pearl has a great effect on Dimmesdale, which, although not necessarily sexual or sensual, is worth noting. In Sula, there are three generations of women who have seduced people or the gaze of the community as a whole in different ways: Eva with her missing leg, Hannah with the ebb and flow of her sexual energy and Sula with her temperament and the things she says.

Finally, I’d like to mention some things about this week’s novel that really stuck with me. While a great deal of focus was placed, in Hansen’s essay, on the fact that many individuals had to get permission from their owners to wed, have children or co-habitate, and I know this might be a stretch, but that phenomenon was contrasted in my mind starkly with the fact that Sula and Nel, throughout their whole friendship as young girls, did not ask permission of anyone to do anything. They were fearless together, but incomplete apart. The deep, unending love they had for each other reminded me of the type of friendship described as having taken place in the early 19th century, the type that we struggled to define in class and ultimately decided was rare today. On page 52, Morrison writes that Sula and Nel bonded so intimately and intensely because they were both neither white nor male, and that “freedom and triumph” were forbidden from them – did they bond most over being outsiders, or was it something more organic than that?

I’m also excited to tackle Sula’s description of when people will “love” her – after x has slept with y, after this group has done the unheard of to that group, etc. I have my own thoughts about what Sula meant by this but I’m eager to hear the analysis from the class.

For this week’s reading I was particular interested in the power dynamics between the female and male characters in the Toni Morrison’s novel “Sula,” which is also portrayed in Stevenson’s essay Slave Marriage and Family Relations. Stevenson argues that the though slaves where ultimately under the sovereign of their master, they were able to carve out their own distinct niches of power, create their own social and normative rules and enforce them in a variety of ways. Stevenson goes further to analyze the reasons of marriage, and how different types of marriages—whether it is marriage abroad to marriages held in secret—all have their own advantages of stabilizing and enforcing the dominance of matrifocality in slave society.

In “Sula,” we are familiarized with the power of seduction of through a generation of women—from Eva to her attention-grabbing leg, to the promiscuous but suave Hannah, to eventually Sula who later not only sleeps with Nel’s husband but many husband and men. However this seduction, which may climax at sex, never results in any intention for procreation or social commitment. The reader realizes that the flirting and lovemaking of Hannah is only for a physical desire when Morrison writes: “Hannah was fastidious about whom she slept with. She would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with someone implied for her measure of trust and definite commitment” 44. The lack of social commitment is also evident in Sula’s affair with Nel’s husband, where Sula disagrees with the gravity of the affair and responds to Nel: “I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it? The whimsical seduction may be related to what Stevenson describes as a way for a person under slave rule to control their own domestic life. Stevenstone states that: “one of the most compelling examples of slave choice and its impact on slave marital structures and relations is that…men and women not only ‘understood’ poloygynous marital relations, but sought them out…slaves adopted a variety of marriage and family styles and that they were comfortable with that variety” (164).

The beginning of the novel clearly shows the ways in which Sula and Nel start realizing their sexual power. Stevenson alludes to the very fact of girls realizing their own sexuality: “As girls grew older, it was acceptable for them to become more aware of the significance and value of their sexual power, to realize that women, through their sexuality, provided great service to their families and communities… a young women should suggest the sensuality and immortally that she held…a single women’s dress, hair, walk, dance, and language could and sometimes were suppesd to be sexually suggestive” (167). This realization of their own sexuality, as noted by Sula when she and Nel walk down to the ice cream show even though it is “too cold to have icecream” to be subjected to the gaze of men, is similar to Dolores Haze’s realization of the fluidity in power relations between her and Humbert Humbert by using her sexuality as a lever. The realization of this power relations that allows them to “transcend” or perform a “reverse discourse” becomes essential in understanding why some females like Sula utilizes this power for self-serving reasons, while characters like Nel tries to fulfill already created roles. Where Sula tries to defy categorization, she still falls victim to the wanting to “possess” another man, eventually compelling Ajax to leave her.

The complexity of slave marriages and slave relations demonstrated in “Sula” is evident in the ambiguity of relationships in the novel. The poloygynous relationships reveal the desire for fluidity of power among female and male, and their own spontaneous creation of hierarchy, familial structure, and sexual power. The coming of age in female slaves mark the period of the realization of a power structure which not only allows but encourages the use of sexual identity to improve the conditions of ones domestic and social life.

In reading Sula, I found some similarities, or parallels, with The Scarlett Letter. The most prominent was the description of the elaborate dress that was sown for the funeral in New Orleans, which was looked upon with mocking disdain by those living in the bottom, akin to Hester Prynn’s. The alternate connection with the dress theme was the Red Dress dream that Hannah had, which culminated in her death. Loosely interpreted, it reminded me of the theme of death in The Scarlet Letter- the death of Hester in terms of her becoming a pariah, and then later the death of that identity. I understand that perhaps those interpretations could be challenged because of their loose affiliation, but to me they made some sense. I also found a parallel in the character named Pearl, who marries at a young age and follows all the social conventions. In some ways this is diametrically opposed to the character Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, with her great reflection of sin and societal difference, but it also follows the same path of Pearl moving away at a relatively young age into some conventional to marry. Perhaps these themes were intentional, maybe not.

In connection with the other readings this week, there was a broad context given for the lives of African Americans; the complexity of social convention and familial structure can be seen in a Foucaultian (sp?) lens, given the discussion of the kinship style of the family, but also the broad definitions of family. Though these variations on the family do not follow the same time line, and in some ways are in opposition, the matriarchy-based families and polygamous relationships are a part of the entire construct. I found it interesting, that the phenomenon of the matriarch functions within a larger patriarchy. It seems to function not only as a construct to promote the individuality of women as slaves, but also in retaliation to the overall privilege of the male gender. Women who objected to and retaliated against the advances of unwanted male attention were seen as heroic; this cannot be attributed solely to the familial structure. Due to the discussion of womens inability to produce children because of the workload they endured, it cannot be assumed that sex would always produce children. This retaliation thus has larger implications- not only in terms of those discussed, as one to retain a sense of community and choice, but also to deny the assumed rights of men over women. I found this to be an interesting and under-analyzed part of life.

In conjunction with Sula, the readings form a base context in which to view the two opposing family lives described. One clearly is an example of female-headed life, and the other a more socially conventional and religiously bound home. However, the same larger rules of society apply to the two girls growing up in The Bottom- they simply react differently to said rules. Going into an analysis of the death of Chicken Little would not be of service to this point, Morrison does enough to imply the effects of the event and the context around it. However, the reaction of Sula and Nel throughout their lives, incorporating this event into it, is an exploration that is very complex. They grow up with a shared mind in some ways, however, Nel demures to what her life is “supposed” to be like, at the wishes of her mother, regardless of her true nature, though she eventually comes around after Sula’s death to that realization, while Sula lives her life in a conscious opposition to it. She, as a character and as a signifier of a cultural backlash, embodies the notion that one cannot separate themselves from the basic structure. Her participation in “a respectable life” or not is how she is viewed, regardless of the larger emotional and moral ambiguity. Her rejection of the conventional life becomes her identity and governs how she is viewed by those in different strata of her community.

For the moment I am not going to go into my analysis on the relationship between Addie and Rebecca, because it has such a large context; this lens of African American life and the surrounding construct, but also that of Victorian Era friendships between women. I would however like to discuss it in class because I think it serves as a bridge between the seemingly unrelated racial worlds.

These are splendid responses that will engender a great discussion of this complex, difficult, pleasurable and painful novel. The game-playing theme is an apt one for entry, so in class let’s start with it. We talked last week about the novel’s wordplay and Ariana has done a good job of highlighting some of the elements that, as she says, offer readers a challenge to stick with the second half, despite its slower pace and drawn out plot. For everyone, think about how the game playing ties in with the detective story that ultimately illuminates why HH is in jail writing this “confession.”

A note to all: be sure to place your names on your entries and have them registered on the sidebar. I think it is Savannah’s entry that dives into the psychological state that HH has come to by the time he has carried out the murder and is in jail for it. That will take us into the spinning process that unfolds, moving from his initial obsessiveness to his attempts to control Delores, to his paranoia that proves to be real, his delving into questions of fate and determinism as cause and excuse (and as the post suggests, what does it say about us as readers to have gone along with him at stages.

Sami has provided a strong grounding for the ways in which the documents from Peiss provide the context for the novel. As she astutely points out, the famous and for some infamous Kinsey report and the McCarthy hearings and the publication of Lolita all take place in the same time period. Grasping this allows us to better understand Nabokov’s creations/creatures/characters as well as Foucault’s arguments about the deployment of sexuality and its networks of power relations that intertwine perversity, promiscuity, and hysteria with normality, stability, and responsibility.

The other unnamed post (I think by Richard) focuses insightfully on the fluid power relations between HH and Delores, pointing out her place of resistance (reverse discourse) and efforts to gain control over her situation and Humbert. Also of importance for our discussion is the status of truth that this post brings up. If, as it states, “Truth” does not exist in HH’s accounts, does it reside in some form in and through the novel? A similar question emerges about love, which ties in with HH’s “poor truth.”

Thanks to all of you for these thoughtful and richly suggestive responses to the novel.

I have to admit, finishing Lolita often felt like a chore. I found the pace painfully slow, and Humbert’s omphaloskeptical narration boring and annoying. I wonder if this was another Nabokovian attempt to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. Just as the offending subject matter and the lack of graphic sex scenes serve to weed out readers who would take the book too literally or skim it looking for erotica, Humbert’s writing style is yet another obstacle in the path of the casual reader.

The only thing that kept me reading to the end was Nabokov’s game of authorial hide-and-seek. My waning interest in the subject matter of the book became less significant as I appreciated more coincidences and Nabokov’s clever wordplay. I was proud of myself if I noticed something before I read the annotation pointing it out, and even if I wasn’t a worthy opponent without the help of the annotations, seeing the game unfold between Nabokov and the annotator (Alfred Appel) was as exciting as watching any other kind of sporting event.

According to Appel, Nabokov appears “everywhere in the texture but never in the text” (Appel 425). For example, when Humbert leaves Lolita on the tennis court to take a fabricated call from “Birdsley,” he sees her through the window playing doubles against Bill and Fay (Nabokov 235). Of course, her partner is Humbert’s ‘double,’ Quilty. The pun inherent in this situation, a doppelganger playing in a doubles tennis match, could have been engineered only by Nabokov. Additionally, the “sisterly mirror reversal” of the names Melanie Weiss (Black White) and Blanche Schwarzmann (White Blackman) is “a verbal relationship that once again reveals the author’s hand” (Appel 449). Other such verbal relationships include Miss Horn and Miss Cole, whose names Lolita charmingly transposes and combines to form “cornhole,” a vulgar term for anal sex (Nabokov 195). Miss Lester and Miss Fabian have a similar relationship.

The Ramsdale “class list” could more accurately be described as a “cast list” of minute cameos throughout the book. For example, the Beales’ father kills Charlotte Haze on p. 98, the Miranda twins are mentioned again on p. 136, Stella Fantasia gets married on p. 289, Louise Windmuller appears on p. 4, her father on p. 290, and of course, Humbert refers to McFate numerous times throughout the narrative (Appel 361-2). ‘Coincidentally,’ the number 342 is the address of the Haze house, the room in The Enchanted Hunters hotel where Humbert and Lolita have sex, and the total number of motels they stay in during their first year on the road. The numbers of Quilty’s fake license plates all add up to 52, which is the number of weeks Humbert and Lolita spend on the road, the number of lines in Humbert’s poem, and the year in which Humebert, Lolita, and Qulity die, 1952.

As we discussed in class, the excerpt from Who’s Who in the Limelight not only represents the characters of Humbert, Lolita, and Quilty, but “prefigures” and “magically mirrors” the novel’s action (Appel xxviii, xxx). One of the many examples is The Murdered Playwright, a play attributed to Quilty in Who’s Who, that foreshadows Humbert’s actual murder of Quilty. Quilty is also the playwright of The Strange Mushroom, which Humbert refers to as “the ingenious play staged for me” (Nabokov 305).

Nabokov subtly reveals his presence and omnipotence with games of clever wordplay and unlikely coincidences, which draw a careful reader more deeply into the book by issuing a challenge s/he can’t refuse. The reader gets the satisfaction of knowing s/he is “getting it,” unlike the more pedestrian readers who give up on the book because of its subject matter, lack of smut, or writing style.

Even after thinking about it for the past few days, I’m struggling to come with up connections between Lolita and the readings in Major Problems, and want to have this up tonight so I’m going to try and provide analysis in a different way and edit the post later if I can form a cohesive argument for something.

Part Two was a more intensive reading assignment for me than last week’s. I think I loved Part One of Lolita so much because of the word play, puns, double talk, descriptive and unusual narrative (unusual in the sense of descriptions, for one), and my appreciation for that style carried through to the last page of Part One. However, in Part Two, the upsetting and disturbing nature of HH’s recollections of a very, very different Lolita couldn’t be shadowed by Nabakov’s great writing. As Sami mentioned in her post, Humbert’s vision, experience and memory of a stable, acceptable, promising run-away life with Lolita begins to crack and he begins to recollect more disturbing scenes from their time together. In Chapter 32 in particular, Nabakov allows us to see more elements of the story and of HH’s character in one chapter than in any previous chapter. HH’s passion, regret, insanity, psychology, realizations and more are all thrown together in a few short pages and suddenly, instead of including a sincere, thoughtful and consequently upsetting anecdote into one scene, the entire scene was an outburst of uncensored admissions and pleas from HH’s innermost thoughts – shocking and hurtful and revealing though they might be.

I wonder what I can tease out from the fact that Part 2 is more disturbing to me than Part 1 because of both HH’s gradually reduced grasp on reality as he writes as well as the newfound information we gain regarding Lolita’s status during their years together. What does it say about Nabakov as a writer that HH’s actions and thoughts were as-good-as excused in my head for the first half of the novel, simply because the writing made it easy for me to make that so? And moreso, what does it say about me?

In Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humber Humbert states that: “I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games” (233). This statement is essential in helping the reader understand not only the mentality of the characters within the book, but how we should read the book as well.

In the first part of “Lolita”, it is was evident that Humber Humbert is in control of the situation. He reveals to the reader the lengths he goes to conceal his sexual tendencies by his made-up identities, the precautions while reserving bedrooms, and even creating stories to compel Dolly to keep quiet about their relationship. However, It is clear when the power relation between Lolita and H.H switches in the second part of the book. When Lolita realizes that she has become an obligation to H.H, and this obligation is mutual (that she has the power to uncover or possibly report his sexual tendencies) she takes advantage of it. H.H writes that “her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition that she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty one-cents at the start of the Beardsley era—and went up to one dollar five before its end” (184). It is clear that Lolita is already using her “basic obligations” as a leverage to gain power for herself—in this example monetary freedom. H.H writes later that he was actually afraid that Lolita may be accumulating money to run away—transforming the monetary freedom into personal freedom. We see early on how Lolita is using what Foucault would analyze as “reverse discourse.”

It is clear that Lolita begins to become more and more manipulative, almost conniving. Her random disappearances and talks to strangers, along with H.H’s growing insecurity allows Lolita to assume the character of the “witch.” She is no longer the weak, innocent creature, the nymph, she is now the one who can control and even cast spells of reality on others. H.H alludes to this spellcasting as acting, where he states that: “by permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit…like a hypnotic subject or performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated version of infantile make-believe” (230). Lolita’s power to manipulate H.H’s reality consciously or unconsciously through her acts makes it even more confusing for the reader to assess whether H.H is hallucinating, extremely distressed, or just falling directly into Lolita’s “traps.” H.H is no longer the one in control of Lolita’s future—it seems that the opposite has became true. H.H states that: “I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy” (222).

The complexity that arises after the rules of the game between H.H and Lolita changes due to Lolita’s maturing makes the reader question the underlying principles of H.H’s reliability as a narrator. Having discussed this in class, it is not the reliability of H.H that determines the story. Instead, it is the active process in which the reader must look through the lense of the narration in order to arrive at our own perspective. We, the reader, must sift through H.H’s accounts to understand that “Truth” does not exist. There is no one story, for Truth is a compilation of many details, accounts and realities. No one truth can ever determine the love between H.H and Dolly, no one truth can explain H.H’s lack of joy after he murders Quilty, and no one truth, as Nabokov makes extremely clear, can define an individual. Because Lolita matures to become an active individual and not merely a variable that H.H can manipulate, the reader is suddenly aware of H.H’s lack of consistency, lack of reliability, and overwhelming vulnerability. Towards the end when Lolita turns down H.H’s offer to leave with him, and says she would rather go back to Cue, H.H mentally supplies her words to say “He broke my heart. You merely broke my life” (279). Breaking of the heart implies that she loved Cue as well, and this mutual relationship was severed by a participant. Breaking someone’s life may allude to H.H’s almost forceful actions against her, his “modernist” mentality of conserving and preserving Dolly as his Lolita forever.

H.H may have finally realized only after seeing Lolita, pregnant with a child, that he is in love with Lolita not only because she is this static concept, as Sami describes in her post, and as this one, ultimate cluster of idea or “Truth,” but he loves her and will always love her for who she is. H.H writes: “She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past…but thank God it was not that echo alone that I Worshiped…I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almost, still Carmencita, still mine.” (278). We can see that H.H has come to realize and is grateful, that he does not only love Lolita for the static qualities. However, he is still clinging on to what he refers to as his “poor truth,” and still refers to the timeless qualities that Dolly will always have, even when she is beyond her years of Lolita. This contradiction may give us insight to the last sentences of the novel, in which H.H writes: “ I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, My Lolita” (309). Maybe the love that H.H has for Lolita is just the reflection of his obsession with youth, with immortality, and the game of life he wants to outplay.