Selfish Hum and Poor Lo
Oh Lolita, my Lolita, I have begun to feel for you! Dear Humbert was endearing and charming when his having Lo was but a fantasy. However, what I read in Part Two of Lolita eroded my warm feelings toward Humbert Humbert. How could they not when he admitted to threatening Dolores for sex? “I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent concubine in submission and passable temper,” Humbert informs the reader (148). Not only does he threaten Lo and abuse her lack of knowledge (in terms of what would happen to her if she left him), but their arrangement also denied Dolores a normal life. She is left to using sex as a bargaining chip for human interaction. “Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them…I’ll do anything you want, oh, please” (157). At the end of the novel Humbert separates himself from his solipsism to admit that on their first trip together he knew that he was nothing but body parts to Lo, “not a boy friend, not a glamour man…not even a person at all” (283).
Even with the regretful remark that, “nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her,” I am still unsure as to whether Humbert reached a “moral apotheosis” (283, 5). On one hand he is aware of the pain that he caused her physically, emotionally, and by taking away her chance for a normal life. “It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest” (287). Yet, I am confident that if given the chance Humbert Humbert would do it all again. His inward reflection and confession only comes after Lolita has refused him for the final time. Even in his confession Humbert is all about himself. “[T]here were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it” (285). Well Humbert if it was “hell” for you to know it then Dolores must have been living in a nightmare.
Killing Quilty was also about Humbert. If he had truly reached a moral apotheosis then he could have spent his time doing something more worthy than killing Dolores’s former lover (who no longer had any bearing on her life). Humbert kills Quilty because he is not over the fact that he “sodomized my darling” (quite an example of the pot calling the kettle black!) (295). Not that I didn’t enjoy the scene—Quilty dies in a manner more than tinged with comedy. I am looking forward to hearing what everyone else in the class thinks in terms of Humbert reaching a moral apotheosis.
It was interesting to read the introduction to the documents in Chapter 11. After reading so much about how un-tightened up the Puritans were, or the accepted homosocial world of women, I had almost forgotten my former thinking. It was therefore interesting to read Kinsey’s report from 1948-1953, and women’s responses to it. Judging from both it seems that there was a large gap between the sexual discourse of the era, and what went on in private. I applaud Kinsey for being spot on in terms of how women prefer to reach orgasm.
Thinking about Kinsey’s report I have just realized that there is no mention of Lolita’s sexual pleasure in the novel. The reader cannot expect her to have received it from Humbert, but I wonder as to whether she was ever able to achieve orgasm from Clare Quilty or Richard Schiller. It never occurred to me forthright that Humbert ruined Lo sexually, as well.
Tags: Humbert, incest, Lolita, moral apotheosis, Quilty
