Lolita Part 1
Defining the sexuality of children has long been a part of civilized society. Foucault’s idea of the strategy “pedagogization of children’s sexuality” is that it is founded on the belief that children are highly sexually beings, that need to be constantly monitored an controlled or they will explore and use their bodies in unacceptable ways. It involves careful attention and rules to limit un-surveilled time alone and to scrutinize time with other children. Foucault cites this a power strategy as a new way of asserting power.
When monarchies were prevalent the primary power held by the sovereign was condemning some one to death. With a move into Scientia Sexualis, power also asserts itself in new ways. The focus is biopower. Instead of only being concerned with the black and whiteness of some one’s final fate, power is now infiltrating the gray areas, to clarify them and to make the “the basic biological features of the human species [become] the object of a political strategy” (quoted from Foucault online). This transition seems to account for Humphrey’s meticulous record of his sins, a closer eye on sex makes it impossible for him to consummate his desire and necessary for him to have an outlet, needed for such a deluge of passion. I feel like this is how pedophilia is always depicted — Humbert’s sexual desire for little girls is always forefront in his mind, overwhelming and constantly affecting him. Foucault does believe that desire is essentially a product of social constructions, but his criticism is that we only see a juridico-discursive notion of power – where the law tells us no and than we desire what we can’t have – when it is in fact more complex than that, because power isn’t only working in a single proclamation of law. But I think it is possible to look at the intensity of Humbert’s desire as a product of the social constructions that tell him he cannot have what he wants.
Humbert Humbert feels this biopower asserting itself over him as a child, with his first love Annabel. In his descriptions of their time at the beach he alludes to being watched, being unable to consummate. His desire for young girls stems from this thwarted love, made even more titillating for being thwarted several times – “All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do” (Nabokov).
Here Humbert is consciously aware of the increased surveillance on his person, because of his class, versus “slum children” who were allowed freedom, and along with that an opportunity to be free with their bodies. This is interesting because it highlights the hypocrisy of the prevalent sexual dialogue: the difference between the proper and approved prudish attitude and the way real people lived. Being aware of this divergence may have heightened Humbert’s desire. But I found the language used in describing the way the watchful family acted was particularly telling: “One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family..” and later, when he decribes their first tryst: “there came from the house hermother’s voice calling her, with a rising frantic note–and Dr. Cooper ponderously limped out into the garden” (Nabokov). There is panic and a kind of eagle-eyed paranoia in the tones of the family descriptions that one associates with danger. Its not a simple transgression – a stolen trinket that gets a child a beating – there’s true fear on the part of the parents. And children pick up on these tones, the tones that tell them what their parents attribute the most import to. The constant wary attention of adults probably gave his romance with Annabel a dark, fleeting edge of fascination that contributed heavily to his fixation.
But besides the “biopower” present in Humbert’s childhood I thought Humbert also managed to utilize biopower to his own ends, to justify his feelings. He lays out rules for achieving what he considers the height of sexual pleasure, “Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets” (Nabokov). He is attempting to outline acceptable exceptions to the age of consent, in a way doing what the law did in creating these cautionary restrictions on female bodies. Humbert goes even further, to compile a list of examples of prepubescent copulations.
Tags: Bio-Power, Lolita; Pedophilia
March 19th, 2013 at 8:25 pm
Hi Rachel,
This is a good demonstration of the implications of biopower at work within the confines of the bourgeois nuclear family. Your comments in class were particularly astute today as well.