Nymphettes on Camera
From the first, Humbert Humbert is by his searing shame. In the opening chapters, the reader becomes acquainted the man as he slowly falls for and wins over his beautiful, 12-year-old housemate Lolita. His shame does not come from a fear of hell—though he mentions it—nor does it come clothed in the garb of a state official. His shame is that of a deviant rebelling against the internalized mechanisms of scientia sexualis, knowing full well in his recording that he is not a sinner, blasphemer, or even merely criminal, but something even worse: he is an oddity, an object of clinical fascination.
Humbert Humbert spends much of Part I of the novel justifying himself before this imaginary panel, and he tests out many different modes in order to win the sympathy of his (ultimately post-humous) readers. From pseudo-authentic self-deprecation to astringent and witty attacks on those whom he feels do him wrong—most notably Dolores’ mother and his briefly-lived wife Charlotte. These asides serve as little insights into the personality of a man we know we ought to revile but—for a complex set of rationales—cannot hardly resist.
It is telling that Nabokov casts the manuscript as an archive from the very start. We the readers are invited to analyze Humbert’s case as juror and armchair psychologist, as spectators bringing to bear our own imprints of the state. But Nabokov, like all great writers (and like Hawthorne before him), includes this in preface the beginnings of a fundamental critique of the stance of such a detached observer. The frame through which we peer at Humbert’s strange odyssey is as much a mirror as it is a lens. We are looking back at our selves.
What Lolita reflects is a society deeply uneasy with its own desires and perceptions of beauty. At the time of its initial publication, the mediated images of television had just begun to stream into the homes and minds of millions of American families, and the post-war economic boom enabled a rapid expansion in consumption of non-essential goods, from labor-saving household doodads to luxury houses, cars, and adornments. The spectacular society in which we clearly live today had, after a long period in utero, had come to full term and was ready to be born. From the beginning this baby was a buyer, and the dominant discourse sold sex, youth, and playful tension between purity and passion. The Lolita of H. H.’s carefully crafted obsession embodied all three.
Nabokov, such a master of his adoptive language, had only word taken off of his pages and into common usage: nymphette. This idea that Humbert makes, shapes, and takes for himself is not just the sum of a perverted man’s dark fantasies and criminal malfeasance—the nymphette is the soul of the male gaze’s desire. Though not all young girls would be so wrenchingly destroyed in the creation of this object as was Dolores Haze, Nabokov implicitly announces the new order of things: all females would be subject to the demand of the all-pervading commercial gaze.
Tags: Psychology, Spectacle
