Dirty Old Men
Dirty Old Men
Before I get into my reaction to Part I of Lolita, I must say that I really love the author’s writing. That said, I am thoroughly disturbed and disgusted by Humbert Humbert. I’ll cut here for spoilers.
When I first started reading, I was torn between sympathy and disgust. Humbert is clearly a disturbed individual. I felt bad for him because he felt that he couldn’t live a normal life. I was glad that he was aware of his illness and wanted to not harm the child’s purity. But then his later actions made me feel sick. I think that his rationalizations and manipulations were disgusting. For instance, when he tried to explain “nymphets” as having an innate quality that separated them from other young girls instead of just admitting that the only thing that differentiated a nymphet is that he happened to be attracted to her, just as a normal man might be attracted to some women and not others.
The author and narrator take care to provide a visual of Humbert as a large, hairy man. Countless adjectives are attributed to his appearance that make me picture him as absolutely terrifying. And Lo, though clearly precocious in speech and action is still just a little girl. Maybe she did make the first move as he vaguely stated toward the end of Part I, but I find it a flimsy excuse that Humbert threw away his quest to preserve the child’s purity just because he found out that she was not as chaste as he’d thought. Yes, maybe Lo was not a virgin, but her previous sexual partner had been a 13-year-old boy. She is frequently referred to as thin and frail and Humbert describes himself as a large man and refers to their sexual encounters as “vigorous” and “violent.” I not only find the fact of their sexual encounters disturbing and appalling, but the thought of their sheer difference in size makes me shudder. He’s a big man and she’s a tiny, little girl, and he though he claimed to love her he gave no thought to her health or the fact that he was probably really hurting her.
To make some connections with the rest of the reading, I found something in each document that related to the novel. Document 1 states that “oftentimes the young people do not do just the right thing because of inexperience in life or because of their acting upon their impulse at the moment” (Peiss, 339). That statement can be directly related to Lo because although she was aware of Humbert’s intentions and behaved physically toward him and other children, the fact that she’s only a little girl of 12 forgives her actions. Ultimately, she cannot really be held accountable because she didn’t have the knowledge of many years behind her. I don’t know the rest of the novel is going to pan out, but maybe she was acting on a whim or a perceived notion of having nowhere else to go, whereas Humbert is an adult and can be held fully accountable for his twisted and depraved actions.
Document 2 discusses petting and states that it is often objected to because parents fear it will lead to other sexual activities and “fear that petting will so stimulate the girl, sexually, that she will experience a desire for intercourse too ardent to be denied” (Peiss, 341). Interesting, Humbert states that Lo is not fond of petting and prefers only kissing or the actual act of sex. So though rational, parents have more to fear than just petting, apparently. Additionally, Document 3 suggests that movies influence the sexual behavior of young girls, a theme that is reiterated early in the novel when Humbert is creepily considering how to grope Lo and thinks she will be receptive because of things she may have seen in the movies.
Most telling, is Document 4, which discusses the guidelines for portraying sex in motion pictures. Impure love is “the love which society has always regarded as wrong” and must not be portrayed as “attractive and beautiful,” “in such a way as to arouse passion or morbid curiosity,” “made to seem right and permissible” or “detailed in method and manner” (Peiss, 345). With the exception of morbid curiosity, I think that the author’s portrayal of this situation follows all of the guidelines present for depicting impure love, if it can even be called love.
Tags: chastity, dirty old men, impure love, little girls, nymphets, perversion, petting
April 3rd, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Jaslee, I’d like to hear more about why you eliminate “morbid curiosity” in the last paragraph, so in class please be ready to lead a discussion on that and the intriguing concepts of impure vs pure love. Don’t forget, as well, that the narrator of the novel is HH, so he is the one who describes himself in such unflattering terms. What effect does this have on the reader?