Dolores, or Lolita
Dolores, or Lolita
Something very intriguing to me in Nabokov’s Lolita is the fact that Humbert Humbert needed to create a separate identity for Dolores (much like, as Jaslee pointed out, he needs to create “nymphets” to rationalize his lust for young girls.) To him, Dolores is hardly ever Dolores – she is sometimes Lo, or Lola, but, so often “this nouvelle, this Lolita, my Lolita” (40). The name is one of the things I find so brilliant about Nabokov and this novel – by creating “Lolita” out of “Dolores,” Humbert Humbert puts her into a state of infinite childhood; if he always refers to her as “Lolita,” the “ita,” her youth, never goes away. Dolores is a real person – she ages, but Lolita is another identity – Humbert’s nymphet, and the name for the perfect picture of her childhood that he’s in love with.
Humbert’s problem seems to lie in his creation of the nymphet identity and, subsequently, placing Lolita into this category. With the descriptions of nymphets, H.H. seems to assert that nymphets are somehow sexually aware, and that they tempt men like him. “The body of some immortal daemon disguised as a female child” (139). With this, he disregards the fact that these little girls are helpless and rather unaware of what sex entails, both physically and emotionally. “While eager to impress me with the world of tough kids, she was not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid’s life and mine. Pride alone prevented her from giving up” (134).
I was also disturbed by Humbert because of his violence. His use – and I don’t think this is at all a strong word – of Lolita shows complete disregard for her. It was one thing to get off by rubbing himself against her legs, but he plans, for months, on raping her, telling himself that she somehow wouldn’t know that something had happened to her while she was unconscious. When he does sleep with her, he takes her giggles and forced boldness as seduction and has intercourse with her 3 times. The morning after, she has a “purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted” and “a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips” (139). He buys her sanitary pads when they leave, which leads me to wonder if she was actually menstruating or if she was bleeding from the “strenuous intercourse” (140) with a grown man (a thought put in place when “an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face” as she got into the car (140).) Finally, ending part one with “You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go” (142) is horribly disturbing, because it reinforces the fact that, with H.H. as her legal guardian, Dolores is trapped as Lolita and in abuse.
April 4th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Katherine, the passages that you quote about Delores’s wincing in pain and HH’s purchase of sanitary pads are crucial clues that are often overlooked by readers and even scholarly critics–but, as you indicate, they are keys to the way we are to understand the difference between what HH says about Lolita as his object and Delores as, basically, his hostage. Please guide the discussion in this direction on Tuesday. It is crucial to the kind of art that Nabokov creates–which is also different from HH’s form of artistic creation in transforming a girl into an object.
April 5th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
I agree with your comments about Humbert’s violence and the morning after their first encounter. I feel that is when Dolores may have realized that her relationship with Humbert was not a game and therefore vastly different from her encounters with the boy at camp, which is probably why she suddenly decided that she wanted to call her mother.
And you bring up a good point about Humbert essentially holding her hostage. He was brilliant in ensuring that he would become Lo’s legal guardian, by planting the seed that he’d had a tryst with her mother years ago and was her real father, so no one questioned leaving a very young girl with a relative stranger.