Sex, Death, and Lexiconsiousness
Sex, Death, and Lexiconsiousness
This week, while reading Nabokov’s masterpiece, I was also traveling around the National Cherry Blossom Festival in DC. My absorption of the narrative was contextualized by the event — Japanese trees in bloom, tourists and GW students of all ages, races, intellects, couplings, and persuasions.
In my close observation of real-live Humbertian nymphets made me realize that I was trying to sympathize with him, see what he sees, and feel what he feels. I looked in his interactions with Lolita and in the interactions around me for that half-conscious adolescent seduction that might possibly excuse Humbert’s self-depracating behaviors and desires. I searched equally hard for that repulsive quality in grown women that Humbert describes, and although I found quite a bit of it in mid-western khaki-shorted double-wide tourists and local party girls, there was no woman like Mrs. Haze.
Her kind of woman, the lonely middle-aged pseudo-cultured pseudo-intellectual, is the modern American woman captured in a paragraph. Her Mexican trinkets, bad French, and resentment toward the youth and verility of her child, all point to that thriving feminine sexuality that comes with education and loneliness, and this is where I find many of my older friends. Unable to meet a man to settle with, they go from relationship to relationship, resenting the marriage proposals that their exes dole out to younger, blonder, less educated women. This is a condition of attraction, power, and control. Humbert’s ability to reign in Charlotte is due to her loneliness, and her surprise at his interest. Humbert’s reeling in of Lolita, however, is due to the sheer powerlessness and inexperience of her age. However, this does not mean that Lolita is entirely oblivious and innocent in the equation. The first intimate scene between them, when Humbert sings and feigns a tooth-ache so that Lolita won’t notice his rubbing himself on her, is a parody of itself. Clearly, she has dressed up and made sure that they will be alone. Clearly, she has thrown herself on top of him and arranged the proper position so they can both pretend that she is innocent. She may not be aware of the extent of what she is in for, but she knows enough to welcome the attention and hide it from her mother. Most girls know at a young age whether they are attractive, desired by the people around them, or objects of other women’s jealousy. Dolores is no exception, and the idea of consent comes into play here in the early stages of their relationship.
