Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
In "Lolita" by Vladamir Nabokov, tells a story of a middle aged man, Humbert who falls in love with a young girl, Lolita. The story is told from the perspective of Humbert Humbert who is an unreliable narrator. Humbert is trying to justify his love of under-aged women by showing first an appropriate relationship he had with a girl when he was young. His young love died leaving in him a void where love should have been.
Humbert has a first wife, he marries her for her naive nature, but he never loves her. He tries to possess her and control her. Valeria, the first wife, eventually leaves him for another man because she feels shut off from his love. He is enraged over her leaving even though he didn't love her. He becomes completely obsessed with Nymphets and hires a young prostitute to fulfill his fantasy. Humbert has several stays in mental institutions. Humbert moves to a New England town and lives as a boarder with Charlotte and her daughter Lolita. Humbert becomes obsessed with Lolita.
He seduces Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze. He believes this will keep him close to Lolita. However, Charlotte sends Lolita away so that she can have alone time with her new lover. Humbert proposes to Charlotte in an attempt to bring Lolita home and to secure her with him for a longer time. The two marry, Charlotte keeps Lolita away. Charlotte reads a journal Humbert has stashed about his affection for Lolita. She orders him out of the house that very night. She runs in front of a car and dies. Humbert kidnaps Lolita from her school. He spoils her with stuff that is never enough. They travel for a year and then settle down in a small private school. When Lolita becomes secretive and seeks out dating people her own age, Humbert takes her on another road trip.
Humbert becomes anxious that they are being stalked and worries that Lolita is informing their follower. Lolita becomes sick and he takes her to the hospital. Lolita leaves the hospital with an “uncle” presumably the stalker. Humbert vows to kill him, Quinty when he finds him. After 2 years of hunting he receives a letter from Lolita requesting money. Lolita left Quinty because he wanted her to be involved in child pornography. Lolita refuses to ever go home with Humbert. Humbert tracks down Quinty and shoots him to death. Humbert gets arrested, writes this memoir in jail. Lolita dies during childbirth and Humbert dies shortly after of heart failure.
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In my first attempt at reading Lolita, I was reading it with
the ideas from “Structure and Meaning” where Robert McKee speaks about the way
in which a story is told to produce aesthetic emotion. In which, the story is
structured to produce an epiphanies. In reading under the method of McKee, I
felt Nabakov had chosen to present Humbert in a way that was completely
unreliable. As a reader, I felt manipulated by Nabakov and Humbert. McKee states, “ Two ideas bracket the creative
process: Premise, the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story
and Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through action and
aesthetic emotion.” Originally, I believed the Controlling Idea would be: That which we don’t know can’t hurt us and the
counter idea would be objectifying the innocence will destroy innocence.
However, after completing the book, I feel like I missed something in my
initial blog examination under McKee’s method. Now I think the Premise is:
something more like: What would happen if a man tried to poses love? The Controlling
Idea is if you try to own love, you will drive it from you and ultimately you
will kill it, and it will kill you.
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“She (Lolita) searched for words. I (Humbert) supplied them mentally (He (Quilty) broke my heart. You merely broke my life)” |
In stealing her innocence, Humbert ruined Lolita’s life. Quilty broke her heart, which left her 17, married and pregnant. The pregnancy, which was a result of Lolita’s loss of innocence, killed her. Likewise, his inability to love her and need to objectify her, killed Quilty. Humbert died of unrequited love, because he tried to steal innocence.
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Nabokov used irony to drive home his message. McKee states, “We recognize that idealism and pessimism are at the extremes of experience, that life is rarely all sunshine and strawberries, nor is it all doom and drek: it is both.” So we can see that in Humbert not publishing the manuscript until after Dolly’s death, we know that he in fact loves her. He is able to recognize he has wronged her. Likewise it is in that moment of Dolly trying to be kind in telling him she will not go home with him. The irony that they are both more kind and loving in their goodbyes than in their relationship and neither survives long after their final meeting shows an ironic ending.
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When reading Lolita under the idea of "Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters," Jane Gallop's premise is that the way we read for the main idea we are projecting our own "Read for." Gallop proposes ethical reading is when a reader looks for what is surprising in the text and attempts to read without prejudices. When I attempted this in my "Lolita's Lure" Blog, I addressed things that were unexpected, such as the name changes that Nabokov creates in the story. I also explored particular text that appeared to be feminist inflected language:
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...Oh, that I were a lady writer who could have her pose naked in a naked light |
"Changeful, Bad-Tempered, cheerful, awkward, graceful with tart grace of her coltish subteens, excruciatingly desirable from head to foot (All New England for a lady writer's pen) |
I then noticed an attempt at Irony within the text, where I believed Nabokov was using Metaphoric symbolism to provide a contradictory irony.
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Mr. Uterus [I quote from a girls' magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance that a possible baby may have to be bedded down there |
I was projecting my own ideas of what I read for onto the text. I realized in reading a whole novel I was searching for the places where I can read the ideals I could align myself with, I could believe in the sensitivities of women. I WANTED to believe that in those moments where he longs to be a woman writer that he is actually saying women writers are better, more able to get at emotion. Additionally, I am reading for the victimization of Lolita, the fact that he shows her to be sexual bothers me. I want to deny her ability to be sexual because it feels like the sexualization of her is an excuse Humbert is using for the objectification of a child. I even take this whole wool over my eyes approach to the text and read for Lolita as a metaphor for education in my blog, "Lo, How the Man Hath Crazed Me." I was able to stop reading for the victimization of a girl and read Nabokov as an educator trying to educate his reader. But it is a projection, a projection different than my usual projections, but none the less, a projection I have chosen to make.
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Another element that was projecting my own ideas, tied into an article I read called, "Split Skins: Female Agency and Bodily Mutilation in The Little Mermaid," in which Susan White claims, "Male desirability is still considered much less important than male desire in cinema and elsewhere. The transformation of the body towards desirability has involved, up to the present, a process of weakening the woman in order to render her sexually desirable, while men are made stronger. In this Context we can hardly blame little girls for seeing the kind of magical solution provided by The Little Mermaid to the almost impossible project of growing up, when now more than ever the adult female body must retain contours of childhood (cf. Nabokov's Lolita), while acquiring the secondary sexual attributes of woman." I can recall my own obsession with The Little Mermaid I read the Hans Christian Andersen version all through childhood, I spoke to this in my Reading Inventory. I then watched the Disney version when it was released in 1989 (I was 12.) I identified with Ariel, budding breasts, autocratic father, daydreaming of grandeur and of course, there was always some variety of Eric. In creating an intertextual relationship between Lolita and The Little Mermaid, I can see how I too have created a world in which women will be the stereotypical representation of archetype ideals. I am engaging in a text looking to find women oppressed because I want to fight such oppression. But in having the conversation am I also perpetuating it?
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