816 Nabokov, Vladimir
Before he meets Lolita, Humbert claims that “he
had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with
their purity and vulnerability, and under no circum-
stances would he have interfered with the innocence
of a child, if there was the least risk of a row.” He
takes this approach with Lolita, claiming that he is
determined “to protect the purity of that twelve-
year-old child” and satisfy his sexual desires “without
impinging on a child’s chastity.” According to him,
the danger lies the other way, for it seems Lolita has
a “twofold nature”: She is not “the fragile child of a
feminine novel” but a “daemon disguised as a female
child,” and he is her innocent victim. To reinforce
this idea, he portrays her as “hopelessly depraved,”
describing, for example, how she throws herself
into his arms before she leaves for camp and kisses
him passionately when they are reunited. Although
he knows that the kiss is “an innocent game on
her part” in imitation of some “fake romance” she
has seen in a movie or a magazine, he stresses her
forwardness. This shifting of responsibility reaches
its climax when they have sex and Humbert claims
that she seduced him. He learns that he is “not even
her first lover”: She has already been “debauched”
by Charlie Holmes. This makes him the innocent
party: “I am not a criminal sexual psychopath taking
indecent liberties with a child. The rapist was Char-
lie Holmes; I am the therapist.”
For two years, Humbert “ignores Lolita’s states
of mind while comforting [his] own base self,”
exploiting her dependency and vulnerability and
making her a virtual prisoner to his sexual demands.
At one point, he forces her to fondle him in a school
classroom beneath a print of Joshua Reynolds’s Age
of Innocence, a horribly ironic scene that underscores
the disparity between Lolita’s life with Humbert and
the one she should be living at her age. Only later,
after the damage has been done, does Humbert drop
his pretense of innocence and admit that he is guilty
of destroying her life. This “moral apotheosis” occurs
after Lolita has fled with Quilty. Humbert hears
“the melody of children at play” from a distant town
and realizes that “the hopelessly poignant thing
was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the
absence of her voice from that concord.” Robbed of
her childhood and prematurely thrust into an adult
world, Lolita does not have the chance to experience
adolescence naturally; as a result, her innocence has
been irretrievably lost.
Humbert says that if he were his own judge, he
would give himself at least 35 years for rape and
dismiss the rest of the charges. While we respect his
admission of guilt over what he has done to Lolita, it
is strange that he should think of Quilty’s murder as
being inconsequential and himself as being innocent
of any wrongdoing in the matter. Perhaps his own
experience as a sexual predator has taught Humbert
that Quilty is beyond redemption, or perhaps he sees
the murder as a twisted form of atonement for what
he did to Lolita. Whatever the case may be, he is
“guilty of killing Quilty,” and his reluctance to face
up to the consequences of that fact suggest that he
is unwilling to take full responsibility for his actions.
Humbert dies days before his trial begins, so we do
not know whether he would have been found guilty
or innocent; we also have no way of knowing how
much he has truly learned from his experience.
P. B. GrantLove in Lolita
Despite Humbert’s sexual depravity, Lolita manages
to be a moving love story. This causes problems. We
want to condemn Humbert unequivocally for what
he has done, but because his professions of love for
Lolita seem genuine, we have difficulty doing so;
indeed, some readers, persuaded by his “fancy prose
style,” find themselves almost condoning his behav-
ior. This may be a deliberate strategy on Humbert’s
part: If he can elicit sympathy by portraying himself
as a tragic figure cheated of his true love by a despi-
cable rival, he will feel exonerated. In order to arrive
at a reasonably accurate appraisal of his true feel-
ings, then, we must never lose sight of his motives
and look past his persuasive rhetoric to the evidence
Nabokov provides.
When Humbert says that he was “madly, clum-
sily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love” with Annabel
Leigh, we have no cause to doubt him, though we
know young people are prone to exaggerate emo-
tions. His true feelings for Lolita, however, are diffi-
cult to gauge. Shortly after meeting her, he claims to
have “fallen in love with Lolita forever,” but this does
not stop him from wondering how he will “get rid”
of her when her “magic nymphage had evaporated.”