Lolita 817When he sees Lolita for the last time, he finds that
this has come to pass: Her looks are “ruined,” and
she has lost the sexual allure she once had. This
seems to signal a change in Humbert’s attitude: He
finally sees Lolita as a fully rounded individual and
reveals the depth of his love for her: “I looked and
looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to
die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever
seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere
else.” Humbert knows we will be skeptical about
this, given his previous behavior, so he stresses his
sincerity: “You may jeer at me . . . but I insist the
world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita,
pale and polluted, and big with another’s child.”
This goes some way toward convincing us that his
lust has changed to love, as do the pages that follow,
where he reflects on what he has done to Lolita and
declares his love for her in the face of his shame:
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved
you.” Again, this seems genuine, but we must not
forget the psychiatrist John Ray Jr.’s warning: The
“desperate honesty that throbs through [Humbert’s]
confession does not absolve him from sins of dia-
bolical cunning.” Humbert’s professions of love for
Lolita may simply be staged for the benefit of his
readers. We should also recall his remark describing
his pedophilia in relation to his loss of Lolita: “My
accursed nature could not change, no matter how my
love for her did.”
Humbert’s love for Lolita is also questionable
given that his desire for her is not exclusive. When
he is on the verge of sexually possessing her for the
first time, for example, he still manages to register
the looks of another nymphet; after he has sex with
her, he asks her for salacious secrets about one of her
classmates; and during their first cross-country trip,
he makes her caress him while he ogles other girls.
Lolita’s escape with Quilty may destroy Humbert’s
spirit, but it does not cure him of his condition: He
still seeks “the flash of a nymphet’s limbs.” Even
when he is en route to his last meeting with Lolita
and the man he intends to kill for taking her from
him, he cannot quell his desire: “[T]he ancient beast
in me was casting about for some lightly clad child
I might hold against me for a minute.” On this evi-
dence, sex, not love, seems to be Humbert’s primary
concern.
Is Humbert’s love for Lolita less genuine because
he is a pedophile? Lolita’s relationship with Quilty,
who is also a pedophile, may provide an answer.
She is warned about Quilty’s pedophilia before she
begins a relationship with him, but she is able to see
past it in a way that she cannot see past Humbert’s
perversion. Both relationships are unnatural, but
Lolita finds Humbert’s role less defensible than
Quilty’s. This may be because Quilty does not
attempt to mask his perversion under the guise of
love, as Humbert does, and because her feelings for
Quilty are not complicated by a familial tie, as they
are with Humbert, who is her stepfather. Like Hum-
bert, Quilty takes advantage of Lolita, but the expe-
rience does not embitter her: She calls Quilty “the
only man she had ever been crazy about.” Lolita’s
relationship with him proves that sexual perversion
does not preclude the possibility of genuine affec-
tion, and it suggests that Lolita may be an authentic
love story despite its being written by a pedophile
whose feelings are not reciprocated. Ironically, it is
Humbert’s habitual insincerity that undermines his
declarations of love and prevents us from believing
him even when he is, perhaps, at his most sincere.
P. B. GrantSex and SexuaLIty in Lolita
Almost every character in Lolita is defined by their
sexuality, but hardly any engage in conventional
sexual activities. Humbert’s pedophilia prevents
him from having proper sexual relationships with
women; Lolita, being the object of his lust, is unable
to explore her own sexuality normally and chooses
her next sexual partner badly, falling for Quilty,
another pedophile and also a pornographer. Theirs
is not a happy story: Quilty is murdered; his killer
is imprisoned; and their victim ends up married and
pregnant at 17, then dies in childbirth. By present-
ing us with an abnormal gallery of characters and a
story that ends on such a bleak, sterile note, Nabo-
kov seems to be suggesting something about the
nature of sexuality and moral responsibility.
Humbert traces the source of his pedophilia to
an “incomplete childhood romance” with an “initial
girl-child,” Annabel Leigh. Consequently, he is in
thrall to nymphets, sexually alluring girls “between
the age limits of nine and fourteen.” This renders