[On Literary Censorship]: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
On morality, appearances, and engaging with the uncomfortable.
Nymph (n): (1) A mythological spirit of nature imagined as a beautiful woman inhabiting rivers, woods, or other locations; (2) An immature form of an insect that does not change greatly as it grows. — Oxford English Dictionary
Lolita (n): A young girl who has a very sexual appearance or behaves in a very sexual way — Cambridge English Dictionary
We are so often obsessed with appearances of morality. We have been since the dawn of social classes and advertising. Banning books is but one example of performing moral superiority. Assuming any one person or group should determine the most correct or beneficial or damaging thing for the rest of any given community to consume is not only dangerous, but the first signals of a collapse of freedoms. Yet we have been doing so for decades, and sometimes, it seems, thinking very little of it. Even a cursory glance at any gathered list from nearly any year since the beginning of banning and/or challenging/censoring books reveals more truth about the things people in power are afraid of than it does about anything necessarily damaging. Sex — and learning about one’s body in a constructive, instructive manner — is one of the most commonly censored topics.
We’re dancing the edge of what feels to be another round of purity prominence; social media and younger generations are censoring themselves, partly in an effort to avoid having their content removed by moderators and partly as a seemingly voluntary act. There are so many who interpret any instance of sex as both unnecessary and detrimental to the media they consume that they are almost the loudest voice in the room. So maybe there is no better time to revisit some media that uses sex to tell a meaningful story.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is an interesting case of this. Banned and challenged for obscenity in multiple countries since its publication, it seems to have plagued Nabokov for the entire five years it took to write. He’d often toyed with the ideas at play in Lolita in several other works before fully forming in all its darkness to become most potently realized in what is alternately considered a repulsive work and one of the best, most important works of literature to date.
I am not of the belief that any book or other piece of media should be banned. They have too much to teach us about ourselves and the world around us. Nevertheless, Lolita is obscene. It is morally abhorrent and repugnant in its subject matter. It is also incredibly good at proving a terrifying truth we still struggle to face today.
For the unfamiliar, Lolita is the story of one man’s obsession with and sexual pursuit of a child. 37-year-old Humbert Humbert fixates on 12-year-old Dolores Haze — whom he nicknames “Lolita” — at first sight. The opening lines of the novel spell it out for us distinctly:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul….She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
Here we are presented with a narrator who knows his actions are heinous, and yet still, as the novel progresses, tries repeatedly to justify or to pass the blame for them off onto the child — whom he goes through great pains to describe as a “nymphet”:
“Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as ‘nymphets’.”
Labeling young girls and women as overbearingly, irresistibly, demonically sexual objects to shift off blame from the men who would pursue them is nothing new, of course. It has been going on for longer than any of us care to face, no matter how much yelling women do on the subject to bring it to light. It’s complete bullshit designed to make women and assault victims generally feel responsible for a situation over which they had no real control. If someone decides they want to pursue and assault you, they will.
What makes Nabokov’s novel so fascinating is not so much that Humbert Humbert is able to successfully pull off his goal of isolating Dolores and ensnaring her in his trap that, for most of the time, she either has no idea she is in or has no firm way to escape. Rather, it’s that, for so long, it has worked on readers. Readers and reviewers for decades interpreted Lolita as both a great act of comedy and one of the great romances, and considered Humbert Humbert to be an incredibly romantic narrator — entirely antithetical to even his own repeated assertions and hints of himself as a rapist. The Vanity Fair pull quote on the edition six paragraphs above — plastered on a cover that centers a young girl’s clearly uncomfortable lower body language — labels it as “The only convincing love story of our century”.
Alternatively, not only does it seem to work to make most readers side with Humbert’s vision of his quest as romantic, but it has even gotten some readers, at one point or another, to side with him in blaming his pubescent obsession. Never mind that the term “lolita” has entered into the lexicon — meaning exactly what our narrator intends it to — and has been used as such without irony, albeit slightly broadened to expand in modern conversation to include women as well as young girls.
All of this plays right into what the novel is doing, of course, and the gotcha game of sympathizing with a man like Humbert Humbert on paper is one of the greatest moral quandaries readers can be thrown into. It should well be doing the work of helping us to realize how much we are willing to sweep past in the name of visualizing an idealized version we create in our own heads. Which is, of course, another of the novel’s driving cores.
It is but rarely that we get to see and hear the young Dolores Haze in her own words. Mostly, she is described either through the lens of Humbert — who sees her strictly as a love object even as he plays in public at her being his own daughter — or through the eyes of her mother, who considers her a rather homely, obstinate preteen. When we do get Dolores though, she’s like a raw, pulsing nerve of truth that should be throwing cold water on any romantic blinders readers might have set up.
Once the novel really gets going through its climax — after the death of Mrs. Haze, when Dolores is told that her mother is dead and there is nowhere for her to go, that she must play into this idea of being Humbert’s daughter if she does not want to be sent to reform school — we get a bit more of the Dolores who is both very aware of her circumstances and constantly, actively working to find a way out of them.
Her repeated assaults over the course of the road trip are stomach-churning moments to read, that would often get the book labeled as pornographic, but the fact that she — somehow — never lost her strength and will to both confront Humbert about what he was doing and to make calculated moves to escape it often seems to fly under the radar. Yes, she is acerbic in her delivery (“You know, the hotel where you raped me”) but she well should be. The adults at almost every encounter of her life following Humbert’s earliest sexualized encounters have entirely failed to notice the monster among them.
I would love to say that Dolores gets her happy, starlet, Hollywood love story ending. That she gets free from Humbert’s clutches and goes on to live a fulfilled life, unhaunted by the specter of the year and a half or so she spent trapped with a pedophile. That he went to prison and repented for his crimes and died alone as he should. But that is not quite true. Humbert does end up in prison, but not for assaulting his young charge. Rather, he was put in prison for murdering a rival for Lolita’s affections; a man with similar inclinations whom Dolores fancied herself in love with for the first time because he was an artist who cast her in his play, who saw her as the starlet she imagined herself to be. Humbert has, in fact, written the whole tale in prison, often addressing us as the jury who can decide his fate.
Dolores does get a brief respite in life after both of these men. When Humbert hears from her next she is married to a kind man and pregnant with his child. But the opening of the novel tells us before we even know of her life that she dies in childbirth, and with her her stillborn child.
Vladimir Nabokov’s wife Vera is perhaps the biggest champion the novel has ever had. She often stopped him, at various points in its production, from destroying the manuscript. On the one hand, she did it because she “knew that Vladimir would not rest until the book was out of his system.” On the other, she saw Lolita for the tragic tale it was, and often seemed — particularly in its early days — to be the only one who refused to let Dolores’s true reality as a lost, trapped child go under the weight of Humbert’s eloquent words. Where most would be driven to distraction looking to morally condemn the book in one way or another for having such a “horrid little brat” at its center, Vera maintained, “Lolita was not a symbol. She was a defenseless child.”
The reception of Lolita has come a long way indeed, and I suspect as the years march on and it endures as a powerful work of literature, we will continue to dismantle the persistent idea of the book and it’s narrator as romantic, or else of it’s victim being the one to blame for her fate. This last, though, may take far more time than the former. After all, we are still holding women and victims of assault generally up to a certain idealized standard. If they cope with it any other way than what is deemed to be socially acceptable and responsible, they are demonized and blamed into silence.
Lolita is a perfect encapsulation of the myriad receptions to an enduring issue, a lyrically beautiful description of monstrous acts committed by an unrepentant predator, and the longer we go on brushing discussions of what it’s really doing under the table, the longer we misunderstand her as a symbol rather than a mirror into the complexities of victimization and survival.
For more of the Banned Books series:
2023:
- The Well of Loneliness
- The Bell Jar
2022:
- The Catcher in the Rye
- Go Ask Alice
2021
- Coraline
- Winnie the Pooh
- Alice in Wonderland
- Where the Wild Things Are
2020
- Rebecca
- Beloved
- Lord of the Flies
2019
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
- The Scarlet Letter
- Fahrenheit 451
- The Bluest Eye
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover
