Sexual Deviance and Normality în Nabokov’s Lolita

In one of the most mischievous novels in the English language, Vladimir Nabokov weaves an enigmatic tale about a precocious early adolescent and a middle-aged pedophile with “a fancy prose style.” Humbert loves Lolita, or at least his artful image of her. Meanwhile, the mysterious Quilty, playwright and pornographer, shadows the mismatched couple and reads Humbert’s mind. Humbert loses Lolita to Quilty. Eventually, Humbert catches up with Quilty and murders him, or so it seems. Finally, Humbert recounts the whole affair in his fancy prose and dies of a broken heart.

Lolita parodies classic romantic stories about ill-fated passion and struggles with Doppelgänger; it turns in on itself in self-parody of the artist manqué; and it parodies psychoanalysis, especially oedipal theory. While these elements are apparent, just what Nabokov was trying to accomplish with them, if anything, is far from clear. Nearly fifty years since the publication of Lolita (1955), and despite much scholarly exegesis, the novel remains a perplexing read. One possibility is that the parody, literary allusions, and wordplay represent nothing more than an especially strong form of literary aestheticism. It seems more likely, however, that the novel conceals an inner design or thesis. Nabokov himself likens Lolita to a “riddle” with an “elegant” solution (1990), and he warns his readers to expect not only wordplay and artifice, but also deceit bordering on “diabolism” (1967).

Humbert's perversion is not so much pedophilia as narcissism: he seeks not to obtain love objects proper but docile providers of sexual gratification. Being incapable of loving anybody but himself, not even Lolita at first, he cannot be loved by anyone either. His acts of cruelty against Lolita as he tries to keep her for his sexual needs and to fan his waning desire work havoc upon him. When he meets her again after their separation, he discovers that what he desires most from her is not sex but love. As a narrator, he does his utmost to transmute his sexual desire into an aesthetic one in an attempt to gain our understanding as well as Lolita's forgiveness beyond the grave.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita shocked and appalled its American audience upon its publication in 1955. In its blurring of the fine line that separates “normal” sexual behavior from “deviance,” Lolita touched, and still touches, a peculiarly American nerve. Another work that examined the boundary between abnormal and normal sexual activity was Alfred Kinsey’s controversial scientific surveys of sexual behavior among men and women, published in 1948 and 1953.1 These studies, the so-called “Kinsey reports,” also raised a furor in 1950s America. Both Kinsey and Nabokov essentially challenged myths about the presumed “innocence,” or sexual naiveté, of American women. Although Lolita is presented through the eyes of a pedophile who sees her as an American Eve, the novel appropriates the language and scientific perspective of the Kinsey reports to undercut this mythological view of her.

While Humbert presents Lolita’s sexuality as deviant or precocious, Nabokov invokes statistical, scientific studies of female sexuality similar to the Kinsey reports; the effect of this perspective is to suggest that Lolita’s sexuality is in fact “normal.” Failing to recognize this scientific view of Lolita, clearly represented in the novel, critics sometimes see Lolita exclusively from Humbert’s perspective—as an archetypal temptress, a modern-day femme fatale. Indeed, critics have sometimes conflated Humbert’s view of Lolita with Nabokov’s, ignoring the ways in which Humbert’s mythologizing of Lolita and his construction of her sexual deviance is one of Nabokov’s many targets in Lolita. The way Nabokov deconstructs Humbert’s myths about Lolita’s perversity eluded these reviewers, who ultimately adopted, rather than condemned, Humbert’s view of Lolita. Some contemporary feminist critics have also misjudged the novel, erroneously conflating Humbert’s view of Lolita with Nabokov’s. Linda Kauffman, for example, argues that “the novel allegorizes Woman” and feels as though Nabokov “elides the female by framing the narrative through Humbert’s angle of vision”. It is not the novel that “allegorizes Woman,” but Humbert. And Humbert’s “angle of vision” is not the only one we have of Lolita, although it predominates.