Lolita
An Analysis of the Repulsive in Nabokov's Lolita
This paper will show why Vladimir Nabokov chose to illustrate a theme that is considered by many to be repulsive: it was a theme through which he could hold the mirror up to society and reflect what he saw happening in the world around him. hen Nabokov's Lolita debuted first in Paris and then in America in the 1950s, it provoked one of two reactions (aside from the compulsion to buy -- its first American paperback printing sold out): it provoked either condemnation or disinterest. Graham Greene was the first high-profile author to recommend the novel, but his recommendation did not deter his home country (Britain) from banning the book. It appeared that what the Russian-born Nabokov had set out to do, "to disturb the cultural purity of easily-shocked America," ("Fracturing the Pawn") had in one sense been successful: the easily-shocked were shocked;…...
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Works Cited
"Fracturing the Pawn: Destruction of the Reader in Nabokov's Lolita." <
Lolita in Light of Sontag's "Morality"
My experience reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was a pleasant one, an aesthetic experience that, as Susan Sontag states, appealed to my consciousness. Sontag suggests that art is better understood as something that "enliven[s] our sensibility and consciousness" rather than as a blanket statement of moral code. In other words, genuine works of art operate within the aesthetic sphere of experience and do not aim at antagonizing consciousness or action. However, while my reading of Lolita was enjoyable and moral, it was not without its challenges. In fact, several times I had to wonder at the character of Humbert and his perspective and whether his thoughts and actions revealed anything to me about myself. In this paper I will examine the meaning of my experience reading Lolita in light of Sontag's assertions about morality and aesthetic pleasure and show why Nabokov's book may be viewed…...
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Works Cited
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Sontag, Susan. "On Style." Against Interpretation and Other Essays. 1966.
It is very clear that he can be much more dark and scheming than he seems to be. That is illustrated by just how far he will go to possess Lolita - marrying her mother and then literally abducting her after her mother dies.
In addition, they both are tragic figures who never get what they really want. Humbert discovers he is capable of love, and that he loves Lolita, even when she is "passed her prime" at 17. He says to himself, "[a]nd 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 imaged on earth, or hoped for anywhere else" (Nabokov 279). Humbert is capable of real love, or as real as it can be for him, at least, while Quilty seems to be an incarnation of the devil,…...
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References
Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. New York: McGraw Hill, 1970.
Humbert
In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov creates the character of a clear anti-hero in Humbert, a man who has is guilty of pedophilia, possibly rape and murder. The bulk of the book, however, is devoted to Humbert's narration of his affair with his stepdaughter, a "nymphet" named Dolores Haze or, in Humbert's mind, Lolita. For Humbert, the various forms of love he feels for the young girl are inextricably linked with his lust and sexual desires.
This paper examines the running theme of Humbert's sexuality and lust in Nabokov's Lolita. For Humbert, love can only be seen in the context of his powerful desire to sexually possess the object of his attention. Thus, he is unable to express any love for the teenage Lolita -- filial or romantic -- without turning her into an object of his lust.
The first part of this paper looks at how Humbert treated the other women in his…...
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Works Cited
Castronovo, David. "Humbert's America." New England Review, 23(2): 33-41. Proquest Database.
Dupee, F.W. "A Preface to Lolita." The Anchor Review. 2(1957): 7.
Lee, L.L. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1976.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Second Vintage International, 1955.
Nabokov's "Lolita"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" is perhaps one of the most famous novels of the Twentieth Century.
For not only did Nabokov dare to explore the forbidden subject of an older man's obsessive love and lustful desire for a young girl, he did so with sheer poetry and language mastery. Joyce Carol Oates once said that "Lolita is one of our finest American novels, a triumph of style and vision" (Oates Pp). However beautifully written, "Lolita" is the story of a pedophile that preys upon a female child and then murders to both protect her and as revenge against the victim.
Although, it has existed throughout history, pedophilia is taboo in civilized societies. It is not only frowned upon morally but it is generally considered a criminal act of sexual exploitation because it is believed that a child cannot reason the act itself or the consequences.
Female Lolita
Nabokov's famous novel, Lolita, would have some important and essential differences had it been written by a woman. A female writer would have created a more complex and sympathetic characterization for Lolita, expanding on Nabokov's treatment of Lolita as simply a vulgar personification of the qualities of the nymphet. The impact of Humbert's obsession with Lolita and their sexual affair would have been explored more thoroughly by a female author. Further, Humbert would have felt a deeper remorse for his actions in the hands of a woman writer.
Lolita is, in essence, the story of the middle aged Hubert Humphrey's obsession and ensuing affair with a prepubescent girl. Early in his life, Humbert was traumatized by the death of his childhood love for Annabel Leigh. This death renders Humphrey attracted to young, prepubescent girls, or nymphets. Humphries meets Lolita, the beautiful young daughter of the bitter widow Charlotte Haze. He…...
Vladimir Nobokov's book titled Lolita, is a story of a pedophilic romance between a girl and an older man. Famous for its eroticism and exploration of a taboo part of human sexuality, it delves into what makes a girl appealing to a man like Humbert and the consequences behind their affair. The novel discusses through a series of events, the sexuality of the 12- to 16-year-old Lolita and Humbert, a pedophilic man who calls the girls he likes "nymphets." What is a Lolita, why has it become so synonymous with underage female sexuality? (This is the question explored throughout the novel. And the passage later discussed ties into that. This is also the thesis.)
The four-year period in which Humbert and Dolores embark on a perverted, sexual experience develops what the archetype of Lolita is and the consequences of being one. Nobokov describes their sexual relationship vaguely with fleeting and minimal…...
Humbert's Metamorphosis In Lolita
In Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel, Lolita, the character of Hubert Humbert gradually changes from a man who refuses to accept responsibility for his own actions to someone who begins to understand the implications of his own free will. Humbert is a clever, articulate man who uses his many wiles to manipulate the lives of those around them, largely to fulfill his desire for the nymphet Lolita. Eventually, Humbert loses Lolita, an event that makes him reconsider his role in the events of his life.
Throughout the novel, Humbert is portrayed as an educated, literate man who uses his considerable charm and intelligence to go after whatever he wants in life, regardless of the consequences. Humbert is traumatized by the early death of his young lover, Annabel Leigh, leaving him with an attraction to young, attractive women. Humbert meets the young Lolita, the daughter of his repugnant landlady Haze,…...
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Works Cited
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. 1989. Lolita. Vintage Books USA.
Freud in Lolita
The narrator of Vladimir Nabakov's novel Lolita, Professor Humbert, begins his story by recounting his childhood and the early stages of his sexual life, and particularly his experiences with his first love (or at least, his first obsession), a young girl named Annabel Leigh. Humbert recalls their sexual (mis)adventures together in some detail, and his description of this childhood romance closely echoes Sigmund Freud's formulation of the "infantile sexuality" in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. However, Humbert and Annabel are thwarted each time they attempt a coupling, and Annabel dies soon afterwards. This creates a rift in the young Humbert such that he is unable to appreciate girls or women until he meets Lolita, further echoing another of Freud's theories, this time of the oppositional instincts elucidated in The Ego and the Id. By analyzing Humbert's experiences with Annabel and the effects of her subsequent…...
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Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. The Standard ed. New York, NY: W. W, Norton & Company, 1989. 37-38. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The Definitive ed. New York, NY:
Basic Books, 2000. 45-59. Print.
Nabakov, Vladimir. Lolita. 2nd Vintage International ed. New York, NY: Random House, 1997.
Lolita in Tehran -- Reading the Politics of Azar Nafisi
Lolita -- otherwise known as Dolores Haze, the object of Humbert Humbert's affection. Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Daisy Miller, protagonist of Henry James' most famous long short story. These heroines and heroes of fiction might not, upon their surfaces seem to be politically oriented protagonists. Indeed, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran begs her own, presumably estern reader, not to make superficial analogies between, for instance, Humbert Humbert's child victim Lolita and the marginalized status of women intellectuals in Iran. Although a reader could say that both were small, fragile, and oppressed by outside forces who could not appreciate their true inner worth until it was too late, Azar Nafisi argues that it is even more radical to simply appreciate estern works of literature for what they are, great texts that create and explore the world within their own plot…...
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Work Cited
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York; Random House, 2003.
Lolita in Tehran -- the Threats of estern Literature and Freedom
Reading the great classics of estern literature in Tehran during the height of the fundamentalist Iranian regime's power over its citizens was a threatening and radical act of defiance. This was not simply because these books were banned. Specifically, estern literature and estern fiction in particular offered the girls who gathered for discussions in the author's living room the ability to express opinions contrary to the fundamentalist regime. estern novels always involve choices for the protagonist and the reader. hat do I do, wonders the character? hat do I think about what he or she does, wonders the reader? The main characters studied by the girls under the tutelage of Azar Nafisi, like Daisy Miller or Jay Gatsby, make choices -- some of them very dangerous, like going outside during a fever season, or risking a fortune for love.…...
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Work Cited
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York; Random House, 2003.
She is ten and very tired."("Lolita," 87) Again in the hotel room, in the ecstasy of his dream, Humbert loses his 'word-control' in a dialogue with Lolita, building up the tension through a virtual linguistic explosion. Language breaks free, and Humbert lets himself be carried away into a maze of Latin and English and linguistic inversions: "hat's the katter with misses?' I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair. 'If you must know,' she said, 'you do it the wrong way.' 'Show, wight ray.' 'All in good time,' responded the spoonerette. Seva ascendes, pulsata, brulans, kitzelans, dementissima.Elevator clatterans, pausa, clatterans, populus in corridoro. Hanc nisi mors mihi adimet nemo! Juncea puellula, jo pensavo fondissime, nobserva nihil quidquam... "("Lolita," 95) Significantly, as Nabokov emphasized in his essay Good Readers, Good riters 'fiction is fiction', that is, it has to deceive as its name implies: "Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To…...
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Works Cited
Couturier, Maurice. "Nabokov in postmodernist land." CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 34.n4 (Summer 1993): 247(14)
Hustis, Harriet. "Time will tell: (re)reading the seductive simulacra of Nabokov's Lolita.(Vladimir Nobokov)(Critical essay)." Studies in American Fiction 35.1 (Spring 2007): 89(23).
Jenkins, Jennifer L. "Searching high and Lo: unholy quests for Lolita.(Critical essay)." Twentieth Century Literature 51.2 (Summer 2005): 210(34).
Moore, Anthony R. "How unreliable is Humbert in Lolita?." Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (Fall 2001): 71(11).
The novel vividly illustrates this event, stated as follows:
The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That's when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where I tall started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times…...
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Bibliography
Bree, B. (Ed.). (1972). Camus. NJ: Rutgers UP.
Booker, (1993). Literature and domination: sex, knowledge, and power in modern fiction. Gainsville: Florida UP.
Camus, a. (1988). The Stranger. NY: Alfred a. Knopf, Inc.
Dupee, F.W. (1957). In Nabokov: a critical heritage. N. Page (Ed.). NY: Routledge.
But the girls can read the text from Lolita's point-of-view. They can appreciate her powerlessness, as they are powerless in the context of a state, held in the force of an oppressive regime even if the book is not explicitly about Iran.
Nafisi defends her choice of European classics because they uphold the integrity of the individual, and the individual was given scant appreciation in Tehran at the time. A pro-Revolutionary Iranian might have suggested an uplifting, dull theological text as appropriate reading for the girls. An anti-Iranian activist might have suggested a political tract against the regime should have been the focus of the group's secret reading.
By stressing that an individual is important outside of politics, and his or her inner life is worthy of creative and varied interpretation, Nafisi states that she was committing the most radical choice of texts of all. This is Nafisi would defend Lolita…...
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Works Cited
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random House, 2003.
Humpert loved Lolita for what she was and what she represented, but
not as a person. He exerted power and influence over her to meet his own
selfish desires; not because he truly loved her. ut in this way, love is
a major theme of Lolita. Love is the driving force of the work as love is
the cause of the madness and the actions which follow. However, it is a
love gone wrong, a love tainted with obsession. Humpert loves an idea and
loves nothing else. He is mad and his love is an obsessive kind that
drives all the major characters towards dismay endings. Thus Lolita is
perhaps also a warning on the dangers of unjust love, the power of love,
and the often indiscernible differences between love and obsession. Lost
must be giving, and Humpert is always taking. He cannot truly have loved
Lolita for he wanted to put her to sleep and kill her mom to achieve…...
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Bibliography
Vladamir Vladimirohivic. Lolita New York: Putnman, 1955.
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[i] I Vladamir Vladimirohivic Nabokov. Lolita. (New York: Putnman, 1955),4.II. Nabokov, 234.III. Nabokov 265.
1. The impact of the Salt March on the Indian independence movement 2. The role of women in the Harlem Renaissance 3. The influence of Chinese immigrants on the development of the American railroad system 4. The forgotten history of the Mexican Repatriation during the Great Depression 5. The impact of the Stonewall Riots on the LGBTQ rights movement 6. The role of Native American code talkers during World War II 7. The history of Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II 8. The significance of the Zoot Suit Riots in the history of civil rights in America 9. The contributions of Filipino farmworkers....
In the realm of literature, the art of storytelling extends far beyond traditional narrative conventions. Authors are constantly exploring innovative and unconventional writing styles to captivate readers and elevate the impact of their narratives. These experimental techniques offer a myriad of advantages, allowing authors to:
1. Break Monotony and Engage Readers:
Unconventional writing styles break the mold of familiar storytelling, preventing monotony and maintaining reader engagement. By introducing unexpected deviations from the norm, authors create an element of surprise and curiosity that keeps readers invested in the narrative.
2. Emphasize Emotions and Subconscious Experiences:
Through unconventional styles, authors can delve....
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