This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita

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This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in

Nabokov's Lolita Nabokov's Lolita

Amanda Wulforst

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Wulforst, Amanda, "This Is What Makes Us Girls: Recovering the Feminine Voice in Nabokov's Lolita"

(2020).

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Table of Contents 
Chapter 1: Such a Nasty Woman: Reclaiming Lolita from Toxic Freudian Analysis and 
Cultural Misconceptions ..................................................................................................... 5 
1.1 Literary criticism ....................................................................................................... 6 
1.2 Lolita’s modern significance ..................................................................................... 9 
Chapter 2: (You’re the) Devil in Disguise: Exposing Lolita’s Abuser and Contemplating 
His Madness ...................................................................................................................... 23 
2.1 The man behind the mask and his past .................................................................... 24 
2.2 The monster removes his veil .................................................................................. 36 
2.3 Unearth the devil, recover the girl .......................................................................... 43 
Chapter 3: A Trauma to Remember: Lolita, Sally Horner, and the Realities of Sexual 
Abuse ................................................................................................................................ 47 
3.1 The Sally Horner connection ................................................................................... 48 
3.2 Lolita’s ceaseless cycle of trauma ........................................................................... 57 
3.3 Death provides escapism for trauma ...................................................................... 64 
Chapter 4: Run Lolita Run: A Subversion of Masculine Hegemony and Lolita’s Feminist 
Resurrection ...................................................................................................................... 68 
4.1 Psychoanalytic feminism brings meaning to the text .............................................. 69 
4.2 The uplifting feminist death ..................................................................................... 76 
4.3 Recovering Lolita in film and modern narratives ................................................... 80 
4.4 The strength of survivor testimonies ....................................................................... 85 

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Chapter 5: Girl, I Believe You: Illuminating Survivor Testimonies to Mend the Cycle of 
Sexual Trauma .................................................................................................................. 89 
5.1 The significance of the survivor’s voice .................................................................. 90 
5.2 Survivors reclaim the narrative from abusers ......................................................... 91 
5.3 Reframing the narrative around sexuality and abuse ............................................. 94 
Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 99 
     

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: RAINN statistics on sexual assaults .................................................................. 10

Figure 2: "Lolita" art, Lana Del Rey, Born to Die Album ................................................ 12

Figure 3: Lolita costume from website lolitain.com ......................................................... 14

Figure 4: Actress, Alyssa Milano, shares “MeToo” post.................................................. 15

Figure 5: Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1962 ........................................................ 82

Figure 6: Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, 1997 .............................................................. 83

Figure 7: Cuties movie poster comparisons ...................................................................... 97

Chapter 1: Such a Nasty Woman: Reclaiming Lolita from Toxic

Freudian Analysis and Cultural Misconceptions

The mind of the pedophile is an incomprehensible object to many ‘normal’

individuals. What makes a person attracted to young children and why do they feel the

unfathomable compulsion to use children for sex? Vladimir Nabokov pens Lolita as a

psychological investigation into the most renowned literary sexual predator, Humbert

Humbert. By framing the novel through a memoir composed by Humbert’s own hand,

Nabokov provides the reader with an in-depth inspection of his psyche and his irrational

love for the twelve-year-old Lolita. However, Humbert’s narrative is intent on distorting

the reader’s perception of him. He plays with the reader’s understanding of his mental

neuroses and, by doing so, attempts to gain their sympathies. Humbert uses his traumatic

childhood and psychoanalysis to convince the reader that his lust for girls stemmed from

these events. With solipsism, he also depicts Lolita as a sensual creature who provokes

her own objectification and as a woman who encourages his craving for her. Nabokov

humanize this despicable character, thereby critiquing the reader’s ability to evaluate

Humbert because of his unreliable first-hand testimony; with this multifaceted text,

Nabokov confuses the reader and how they should feel about its unfurling contents. The

reader who sympathizes with Humbert in lieu of Lolita, falls prey to his seductive words

and comes face-to-face with their own morality. Humbert is not a good man and he

knowingly, willingly kidnaps and rapes Lolita. Lolita is not a seductress and cannot exert

any control over her situation. Yet, the sad fact is that many readers fall quarry to

Humbert’s rhetorical prowess and, because of the work, “the name Lolita has become

synonymous with a sexualized view of young girls” (O’Neill 2008). Therefore, it is

imperative to exercise a new reading of this novel and upend modernity’s interpretations

of both Humbert and Lolita. In this thesis, I explore how Humbert utilizes Freudian

theory to justify his perversions and contort Lolita into the perpetrator, how trauma

theory pits Humbert as a predator and Lolita as the disenfranchised victim, and how

psychoanalytic feminism can fully recover Lolita’s voice despite Humbert’s narratorial

control within the novel. Ultimately, I claim that feminist criticism reclaims Lolita from

her subjugation and her trauma, transforming her into a resilient and formidable survivor

against masculine sexual violence.

1.1 Literary criticism

Humbert employs psychoanalysis for his personal gain throughout this novel.

Sigmund Freud established this study as an attempt to uncover the inner mechanics of the

human mind and treat mental neuroses. With this theory, Freud alleges that loss triggers

conflict between the conscious and unconscious, yielding mental fixations. For instance,

Freud addresses two types of emotional responses to loss in “Mourning and

Melancholia.” In this essay, Freud states that mourning is a normal, conscious reaction to

the libido’s forced detachment from a loved object; conversely, Freud depicts

melancholia as the extreme psychological response to this loss. Most importantly, Freud

notes that if a melancholiac chooses to abandon the object in favor of ambivalence, the

“new substitute-object” transforms into an outlet for retaliation (Freud 162). Therefore,

the griever obtains pleasurable fulfilment from compulsive, sadistic torment on the self

(Freud 162). These responses reveal an important theme for grieving individuals: intense

mental trauma sparks internal fragmentation and undermines the sufferer’s original

identity. When applied to literature, Freudian theory allows writers and critics alike to

navigate the chasms of the mind, finding new and meaningful ways to examine life and

understand artistic expression. Yet Humbert manipulates Freud to garner sympathies

from his reader and explain away his sadistic fixation on young women. Humbert reveals

his childhood traumas to the reader: his mother dies in his infancy, his aunt expires on the

brink of his pubescence, and his father leaves him to start another family near his

adulthood. As if these wounds are not enough, his great love, Annabel, succumbs to

disease before he is able to culminate their relationship. For all these reasons, Humbert’s

anguish impacts his psychosexual development and aggravates his emotional state. He

also demonstrates how his fragmented mind leaves him attracted to girls or, as he refers

to them, ‘nymphets.’ Humbert uses psychoanalysis to mask his evil from the reader,

disguising his true monstrousness with science; through this criticism, Humbert conceals

his crimes against Lolita and obscures her pain from the narrative. Psychoanalysis cannot

fully unpack this novel as it concentrates exclusively on Humbert’s vindications for his

criminalities and injures the reader’s understanding of Lolita.

On one hand, psychoanalysis serves as a means for justification for Humbert,

allowing him to evade his criminalities and subsequent feelings of guilt; on the other

hand, trauma theory provides the reader with a glimpse of Humbert as the villain and into

the cause and effect of his pedophilia on his victim, Lolita. According to theorists, “a

traumatic event – or ‘traumatic stressor’ – produces an excess of external stimuli and a

corresponding excess of excitation in the brain” (Suleiman 276). A distressing event

leaves the mind unable to manage or respond properly. The brain must find ways to cope

with the tension, including dissociation or numbing (Suleiman 276). As a result, “trauma

is not only a drama of a past event, but also, even primarily, a drama of survival”

(Suleiman 280). The reader can apply this literary lens to Nabokov’s novel to uncover the

extent of Humbert’s violence against Lolita and the effects on her psyche. Throughout his

narrative, Humbert blames his pedophilic nature on his past mental wounds and justifies

his sexual attraction to young women to the reader. Furthermore, Humbert nurtures a

testimony that shows the ‘love affair’ between Lolita and himself. He utilizes romantic

rhetoric to describe his relationship with Lolita and to foster encouragement and

understanding from the reader. Humbert asks the reader to disregard his felonies by

accepting his word as absolute truth. Yet Humbert methodically, calculatedly abuses

Lolita throughout her childhood for his personal selfishness. Humbert intrudes in Lolita’s

youth as a voyeur, entrapping her with his male gaze. He marries and subsequently

murders her mother to fully own Lolita without intrusions. This diarist completely

tarnishes Lolita by stealing her identity by taking away her given name, Dolores ‘Dolly’

Haze. He holds her captive on a cross-country journey out west, steals away her

innocence by repeatedly raping her, and enshrines her most harrowing memories within

his book. Lolita loses her life because of Humbert and feels many psychological

consequences as a result of his predation. In a way, it seems that Lolita never transcends

what happens to her in the memoir. However, this novel investigates the area where

gender power constructs meet trauma, constructing a text that undermines Humbert’s

narrative control.

Psychoanalysis and trauma theory generate insight into Humbert’s psyche as a

criminal while psychoanalytic feminism triggers a dialogue about how Lolita, as a

woman, is treated by men in this novel. The binary weighing the genders against one

another must be broken for women to topple the patriarchy and for women to attain

equality. Freudian theory is rife with phallogocentric arguments the signify women as

lesser than men and his case studies are written to prove such claims. Hélène Cixous

criticizes Freud’s works and, instead, favors a feminist revision of his texts to give life to

the feminine plight against toxic masculinity. Cixous crafts works that inspire the female

voice and women writing. She asserts that, “Woman must put herself into the text – as

into the world and into history – by her own movement” and must strive, “to break up, to

destroy; and to foreseeable the unforeseeable, to project” (Cixous 242). Cixous believes

that woman must write herself into the text and create a new language of her own, outside

of the male created language of society that entraps her mind and body. Through her

words, she can subvert male authority and achieve her own autonomy. Woman must

destroy prior notion on womanhood, foresee a way past it, and project a new future for

themselves. Comparably, Humbert obscures Lolita in his memoir. His unreliable

narration and skillful rhetoric shroud Lolita within a work of his own machinations.

Lolita is a pawn to attract the readers to his story-telling and assuage his own guilty

conscience. The reader must reclaim Lolita’s voice and undermine Humbert’s masculine

oppression of her by framing Nabokov’s novel alongside Cixous’s feminist theories. A

feminist lens drives this work into a modern dialogue about masculine violence and

women’s effectual subjugation.

1.2 Lolita’s modern significance

Nabokov’s Lolita serves as a cultural artifact that critiques the fetishization and

subjugation of young women in American society. However, modern American culture

propagates and glorifies Lolita as a sensual woman. Perpetuating the stereotype of young

women as sexualized creatures encourages their objectification by men and even

seemingly endorses abuse of women because of their sensuality. While Nabokov

published this novel in 1955, the thoughts and ideas he captured within the text are still

relevant today - approximately sixty-five years later. Recent United States Department of

Justice statistics indicate concerning numbers for women: “National epidemiological data

indicate that 1-in-5 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, most often by a

male perpetrator” (Campbell 2019). At least twenty percent of women will suffer from

sexual assault by a male predator in their lifetime and, in the United States, at least one

American is sexually assaulted every seventy-three seconds.

Figure 1: RAINN statistics depicting assaults against women every 73 seconds in the

United States in 2020, https://www.rainn.org/about-sexual-assault

Conversely, “only five out of every 1,000 rapists,” or 0.5%, will be incarcerated for their

crimes (RAINN). While the number of attacks decreased since 1993, the numbers of

attacks versus condemned rapists are still exceedingly high and call attention to

prevalence of masculine violence against women (RAINN). Moreover, if the reader

examines Lolita closely, they will observe that Nabokov’s novel provides a reminder of

the effects of sexual abuse like depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and

dissociation. Lolita suffers immensely at Humbert’s hands as she loses her mother,

childhood, innocence, name, and her identity. Lolita also fails to achieve a normal

adulthood because of pedophilia on her psyche that serve as a memento of her pain.

While Lolita endures specific impressions from her trauma, the Rape, Abuse & Incest

National Network (RAINN) cites that survivors also experience additional effects

including, self-harm, suicide, substance abuse, panic attacks, sexually transmitted

diseases, sleep disorders, and many more (RAINN).

Modern American culture sexualizes women and emulates it through music,

films, fashion, and even literature, which illuminates their objectification in society. For

instance, Lana Del Rey’s appeal is a technicolor version of 1940-50s America,

sentimentalizing this era as a time which promotes ‘free’ women in love with bad boys

and where life in the west is an exciting adventure. As a result, it is not surprising as to

why Del Rey clings to Nabokov’s Lolita. Specifically, this singer overlays references to

Nabokov’s contentious novel over a poppy beat in her songs, “Lolita” and “Off to the

Races” from her Born to Die album. “Lolita” boasts lyrics like “I know that I'm a mess

with my long hair / And my suntan, short dress, bare feet / I don't care what they say

about me, what they say about me / Because I know that it's L-O-V-E / You make me

happy, you make me happy” (Del Rey 02:47-03:01). Del Rey transforms Lolita into an

erotic woman who embraces her sweetheart despite what anyone else might think of their

relationship. The final bridge of the song envisions Lolita as a romance, where the female

protagonist is actually in love with her villainous captor and croons a love tune to him.

Del Rey also fosters idyllic Lolita imagery with fashion. She likens her own appearance

to Lolita in figure 2, adorning sunglasses similar to those that Sue Lyon wore in her

portrayal in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation and producing a seductive

nonchalance for the audience.

Figure 2: "Lolita" art, Lana Del Rey, Born to Die Album

Similarly, Del Rey plays with the famous opening lines of Lolita in the bridge of her

track, “Off to the Races.” She sings, “Light of my life, fire in my loins / Be a good baby,

do what I want / Light of my life, fire in my loins / Gimme them gold coins / Gimme

them coins” (Del Rey 00:36-00:47). She conjures dark imagery about the relationship

between a young woman and a possessive, middle-aged man when she evokes Humbert’s

introduction to his memoir. At the same time, she also references how Lolita made

Humbert pay her money for sex. Del Rey metamorphoses Lolita’s continuous rape into a

rich, glamorous, lifestyle to be idolized by young listeners. Furthermore, the final verse

of the song solidifies Lolita as a dreamy, amorous archetype who just wants to love her

man without the world’s interference:

My old man is a thief, and/ I'm gonna stay and pray with him till the end /

But I trust in the decision of the law / To watch over us / Take him when he

may, if he may / I'm not afraid to say / That I'd die without him / Who else

is gonna put up with me this way? / I need you, I breathe you, I'll never

leave you / They would rue the day, I was alone without you (Lana Del Rey)

This artist takes Lolita’s trauma and turns it into a catchy, passionate melody, resuming

Humbert’s cycle of abuse into the 21

century. Del Rey exacerbates Humbert’s power

over Lolita by painting her as a carefree spirit, in love with her demented man and willing

to die for him. It seems that Del Rey promotes this abusive relationship with her songs

and interpretation of Nabokov’s novel. However, in an Instagram post, Del Rey asserts

that opposite, “picked up this theme, insisting she was writing ‘about the realities of what

we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the

world’” (Savage 2020). Del Rey’s artistic preferences are her own to choose and create,

yet her artistry perpetuates a harmful reading of Lolita and further engenders the

sexualization of the young woman in Nabokov’s text.

Idealization of the ‘Lolita’ figure even reaches Japan’s fashion subculture,

spinning Nabokov’s heroine into a style symbol of innocent sweetness. This genre blends

Victorian fashion with lollipop, childlike cuteness to create the Lolita-look and was a

reaction against Japan’s strict adherence to gender roles and find solace in the beautiful

innocence of childhood. This trend, while subversive in its own right, causes issues with

objectification of the female body.

Figure 3: Lolita costume from website lolitain.com

Lolitas came to fame in Japan prior to Nabokov’s work being translated into Japanese

and the film adaption. The name’s origin seems unknown yet was “chosen by designers

and participants” brands without fully knowing the implications (Deerstalker Pictures

02:19-03:20). Adults wear voluminous dress skirts that skate at the knees, ankle socks or

tights, and tie the piece together with flats with bows or high heels. While the culture

refers to youthful charm, the fashion statement produces a negative connation when

compared to Nabokov’s novel, which toyed with the sexualization of young girls. As a

result, lolitas face backlash for fueling pedophilic fantasies about and desires for children.

Alternatively, the MeToo movement publicly calls for attention to, and fights

against, sexual harassment and abuse. This movement prompted widespread exposure of

predators and demonstrates the vast reaches of sexual abuse in modern society. Tarana

Burke founded an organization to support women and help them heal after sexual assault.

In 2006, Burke initiated the MeToo movement to empower women who face sexual

violence. In 2017, Burke’s efforts were taken to new heights. Following allegations of

Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: “If you’ve been

sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet” on October 15,

2017 (Pflum 2018). Thousands of women worldwide retweeted Milano’s post, sharing

their experiences with masculine aggression against women and generating a new fervor

to Burke’s awareness platform.

Figure 4: Actress, Alyssa Milano, shares “MeToo” post on Twitter on October 15, 2017

Woman called out bosses, friends, family, strangers, and even famous figures. These

women insisted that their voices be heard and called for justice against the widespread

disease of masculine aggression. Therefore, MeToo, “became a widespread battle cry for

those seeking to show that sexual harassment is not an isolated incident, and nor is sexual

assault rare. The results were far-reaching – dozens of powerful men accused, many of

them toppled, a handful criminally charged” (Pflum 2018). Women encouraged each

other to confront the patriarchy and find justice. They advocated autonomy for

themselves outside of the traumas they endured at the hands of men.

Powerful men use their resources against women to suffocate any attempt to

speak out against them; however, the collective female voice can bring about justice for

these women. For example, Harvey Weinstein was the most prominent producer in the

American film industry and, as such, was an individual who was well-respected by his

peers. However, more than eighty women came forward with sexual assault allegations

against Weinstein in October 2017. These accusations incited the MeToo movement to

propagate heavily on social media platforms like Twitter, inspiring thousands of women

to share their own stories of sexual abuse and also prompting many to call out other

famous, influential men for similar cruelties. On May 25, 2018, Weinstein was charged

with “rape, criminal sex act, sex abuse, and sexual misconduct” and arrested by police

(“Harvey Weinstein”). The two women who brought charges against him, Miriam Haley

and Jessica Mann, presented testimony of their rapes to the jury. Annabella Sciorra,

Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff, and Lauren Young also testified in the court case as

character witnesses against Weinstein and to establish a pattern of similar past behavior

by the mogul. Throughout the trial, the six women shared their individual experiences,

yet all women recalled how Weinstein utilized his power and connections to both attack

and silence them. Finally, in February 2020, a Manhattan jury found Weinstein guilty of

two felony sex crimes and, “for many, the trial was a crucial test in the effort to hold

powerful men accountable for sexual harassment in the workplace” (Ransom 2020).

While not all of the women subjected to Weinstein’s assaults found justice for the

transgressions against them, his sentence was a “watershed moment” for them and

women everywhere (Ransom 2020). Tarana Burke comments on Weinstein’s

incarceration: “’Most of us will never see the inside of the courtroom, but these women

got to take the stand, look him in the eye and say, ‘You did this to me,’ […] ‘He will

forever be guilty. That’s a thing we have’” (Ransom 2020). Burke asserts that most

women will not find justice for crimes against them, but Weinstein’s guilty verdict was a

step in the right director for the survivors and for females everywhere who face cruelty at

the hands of men. The six valiant women took to the stand, facing their predator, and

publicly accused him – their voices heard.

Weinstein was not the only prominent man toppled by the MeToo movement and

he will not be the last as the movement continues to gain traction well into 2020. Jeffrey

Epstein amassed wealth and power not only as an American financier (and conman) but

through his connections to elite socialites, princes, business and Hollywood moguls, and

politicians. Like Weinstein, Epstein used his money and powerful connections to

intimidate and manipulate his victims:

’He would find out they have no home, no car, that they need a place to live,

and he would provide a place to live,’ Edwards said. ‘He can get you to the

best doctors. Sometimes he would do that and sometimes he wouldn’t do

that, but the promise was real because as soon as you walk into his house

and see there are legitimate cooks, chefs, and assistants, everybody catering

to him — it gives this air of legitimacy. I mean, everybody in this whole

entire mansion can’t possibly be running an illegal sex trafficking operation,

right?’ (Brown 2019)

Epstein would find girls and exploit their vulnerabilities like poverty and broken homes.

He would guarantee to these young women that they would be taken care of and he ‘only

asked’ for sexual favors in return. He also used Ghislaine Maxwell and his own pyramid

scheme to find girls, which included sending previous victims out to procure others with

the promise of money. With this system of abuse, it is difficult for the authorities to

understand the magnitude of Epstein’s sexual abuse and trafficking. However, it seems

that many individuals were aware of what was happening at Epstein’s residences and

failed to intervene; for example, survivor, Sarah Ransome, recalls that, “’Not one person

helped us,’ said Sarah Ransome […] ‘Everyone around us had to know, because we

looked so broken. But no one did anything’” (Brown 2019). Ransome remembers that no

one helped her – even though they had to know what was going on. Ransome and may

others were caught in his web of exploitation without a way out and without help.

Finally, Epstein was arrested on federal charges on July 6, 2019 after the FBI identified

thirty-six women who were victims of his sexual abuse (Carlisle 2019). Approximately a

month later, Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell on August 10, 2020. His survivors

will never be able to publicly accuse him and get the justice that they deserve. However,

the U.S. District Judge Richard Berman allowed twenty-three of Epstein survivors to take

the stand to speak against what happened to them. These women were finally able to have

their voices heard in the courtroom. Virginia Roberts Guiffre stated that, while Epstein is

dead and the trial against him is over, her job is not complete: “’The reckoning must not

end. It must continue […] He did not act alone, and we the victims know that’” (Carlisle

2019). Giuffre calls for all of Epstein’s friends and fellow abusers to also be punished for

their crimes. All individuals involved must be charged, arrested, and tried.

R. Kelly stole the hearts of rhythm and blues lovers world-wide, but he hid dark

pedophilic secrets in his closet; pending the court hearing, his victims are still waiting for

closure and healing. Kelly used his power in the music industry to control young women

and he started his power trip incredibly early in his career. For instance, in a secret

wedding in 1994, a twenty-seven-year-old Kelly married the fifteen-year-old Aaliyah

(Savage 2020). Subsequent to his annulment, Kelly was a part of several lawsuits with

Tiffany Hawkins, Tracy Sampson, Patrice Jones, and Montina Woods who stated that he

sexually abused them when they were teenagers, videotaped sexual acts performed

against them, or forcing them to get an abortion. Tracy Sampson advised that, "He often

tried to control every aspect of my life including who I would see and where I would

go,’” (Savage 2020). Like Weinstein and Epstein, Kelly kept young girls under his

influence. Yet Kelly took his manipulation more personally by dictating their every move

for them. Kelly also became part of an FBI investigation when they acquired a sex tape

of himself with an underage girl. He was subsequently charged in 2002 with 21 counts of

child pornography that never stuck, indicted with an additional 14 counts from 2002 to

2004 that were also thrown out, taken to court in a lawsuit filed by his ex-wife because he

knowingly gave her a sexually transmitted disease, and further allegations from Jerhonda

Pace who broke her non-disclosure agreement to tell the world that he raped her while

she was underage and tortured her (Savage 2020). Meanwhile, Kelly released the

“wildly successful Trapped in the Closet album” and was even “nominated for an Image

Award by the NAACP” (Savage 2020). Numerous women suffered at Kelly’s hands, yet

he continued to remain a successful, accoladed artist. Society seemingly discounted the

narrative of cruelty circling the singer. In 2018, the #MuteRKelly campaign began and

prompted labels and stations to stop promoting Kelly’s songs – twenty-four years after

his first incident of sexual contact with a minor, Aaliyah (Savage 2020). Kelly

infamously stated, “’Only God can mute me […] Am I supposed to go to jail or lose my

career because of your opinion?’” (Savage 2020). Kelly refused to admit to wrongdoing

and professed his innocence, even though many women rose to speak their truth against

him. Roughly a year later, their voices were heard; in 2019, Illinois and New York

indicted Kelly with federal charges such as sex trafficking, child pornography, and

obstruction (Savage 2020). Kelly is currently awaiting trial, along with his victims who

yearn to tell their stories and for justice against this predator.

Rich, influential men like Weinstein, Epstein, and Kelly perpetuate the gender

power dynamic between men and women, as well as the account of violence against

women. Women become victims to them, falling one by one at their feet. As a society, it

is time to focus on the female voice and let the masculine predators fade to the

background. Survivor testimonies are an important outlet to give command back to

women and so they can preserve their own stories. Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall

state that, “It often seems that girlhood has congealed into a single sad story in which

imperiled girls await rescue, with limited hope or success” (Gilmore 667). It is necessary

to unravel this narrative and fashion a new mode of understanding women as victims in

literary texts. They are not girls who casualties awaiting saving from the justice system.

They are women who encountered atrocities and who are trying to heal from them. Their

testimonies allow them to take back their voice and save themselves: “The user of the

young girl as a narrator positions the reader as a learner alongside [the narrator] rather

than as the student to be taught by the adult authors […] The horrors of violence and

gendered oppression are revealed to […] the reader/viewer simultaneously” (Gilmore

681). A male authorship and analysis obscure the reader from the female’s suppression

and blurs the truth of their representation. Through a female perspective and authorial

control, the reader can gain the realities of the cruelty committed against her by men.

Nabokov’s Lolita s a psychological investigation into the most renowned literary

sexual predator, Humbert. With this brilliant work, it is important to be aware of society’s

existing relationship with Lolita and how its morphed throughout the last sixty-five years.

Lolita is no longer an innocent girl who is subjected to Humbert’s pedophilic actions.

Instead, she is interpreted by culture as the ‘nymphet’ and her sexuality is used against

her as a means of objectification. Critic, Elizabeth Patnoe, solicits the question: “Why

didn’t the Lolita myth evolve in a way that more accurately reflects Nabokov’s Lolita?

Why isn’t the definition of ‘Lolita’ ‘a molested adolescent girl’ instead of a ‘seductive’

one?” (Patnoe 83). Nabokov’s multifaceted text supports misinterpretations despite the

proof he gives his readers about Humbert’s criminalities and Lolita’s victimization.

Through the mind of a pedophile, the reader surveys how he uses his narrative to blend

and shape truth to fit his intentions. Humbert uses skillful rhetoric and Freudian to

convince the reader that he did not choose to fulfill his pedophilic urges, that he loves

Lolita, and that he is not to be solely blamed for the events in the novel. Yet Humbert’s

words merely mask his monstrousness. He kidnaps and rapes Lolita, seeking to possess

her body, identity, and selfhood completely. My thesis will convey how Humbert utilizes

language and psychoanalysis to conceal his crimes. I will also demonstrate how trauma

theory marks Humbert as the perpetrator and, providing a comprehensive review of the

ways in which Lolita suffers at his hands throughout the memoir. And I will uncover how

to retrieve Lolita’s overpowered voice and how psychoanalytic feminism recaptures

Lolita’s voice despite Humbert’s control within the novel. A reader can inherently

impose the binary opposition of male versus female in this text and, in doing so,

“interprets and presents her oppositionally” (Patnoe 83). As Humbert writes, the ‘Lolita’

sexuality becomes a danger to all men. Yet by retrieving Lolita from the text, she can tell

her own story and conquer her victimization. Lolita can finally be free from Humbert’s

demons and express herself with her own modes of expression. She will no longer be

ensnared in his wicked web of masculine dominance, trapped within her all-consuming

trauma.

Chapter 2: (You’re the) Devil in Disguise: Exposing Lolita’s Abuser

and Contemplating His Madness

Sigmund Freud asserts that intrapsychic tensions between the conscious and

unconscious can produce psychological issues, including melancholy. Freud classifies

melancholia as the extreme anguish over a lost ideal deeply buried in the unconscious;

without an object-cathexis, the newly freed libido forms an identification between the ego

and the lost object, irrevocably altering the ego (Freud 153). Similarly, Nabokov

inundates Lolita with suffering, exposing its causes and repercussions through the

protagonist, Humbert Humbert, and his narrative. In Humbert’s developmental years, he

loses his mother, aunt, father, and childhood love, Annabel: his mother dies in a tragic

picnic accident when he was three, his aunt passes away after his sixteenth birthday, his

father abandons him for a new family in France as he is nearing adulthood, and Annabel

succumbs to typhus after their fruitless, uncompensated summer together. While each

loss impacts Humbert’s psychological growth, Annabel’s death ushers in an anguish that

alters his psyche permanently. Annabel signifies Humbert’s final close, unsuccessful

relationship in a string of juvenile comeuppances. Failing to consummate his connection

with her, he clings to her youthlike shade, which haunts his unconscious and incites his

attraction to young girls. As Humbert’s obsession with women-children

grows and takes

shape in his conscious, his mental state corrodes and his self-hood fragments. He

commits sordid crimes in order to satiate his compulsion and his narrative becomes

erratic as he vindicates his actions to himself, as well as the reader. Humbert’s pedophilic

preoccupation and self-fragmentation through his elaborate testimony, as I demonstrate,

Humbert explicitly refers to young women he finds attractive as ‘women-children’ or ‘nymphets’

throughout the novel.

arise from his past wounds, his inability to cope with his misery, and his compulsive need

for control. Yet, Nabokov’s coded language, I claim, is confusing, seductive, and

unreliable, simultaneously serving as a warning and an invitation. Such an analysis is

relevant to understand the different masks used to conceal the inherent evils of masculine

hegemony and its impact.

2.1 The man behind the mask and his past

Lolita opens with scientific, logical rhetoric to encourage, perhaps ironically, a

psychoanalytic reading of the narrative that follows. The novel begins with a foreword by

the editor, John Ray, Jr, who introduces the reader to H.H. (Humbert Humbert), his

crime, and the ensuing memoir he wrote while in captivity for his offence. Ray laments

that, “the special experience ‘H.H.’ describes with such despair; that had our demented

diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would

have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book” (4). Ray

fashions a sympathetic lens for the reader to regard Humbert with because the

introduction cites untreated psychological issues as the central factor leading to the

crimes depicted throughout the memoir. He postulates that Humbert is a criminal because

of his psychology and states that, if Humbert sought intervention prior to the events, the

kidnapping, pedophilia, and murder would have been avoided. Ray holds great

confidence in psychotherapy and, as a specialist in this field, the reader trusts his

assertions. As a result, the reader begins the memoir with Ray’s interpretations in mind,

searching for justification for Humbert’s criminal behavior and thereby dissociating him

from his inner maliciousness; while psychoanalysis can provide the reader with insight

into Humbert’s unhinged mind, it does trap the reader into actually blaming him for his

sins and considering the victim, Lolita. Also, some critics equate Ray as an extension on

Humbert’s narrative. Julian Connolly agrees in her chapter, “Humbert’s Memoir,

Nabokov’s Novel: A Reader’s Analysis,” elaborating that “The style of Ray’s

commentary alternates between the prosaic and the poetic” (69). For instance, this editor

finds beauty in Humbert’s literary piece, eagerly applauding the memoir for its craft and

genius while simultaneously and perfunctorily expressing the general importance of

Freudian theory within the work. He condemns and uplifts Humbert at the same time, all

the while obfuscating the effects of Humbert’s actions. Like Humbert, the preface fails to

provide Lolita with a voice, further victimizing her and laying the foundation of her

continued cycle of abuse for the sake of art. Ray’s rhetorical shifts sets up the novel’s

chaotic tone and represent the instability of the narrative voice throughout the work.

However, some critics disagree with this perspective and proclaim that Nabokov

uses a tongue-in-cheek tone in the foreword to mock Freudian thought. For instance, John

Ingham states that “Nabokov may parody psychoanalysis to counter the threat it poses to

the autonomy of the artist and the magic of art” (28). Ingham presumes that the foreword

is a satire to stave off presumed character interiorities, preserve the author’s freedoms and

uphold the charm of the work. Critics like Ingham believe that Nabokov critiques Freud

because his theories are detrimental to authorial intent and the characters’ aesthetic

contributions to the work. While some critics lambast Freudian analysis of this novel, the

foreword, as well as the entire work, inspires this sort of investigation into the psyche of

its characters. On one hand, the foreword explicitly calls out the importance of

psychotherapy and how it could have prevented Humbert’s repugnant actions and

Lolita’s devastating conclusion; with therapy, Humbert could have experienced a

catharsis that quelled the effects of his mental illness. On the other hand, psychoanalysis

allows Humbert to disguise his evil and rationalize his offenses. Humbert begins his

memoir with a description of all the events that triggered his mental afflictions, leaving

the reader to believe that what happens throughout the work to be not his fault all because

Ray swayed the reader with his introductory remarks in the preface.

Ray concludes the foreword by further pointing out that the novel is also a

warning that cautions the reader of the imminent dangers that emanate from deep within

the unconscious: “As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects and still more

important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the

book should have on the serious reader; […] they warn us of dangerous trends; they point

out potent evils” (5). The editor states that the reader gleams a ‘moral lesson’ from

Humbert’s tale because they can absorb the beauty of the text without surrendering to the

narrator’s evil perversions and pleas for compassion. Yet John Ray’s statement extends

literary accolades to a pedophilic and morally corrupt author, calling into question of

whether a writer’s corruption can inhibit their prowess and literary skill. Nabokov weaves

this contradictory language into the introduction, advising the reader to take notice of the

severity of Humbert’s actions and their import outside of literary significance. As the tale

unfolds, the reader understands the impact of Humbert’s past on his current self but, more

importantly, also examines his narrative and artistic techniques for different meanings

and learns the multi-faceted depths of this narrator.

Humbert’s familial loss etches into his unconscious, carving out pockets of

trauma that will develop into large craters and severely impact his mental state. Humbert

first encounters death at an early age: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak

accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and save for a pocket of warmth in the

darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which

if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had

set” (7). Humbert’s declaration of his mother’s death seems shocking, flippant, and a sign

of his egoism (Connolly 72). Nevertheless, he was a young child when his mother died

and memories of her are only formed through looking back through archives of her

picturesque face. He does not have memories of his mother and lacks the warmth and

motherly comforts as a result of her tragic death. Humbert does not feel whole with her

absence and does not have a connection to, or understanding of, the feminine as a result

of his mother’s passing. According to Freud, a child’s first attachment is during their oral

psychosexual development stage where they first attach to their mother’s breast (Freud

188). Freud proclaims that children between the ages of two and five then enter the

phallic psychosexual development stage and begin to experience sexual curiosity as their

libido and ego emerge (Freud 188). A male child fixates on his mother, clinging to his

infantile object-cathexis with his mother’s breasts and spurring on “the final shape of his

erotic life” (Freud 188). Humbert loses his mother in the primacy of his phallic stage

and, therefore, he seeks out an alternate to gratify his emerging libido. Motherly loss

stunts Humbert’s sexuality at the start of his psychosexual phase and initiates the start of

his neuroses. After Humbert’s mother dies, he attempts to fasten himself to his Aunt

Sybil, his ‘mother-replacement’ and the only feminine figure that remains in his life. His

aunt also meets a grim fate: “Aunt Sybil had pink-rimmed azure eyes and a waxen

complexion. She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she

would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did” (8). Humbert’s aunt correctly

assumes the timing of her death, leaving Humbert without any semblance of motherly

comfort and affection. And, once again, Humbert’s libido grieves for its feminine

fixation. Humbert’s narrative shows the reader that this lack disrupts his maturing libido

and his growing consciousness, irrevocably changing how he considers and responds to

women throughout the course of his life, and the memoir.

On the brink of adulthood, his remaining motherlike influence meets her untimely

fate and leaves Humbert with only his father for comfort. Consequently, Humbert’s father

became his world: “He, mon cher petit papa, took me out boating and biking, taught me

to swim and dive and water-ski, read to me Don Quixote and Les Misérables, and I

adored and respected him and felt glad for him whenever I overheard the servants discuss

his various lady-friends [who][…] shed precious tears over my cheerful motherlessness”

(8). His father teaches him to play water sports and inspires his love of romantic novels;

also, his father’s mistresses “come and go in his life without names” but, regardless,

Humbert still loves his father, his only familial link. Despite his mother’s and aunt’s

absence, Humbert seems to prosper under his father’s attention. Humbert hears murmurs

about his motherly lack, but he buries her dark memory in the deepest reaches of his

mind, instead focusing on his father’s attention. His father abandons him for another

family and, eventually, leaves him all together. Nabokov emphasizes the importance of

the family, especially fathers in numerous interviews: he was a “a deeply moral man and

[with] a profoundly moral body of work. Nabokov noted in his journal: ‘There are moral

principles passed down from father to son, from generation to generation.’ He strove to

express these moral principles in his fiction – and in his life” (Goldman 2). Per Goldman,

fathers play an important role in handing down guiding moral lessons to their sons.

Growing up, Humbert’s father taught him sports and about works like Don Quixote, but

any moral lessons are excluded from his narrative. However, the La Mancha knight

shares Humbert’s penchant for erotic preoccupations, disillusionment, and self-

destruction. Cervantes’s thematic devices seem to mirror Humbert’s later ‘romantic’

leanings and disastrous inclinations throughout the text; in their time together, Humbert’s

father provided him with a foundation for his later abuses. Nabokov’s exclusion of a solid

fatherly presence in Humbert’s childhood in this text reveals that the narrator is

predisposed to dubious ethical standards, which is further exacerbated by the melancholia

triggered by his father’s departure. Humbert is familiar with loss, but nothing prepares

him for losing his childhood love.

Humbert’s love for Annabel is intense and her death is a devastating blow to his

psyche; this loss impacts him more so than any other experiences in his childhood and

incontrovertibly traumatizes him for life. His memory clings to Annabel: “There are two

kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of

your mind, with your eyes open […] and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut

eyes, the objective absolutely optical of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors

(and this is how I see Lolita)” (9). Within the novel’s first chapter, Humbert advises the

reader that his memory of Annabel is vivid and heavenly. He recalls her image with

certainty and immediacy. While Humbert’s memory of his family is succinct and matter

of fact, his portrayal of his time spent with Annabel is elaborate and poetic. The

narrative’s tone completely shifts and displays Humbert’s deep and consuming feelings

for Annabel. Humbert depicts a soulmate-love to describe his relationship with Annabel,

stating, “

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with

each other; hopelessly I should add, because that frenzy of mutual

possession might be been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and

assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were,

unable even to mate as slum children would have to easily had an

opportunity to do. (10)

The language is lulling and magical, coinciding with Humbert’s feelings for Annabel.

Their love takes over their psyches and sparks a furious, lustful need for bodily

satisfaction. The poetic narrative immediately concludes when Annabel dies, their

passionate love left unconsummated: “four months later she died of typhus in Corfu”

(11). Their love affair is told in a grandiose fashion, but the romantic language concludes

with a final, brief sentence. Annabel passes at a distance, but her end reverberates in

Humbert’s mind and quells his sentimental love. Through the layer of these memories,

the reader experiences Humbert’s soul, and identity, cracking as he loses himself to grief.

Dale Peterson declares that Nabokov: “eloquently and obsessively connected the

successful evocation of memorable images with the sensation of absence” (104). Peterson

claims that Nabokov’s works combine descriptive imagery with the feeling of loss, a key

factor in mental depression. Humbert’s already unstable libido adheres to Annabel. With

her death, the libido forms connection between the loss of his ideal woman and his ego,

conjuring a significant blow to his mind and triggering melancholia. He also exhibits

depression’s key features include violent reactions like “profoundly painful dejection,

abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all

activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in

self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of

punishment” (Freud 153). Specifically, Humbert, cannot love and is prone to self-hate.

He claims to love Lolita, but his love punishes and abuses her. While he attempts to cast

off his shame throughout his memoir, he also demonstrates moments of clarity. These

responses to mental injuries reveal an important theme for grieving individuals: intense

mental trauma sparks internal fragmentation and undermines the sufferer’s original

identity. Humbert’s loss triggers intense melancholia and his psyche begins to yearn to

fill the hole created by Annabel’s death.

As Humbert continues his story, he explains to the reader that Annabel rests deep

in his unconscious, inciting yearnings for women-children that reminded him of her to the

point where his self-hood becomes reliant on these obsessions. Humbert outrightly posits:

in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was

my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of inherent

singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and

so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the

analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each

visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex

prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and

fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. I also know that the shock of

Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer,

made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance. (11)

Nabokov implicitly utilizes psychoanalysis in this passage, presenting Humbert’s

interiority as he analyzes the neuroses linked to his troubled present. Annabel haunts

Humbert’s mind; through self-analysis, he uncovers that the summer is when his life

began to unravel, consciously slipping into madness. Once Annabel dies, he believes that

his psyche is forever changed. Though its many years after her death, Humbert imagines

that he can still feel Annabel’s essence merging with his own. The narrative eloquently

and romantically describes Humbert’s descent into melancholia through the visual of

their minds merging as one unit, which represents Annabel’s fixation to his ego.

Consequently, this narrator postulates that this mental trauma corrupts, destabilizes his

identity, and irrevocably alters his sexuality. Because of his deep mental wounds and

fixation on Annabel’s youthful spirit, Humbert compulsively struggles to obtain his ideal

once more and fixates on young girls in compensation. Despite Humbert’s narrative, the

reader must question: how reliable is his narrative? Humbert’s rhetoric dazzles with

hyperbolic introspection and persuasive lamentation, seemingly manipulating the reader

with his scientific knowledge and application to his youthful ‘despair.’ Additionally.

Nabokov lambasted Freudian thought because he deemed it an “ignorant” approach to

understand the complexity of human mind (Kwon 69). Many critics even argue that

Nabokov uses psychoanalysis in this novel to criticize the psychiatrist’s application in

literature and its characters. One critic, Joanna Trzeciak, writes that, “With Freud the

dominant hermeneutic force of his times, Nabokov had little choice to engage him” (65).

Freud is the founding father of psychology and is even a major player in literary theory.

Nabokov, as a writer, spotlights the complexity of the human mind in his works and

attempts to demonstrate its unknowability (Trzeciak 65). Nabokov also heavily

incorporates psychological themes and imagery in his works, which automatically

promotes psychoanalytic readings. Even so, the modern reader may gleam more from the

novel should they disregard authorial intent and scrutinize the work’s experientiality. As

Humbert explains his criminal deeds, the reader can ascertain the importance of

dissecting his actions in relation to his past mental injuries as the two are fundamentally

entangled together. The reader must also be aware that Humbert is a well-versed,

intelligent narrator who seeks to control the memoir’s audience; for that reason, the

reader must take caution when Humbert psychoanalyzes himself and cautiously pull apart

his words to determine deeper meanings.

Humbert’s pedophilic fixations become even more grotesque as he enters

manhood and uses his position to assert his dominance over these girls, satiating his

unconscious pleas for relief from his mental pain. Like Poe, Nabokov focuses on “sexual

peculiarities” throughout Lolita (Coviello 858). Nabokov venerated Poe’s Southern

Gothic works and Peter Coviello likens Nabokov to Poe in his essay, asserting that both

authors use perversions like pedophilia, “as the engine that sustains, through a range of

permutation, the ongoing drama of sexual promise and sexual frustration” (Coviello 858).

Moreover, Poe and Nabokov use the taboo metaphorically, crafting pedophiles with

extreme anxiety regarding gender difference. Poe’s and Nabokov’s characters express

frustration with women throughout their works and align with pedophilia as a means for

exercising control over their own sexuality. Based on the characters’ narration, they

employ their will over children because of their anxiety concerning adult women and

their equivalence to men; in doing so, they level out the perceived power structures

between the sexes. At first, Humbert’s male gaze commits odious crimes against young

girls. Humbert admits: “Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had

formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various

institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with

matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in

dreams” (13-14). Like a true predator, Humbert stalks his youthful prey and searches for

his ideal victim. At university, Humbert begins to study psychology before he ultimately

changes his major to literature. His short time with psychology students allows him to use

his school connections to freely observe his youthful target. Humbert’s narrative turns

poetic once again as he beings to ruminate on the young girls. For example, he constructs

a name for the young girls he peruses and employs mythological language in order to

elucidate their siren-call. These girls are spellbinding and otherworldly and he

mythologizes them: “the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm

that separates the nymphets from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more

dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island

of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes” (14). Humbert depicts these

‘nymphets’ as dark faerie creatures, full of malcontent. His language is prosaic, but the

underlying malevolence is scandalous; while the words inspire beautiful imagery, the

girls transform into charming but mischievous and sinister beings that corrupt man. By

shaping these young girls as devious, fae-like beings, Humbert transfers any sort of

blame from himself and onto the girls, attempting to assuage any guilt for his neurotic,

deviant behaviors.

Humbert alludes that his childhood trauma triggers self-destructiveness within his

psyche because of his inability to cope with the pressures associated with losing Annabel.

Throughout the narrative, Humbert does not seem to be negatively affected by his mental

wounds or his monstrous appetite. In select scenes, Humbert is angry with himself

because of his desires and laments that he cannot help himself. In these chaotic throes,

Humbert’s lofty language becomes introspective and he examines his mind through the

lens of Freud’s theories:

While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body’s plea.

One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic.

Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with the

pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of

amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel […] At other times I would tell

myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing

wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. (16)

First, the manic memoirist calls upon Freud as his mind breaks, trying to understand the

cause and effects of his obsessions. He then claims the girls light his once darkened ideal

by likening them to Annabel’s ghostly memory. Based on his own self-analysis, he states

that losing Annabel causes him to search for something similar to his ideal love to satiate

his libido and damaged ego. He affixes these young women to an ideal state and

obsessives over them. Meanwhile, Humbert intertwines romantic language with

psychology, his writing style prosaic and matter-of-face as he persuades the reader why

he is not at fault for his pedophilic predilections and supports these reasons with scientific

evidence. Humbert continues and cries that social mores keep him from what his body

desires. Despite his protestations, Humbert tries to negotiate with himself, to justify his

deviant lust, advising that, “Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine,

a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in

1274” (17). Dante Alighieri, loved a nine-year-old girl, Beatrice. Humbert cites literary

references to normalize his case and cast blame from himself for his maddening desires.

He also references historical figures like Queen Nefertiti and King Akhenaten, India, and

Petrarch and Laureen to assert his case to the reader. Moreover, he contemplates why the

United States and England condemn sex with children if many other cultures still

participate in this act. As a result, Humbert makes the reader, and himself, question why

sleeping with, or obsessing over, young girls is a modern, social taboo. With logical

reasons like historical and cultural citations, Humbert also helps quell his conscience and

self-destructive thoughts, if only for a moment in time. Yet, Humbert’s mind refocuses on

his pedophilia: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite

melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame

permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!)” (14).

Humbert admits to his insanity and deprecates himself. Yet, Humbert also refers to

himself as an artist, detracting from his admission of shame in lieu of self-commendation.

One moment, Humbert’s narrative justifies his lust, while the next moment grieves over

the causes of his demented actions. This narrative contradiction illustrates the instability

within Humbert and, subsequently, in the novel.

2.2 The monster removes his veil

Throughout the novel, Humbert addresses his pedophilia with conflicting feelings;

consequently, his volatile narrative masks his evil and inherent need for control over

women. At first, it may seem that Humbert feels sympathy for his victims: “A propos: I

have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of

criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not

affect their future? I had possessed her – and she never knew it. All right” (18).

Nevertheless, Humbert continues to seduce and even kidnap the ‘objects’ of his

obsessions, going so far as to persuade the reader that they were active participants in

their own demise. Yet Humbert seems sympathetic about causing harm to his victims. He

contemplates if his actions affected them. Towards the end of his passage, Humbert

believes that the girl was unaware of his control and, therefore, he did not affect her or

cause her pain. His final words, “All right,” resound and cast off any guilt; this narrator

suppresses the guilt in his unconscious (18). This interiority is conflicted and unstable,

mimicking the war that wages in Humbert’s own mind as a result of his lust. However, a

vast majority of his narrative indicates his psychological compulsion to manipulate and

possess women, unraveling his shameful repentance and revealing the inner monster

within this narrator. For instance, he directly expresses that he could attain “any adult

female [he] chose” (22). To prove himself right, Humbert decides to marry Valeria to

show that he can attract an adult female even though he feels nothing for her. While

Humbert does not love Valeria, he becomes enraged when he finds his wife with another

man: “A mounting fury was suffocating me – not because I had any particular fondness

for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction

were for me alone to decide” (24). Humbert lacks control over his marriage’s fate and his

wife. His fury sparks a fire because Valeria shows womanly independence outside of his

influence and made the decision to leave him. Humbert views himself, as a man, as

superior to women and feels anger when they escape his domination. He yearns for

control and adult women prove to be outside of his realm of manipulation. As a result, he

exposes a primary reason for why he victimizes young women - they are deemed easier

to govern and oppress with their age and innocence.

As Humbert begins his story about Lolita (Dolores Haze) he describes his

immediate infatuation with her and distaste for her mother, setting the stage for the cycle

of abuse to continue for all involved and further solidifying his urge for control over

women in his life. He instantly identifies Lolita, associating her persona with the ideal he

lost with Annabel. Humbert positions himself in close proximity to her daily life,

marrying the mother, Charlotte Haze, who he often refers to as that ‘Haze woman.’ After

his marriage to Valeria, Humbert is weary of his ability to influence Charlotte, especially

with the added fact of her brazen American womanhood: “I could make her change her

mind instantly; but anything of the sort in regards to Charlotte was unthinkable. Bland

American Charlotte frightened me” (77). Humbert considers Charlotte and is instantly

alarmed; he might not be able to manage her ‘American,’ head-strong nature, but he

believes that he is intelligent and capable of molding her to his will. In turn, Humbert

depicts Charlotte as an unloving, jealous mother to sway the reader against her and

validate his self-perceived superiority over her. Humbert succeeds in fooling Charlotte

for quite some time, but she ultimately escapes his control. Once Charlotte recognizes

Humbert’s intentions towards her daughter, she calls him out for the villain that he is:

“You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud. If you come near –

I’ll scream out the window” (89). For the first time, a woman outrightly calls out

Humbert for his sinister behavior and attempts to derail his entire existence exposing him.

He fails to maintain authority over Charlotte and, therefore, she perishes so that he can

keep his secret and pursue her daughter.

Humbert believes that Lolita was made for him and pulls her into his turbulent life

and psychosis, using his past psychological pain to explain his obsession with the young

girl and justifying his gendered trauma. Lolita captivates Humbert at first sight. Instantly,

he likens her to his Annabel and his libido takes hold of her, just as the trauma takes over

his own identity. On further observation, Humbert postulates that Lolita may even eclipse

Annabel’s meaning within his mind, replace the lost ideal he has been searching for since

her death: “my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I

checked against the features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this nouvelle,

this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype” (36). Humbert’s psyche

ravages Lolita and reduces her to a thing, an object for his psyche to cling to and possess.

At first sight, Humbert realizes that Lolita could be the object-cathexis that his mind lost

and contemplates that she may be the key to replacing his Annabel and his sorrow. Going

forward, Humbert buries himself in Lolita’s life, clings and sordidly seeks out her

youthful beauty, and navigates his way to kidnap her. After she learns of her mother’s

death, Humbert finds her withdrawn and worries about his plan: “As she was in the act of

getting back into the car, an expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face. It flitted again,

more meaningfully, as she settled down beside me. […] Loquacious Lo was silent. Cold

spiders of panic crawled down my back. This was an orphan. This was a lone child”

(131). Lolita, to Humbert, is always full of laughter and beauty yet, as she sinks into his

car, he sees hurt flicker across her young face. The reader is unable to interpret Lolita’s

thoughts outside of Humbert’s narrative; simultaneously, Humbert captures Lolita

physically and mentally. Therefore, the reader must interpret Lolita’s facial expressions

through Humbert’s filter. Humbert shows that he worries about Lolita’s pain and shivers

shimmy down his spine as he contemplates what she could be thinking in this moment.

He knows that Lolita is alone, just like himself and just like he planned. Now, Lolita will

continue to be alone through his sustained abuse on their adventure across the United

States. Despite Lolita’s suffering, Humbert continues to manipulate every aspect of

Lolita’s life, including how she deals with grief over her mother, and further her mental

scars from her sexual abuse.

Humbert seeks absolution for his sins through establishing Quilty as the villain of

the tale. On one hand, Humbert is a combination of “picaro, sentimentalist, victim,

marginal man, madman and artist;” in this text, Humbert plays various different roles

(Uphaus 104). On the other hand, Quilty acts as a “warning to Humbert’s mad life of

excess” and reveals the possibilities of what is to come if Humbert continues to act in

extravagance and immorality (Uphaus 106). Humbert enacts different roles to validate his

actions throughout the novel and exercise his control over the reader’s perceptions of

him. He introduces Quilty to lessen his own demons while Nabokov utilizes Quilty as a

figural glimpse into Humbert’s potential future should he continue with a cycle of sexual

abuse against, and control over, women. Despite Quilty’s symbolic depictions, Humbert

regards Quilty as a vilified figure throughout the text to displace blame from himself. For

example, Humbert tells the reader:

Unless it can be proven to me – to me as I am now, today, with my heart

and my beard, and my putrefaction – that, in the infinite run it does not

matter a jot that a North American girl child named Dolores Haze had been

deprived of her childhood by a maniac […] I see nothing for the treatment

of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art

(266)

Humbert concedes that Lolita’s childhood was a tragedy but does not reveal the identity

of the “maniac” who ruined her life (266). Until this moment, Humbert focuses on

keeping Lolita for himself, as an object to own, instead of a person to love and consider.

Despite his declarations of love, Humbert cannot disassociate Lolita from his object-

cathexis. Humbert overcomes each moral objection and tarnishes Lolita’s purity. In spite

of Humbert’s guilty conscience, he dictates that Quilty damages Lolita’s youth and

virtue, failing to accept his responsibility for Lolita’s heartbreak. Humbert cannot escape

his melancholy outside of the art of writing. He believes that art, his writing, will bring

about catharsis and heal the past and numb his pain. After Quilty abducts Lolita,

Humbert, in turn, blames the kidnapper for taking advantage of her youth. Humbert

stands in front of Quilty and reads off the allegations against him, his voice prosaic but

disjointed: “Because you took advantage of a sinner / because you took advantage /

because you took / because you took advantage of my disadvantage […] / because of all

you did / because of all I did not / you have to die (282). In his own words, Humbert

observes that he is a victim, just like Lolita. Quilty stole his prize and Humbert believes

that he deserves his own justice. Humbert is at the brink of collapse because of his

mental incapacities as shown through the lilting and fractured narrative structure of his

poetry. His power over Lolita and his own life slips through his fingers, prompting a

psychological break. The only thing left to control is language and the reader’s perception

of him. Therefore, he clings to lyrical wordsmithing, which allows him to craft a diatribe

against Quilty and all of the ways that he hurt Lolita, casting off all of his culpability by

writing his sins and casting them onto another sinful villain.

Humbert, emmeshed in his poetry, murders his literary foil, relieving his

distressed conscience and atoning for his abuses. But Quilty is guilty of the same

pedophilic crime as Humbert, so how are Quilty’s crimes that abominable to Humbert?

Humbert’s unconscious regards Quilty as his double. By confronting Quilty, Humbert is

finally able to challenge himself about what he has done to Lolita. Also, by killing Quilty,

Humbert murders the part of his suffering mind and find solace amidst his struggle with

his identity, regaining control of his own fate. Yet Humbert does not find self-comfort

after murdering Quilty. On the contrary, the narrative continues to retrospectively fixate

on his wrong-doings and his mental torment because his identity is still broken. Humbert

tells the audience that he deserves to be penalized for his misdeeds: “Had I come before

myself, I would give Humbert at least thirty-five years for rape” (290). Humbert acts as

his own judge and jury, giving himself his own sentence for his crimes. The narrator

neglects to define his offenses and leaves the reader questioning whether he deserves jail

time for Quilty’s murder or for Lolita’s abduction and rape. Because Humbert does

identify his transgressions to the reader, he demonstrates that he cannot completely

regard what he forced Lolita through and, therefore, fails to clear his conscience with

Quilty’s murder. This narrator escapes any real time in prison through self-therapy as he

crafts his art, confessing his sins and negating them at the same time. His art does not

grant him a true healing experience because this unreliable narrator cannot admit the truth

of his actions or repent for his failures. Linda Kauffman reviews Humbert’s internal

struggle through a feminist lens and asserts: “Aesthetic bliss is not a criterion that

compensates for those crimes; instead it is a dead end, meager consolation of the murder

of Lolita’s childhood” (163). Humbert’s memoir does not pay for his misdeeds and is not

a viable alternative for escaping his guilt. In fact, the diary provides paltry comfort to

recompense for Lolita’s tragic story. The text does not encourage a positive outlook for

any character and their inner traumas continue to eat them away from the inside out.

Humbert remains the same after he murders Quilty: expressing that his past triggered his

present monstrosity, failing to fully realize the harm of his actions on his victims, and

continuing to control the victims like chess pieces through the memoir’s conclusion.

Humbert, like Quilty, dies without fully addressing and compensating for their sins.

2.3 Unearth the devil, recover the girl

Many writers who emphasize melancholy in their works allow their characters to

work through their mental injuries and experience catharsis by their conclusions;

however, Nabokov’s Humbert fails to free himself from his fixations and his

melancholia, despite this protagonist’s protestations. Leona Tucker declares that “Lolita

produces a cathartic effect. It lulls us into long spans of sympathy for Humbert and then

punishes us for our temporary suspension in judgment” (200). Nabokov’s novel

reprimands the reader when they fall for Humbert’s rhetoric and feel sympathetic for him.

Tucker asserts that the liberating experience is when the audience is castigated so they

can free their minds from Humbert’s narrative clutches. Humbert, himself, remains

frozen in his chaotic mind. He writes this memoir about Lolita, showing that his

compulsive hunger still affects his conscious: “I wish this memoir to be published only

when Lolita is no longer alive,” so that he would not besmirch her name or make her

suffer any longer (290). Regardless, Humbert keeps Lolita captive in his mind and in his

text, further subjecting her to his oppression and stealing her away for his own benefit.

Humbert does not allow Lolita freedom even after their deaths. Instead, her victimization

will forever be immortalized within the tombs of Humbert’s art. Additionally, Humbert

then speaks directly to Lolita in the text, stating: “Be true to your Dick. Do not let other

fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. […] That husband of yours, I hope, will

always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke,

like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve” (291). Humbert is still inserting

himself into Lolita’s life without permission, controlling her with his self-perceived

masculine dominance. He even threatens her husband, Dick, proclaiming that his ghost

would rip him apart should any harm come to her. Humbert fails to recognize the pain he

inflicted on Lolita and, in doing so, paints himself as an avenging angel who will stop at

nothing to keep her safe. It seems that, despite the moral lesson, he still cannot overcome

his obsession and is mentally corrupt. He concludes his passage to Lolita with these final

lines: “the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I share, my Lolita”

(291). Humbert takes shelter in his art, his memoir, to preserve his memory and love for

his Lolita. With the art, Humbert cannot release his melancholia and its repercussions on

his mind. He attempts to cleanse his trauma by means of sanitariums, his prison stay, and

even by writing this novel. However, despite awareness of his flaws and fixations,

Humbert remains a flagrant narrator and does not undergo any sort of catharsis

throughout the entirety of this novel. Humbert fails to fully realize how he controls

Lolita, exposing her to continued abuse throughout the course of the novel and

afterwards.

Nabokov, like Freud, attempts to expose the mechanics behind the human mind in

his novel. Critic John Ingham states that this work is based on “Freud’s paper on the

rescue fantasy” (Ingham 28). For instance, a number of critics follow Humbert as he

“tries to protect Lolita from Quilty, and he fathers a ‘child’ with Lolita in the form of a

memoir, a text that transforms Lolita and himself into an immortal work of art” (Ingham

29). Many writers believe that Nabokov solely attempts to parody out Freudian thought

and set a demented Humbert up as carrying out the “parental art of procreation” (Ingham

29). However, considering this work as exclusively a mockery would discount any of the

psychological development that Nabokov analyzes throughout this work. Humbert’s

traumatic past invades his identity and the work’s narrative, highlighting the cause and

effect of mental anguish on the conscious. As a child, Humbert experiences loss of

parental figures and an ideal of love. Seemingly unable to reconcile with his past, a

young Humbert turns inward into his unconscious and his libido fully takes hold of his

ego. His libido, with a mental state grief-stricken over the lost love, spurs his fascination

with young girls. As Humbert’s obsession with women-children grows, his mental state

decays and he is incontrovertibly changed. Humbert’s identity solely exists to satiate his

fixations, which, in turn, completely fragments his original identity. Nabokov indicates

that Humbert’s demented mental state correlates to the language used throughout the

novel. In the memoir, Humbert is mostly clear and concise. However, as Humbert

negotiates with his conscience, attempts to conceal his wrong doings, or explains away

his abuses, his language becomes prosaic and elaborate; in fact, the author, Humbert,

reveals his inner madness as he uses artful literary devices and lofty rhetoric. This chapter

is not intended to relieve Humbert of any guilt; on the contrary, it is an attempt to

understand the madman behind Nabokov’s pen and the ways he uses language as a means

of hiding Lolita’s truths from the reader, displacing his guilty conscience, and continuing

his abusive behaviors. By understanding the monster, the reader can gleam more insight

into how he manipulates the reader with his psychoanalysis self-interpretations and vies

for control of Lolita’s voice and body throughout the text. In the next chapter, I will

discuss the effects of gendered trauma by analyzing Lolita’s experiences throughout the

memoir.

Chapter 3: A Trauma to Remember: Lolita, Sally Horner,

and the Realities of Sexual Abuse

While psychoanalysis provides Humbert with an escape from his crimes and guilt,

trauma theory exposes Humbert as the perpetrator and reveals Lolita as both a victim and

a survivor of sexual abuse. Throughout his memoir, Humbert attempts to seduce the

reader and cultivate their compassion as he describes his sordid ‘love affair’ with the

young Lolita. With prosaic language, Humbert composes an account describing the

events that trigger his pedophilia and present him as a sympathetic narrator. His text

encourages the reader to discount his heinous crimes, as well as to displace any

subsequent blame, obscuring his criminalities with psychoanalysis. Yet, he fails to fully

conceal Lolita’s insurmountable suffering and the abuse she endures from the reader.

Lolita’s systematic abuse begins when Humbert dismantles her home, infiltrating her

family as a newfound ‘father figure’ and playing a significant role in her mother’s

untimely death. Humbert deprives her of her youth to satiate his sadistic sexual fixations,

confiscates her self-hood by usurping her name and stealing her voice, alters the course

of her life which inexplicably prompts her death, and, as his final act, forever entombs

her within a literary coffin stained by the memories of her childhood torment. By

analyzing this work through a trauma theory lens, Lolita’s muted identity returns to the

forefront of the literary conversation, despite Humbert’s attempt to textually dominate

her. Judith Herman defines a traumatic event as one that “overwhelm[s] the ordinary

human adaptions to life,” which “Unlike commonplace misfortunes […] traumatic events

generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with

violence and death” (Herman 33). Trauma theory facilitates comprehension of how

Humbert’s actions impact Lolita, thereby uncovering the ways in which Lolita suffers, as

a casualty of abuse, in a modern society. Throughout this novel, with Herman’s definition

in mind, Humbert violates Lolita’s body and voice, traumatizing her to the core of her

identity. According to scientific studies, children who suffer sexual abuse are subject to

“dysthymic symptoms,” which is related to persistent depressive state, and experience

“psychological, emotional, and social consequences” as they grow into adulthood

(Horwitz 195, Larsen 436). As a result of Humbert’s prolonged sexual abuse, Lolita is

subject to an array of subsequent life altering consequences. Furthermore, Humbert stalks

and assaults Lolita because he views her as a youthful, feminine object, or a plaything for

his pleasurable amusements. Many critics believe that Nabokov’s novel references the

actual abduction of Sally Horner. Although Nabokov never verified the origins of his

tale, pairing the novel with a true kidnapping reveals the stark reality of male domination

while subverting Humbert’s power as the creator of Lolita. In the text, Humbert advises

the reader that Lolita exercises control over him and entices him. On the contrary, Lolita

is powerless in the face of Humbert’s male gaze and domination, invisible beyond the

confines of Humbert’s distorted recollections. In this chapter, I contend that Nabokov’s

Lolita covertly explores the space where feminism and trauma intersect, creating a text

that subverts masculine hegemony by exposing Lolita's abuse through the fissures of

Humbert's narrative.

3.1 The Sally Horner connection

Nabokov seemingly constructs his novel around Sally Horner’s abduction; by

setting Sally’s kidnapping as the foundation for his work, Nabokov comments on the

reality of toxic masculinity and its effects on women. In 1948, Frank La Salle stole

eleven-year-old Sally in Camden, New Jersey. Sally took a notebook from a store “to

impress some popular girls” but Frank stopped her and made her follow him, claiming

that he was with the FBI (Waldman 2018). Frank journeyed across the United States with

Sally to settle in California. When Sally told her neighbor about her Frank, she “endured

twenty-one months of rape and abuse” (Waldman 2018). Sally died in a car crash in

1952, only two years after she was rescued from Frank. Like Sally, Lolita falls prey to an

older man’s malintent and faces sexual abuse at the hands of her abductor. Lolita also

encounters a tragic end after finding freedom from their abuser. On the surface, Sally’s

life and Lolita’s tale match almost perfectly, signifying that Nabokov drew inspiration

from Sally’s capture. At the time of the work’s release, critics lambasted Nabokov “for

draping entrancing sentences over the ugliness of sexual abuse” and “obscures the truth

of Sally’s pain and trauma, and thereby is a betrayal of Sally and all the victims of sexual

abuse” (Waldman 2018). Some critics regard Nabokov with judgement, stating that he

exalts pedophilia and entraps Sally in a continuous cycle of violence. Yet, the reader must

remember that Nabokov’s narrator pens this novel to recount his fixation with his young

‘love.’ The reader should not fall into the narrator’s sympathy snare or else they shall

become “moral mincemeat” along with the diarist (Waldman 2018). Instead, Nabokov

provides the reader with the ugly truths of a pedophile’s mind, exposing their sadism and

the victim’s truths. The novel pays tribute to the Lolita and not to the pedophilic

memoirist. As a result, the narrative creates a tension between masculine dominion over

women and the ensuing trauma. It is important to preserve Sally’s story while reading

Lolita in order to address the similarities of their abuses and to examine the prominence

of child sexual abuse, as well as its consequences.

As Humbert describes his fixation with Lolita to his reader, he uses his masculine

gaze, as well as his power as a writer, to overpower her and denies her individual

existence outside of her sexuality; in doing so, Humbert grooms Lolita into his silent

prey. Frank La Salle found a lone child and used a false position of authority to capture

her. Similarly, Humbert identifies vulnerable, young girls as his ‘perfect victims’ and

exploits their helplessness. Humbert pinpoints fatherless, affectionate-starved children as

his ideal target, allowing him to disguise his pedophilia with paternal affection. As a

narcissist sex offender, Humbert also uses affection to control the young girls and turns

the shame onto them once he ensnares them in his wicked trap. Humbert uses language

and style to persuade the reader, as well as the children themselves, that they are to blame

for his demented appetite:

Now I wish to introduce the following idea. 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.’ (14)

He asserts that the girls enrapture him with their otherworldly powers. His romantic,

magical word-choices hypersexualize the girls and transforms them into seductresses,

leaving himself as the ‘innocent’ casualty of their will. Humbert’s rhetoric also

contributes to the tone of masculine oppression throughout the novel. To Humbert,

women are not equal to men but, by fashioning these girls into subhuman creatures, he

denigrates their existence and casts them further outside of the fixed gender binary power

dynamic. In a patriarchal society, lineage stems from the father and explains the child’s

ancestry; consequently, a woman’s sensuality can trigger male anxiety about their legacy

(Gubar 3). Therefore, society envelopes women into categories of ‘angel’ or

‘madwoman’ to reinforce order and masculine control over their own history; similarly,

literature recapitulates this notion and also designates women as objects “exist[ing] only

to be acted on by men” (Gubar 4). Likewise, Patnoe believes that Lolita aligns with a

conversation that condemns feminine sexuality and reinforces masculine violence against

women. Lolita’s story expands upon an existing discourse that justifies male sexuality

and castigates female sexuality (Patnoe 84). By sexualizing Lolita, Humbert shifts blame

from himself onto Lolita. Lolita’s perceived female ‘sexuality’ provides a way for

Humbert to justify his sexual abuse and what happens to Lolita. Yet Humbert fails to

account for the actual children underneath his painting. His male gaze seeks the children

out and perpetrates masculine violence against them. Likewise, Humbert references

Lolita as the sexual instigator, blaming her for his perversions: “[…] it was she who

seduced me” (124). From one perspective, the dominant one, the narrative tells a story of

a brazen, flirty girl who tempts Humbert. From another perspective, the marginal one,

Humbert sets his sights on Lolita as soon as he enters the Haze household – his gaze a

panopticon to keep her under his thumb. He even weasels his way into becoming Lolita’s

stepfather and holds stock in her mother’s death, all so that he can steal Lolita away for

his own his personal gain despite any tragic consequences for the young Haze.

Humbert’s distorted portrait of Lolita detracts from her image and identity; as a

result, Humbert becomes Lolita’s author as well as her eliminator. Humbert hides the true

Lolita and only reveals her to the audience when she can be useful within the text. First,

the memoirist drugs Lolita to keep her physically inert and emotionally muted:

“Tomorrow I would stuff her with those earlier pills that had so thoroughly numbed her

mummy” (121). Humbert plies Lolita with medication to keep her compliant and to dull

her responses to his advances. Like her mother, Lolita is more useful to him as a doll and

not as a full-bodied, fully present person, susceptible to only his wants and needs.

Humbert disparages Lolita further by literarily transforming himself into her god-like

creator: “In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one

summer, an initial girl-child” (7). He explains that his sexually unfulfilled relationship

with his childhood love, Annabel, prompted Lolita’s existence in the world. He proclaims

that his loss triggers his pedophilic predilections towards Lolita. On the surface,

Humbert’s argument may seem like a plausible, scientific formulation of his base

fixations. However, Humbert envisions Lolita as his own creation and objectifies her

youthful girlhood by pinpointing himself as her maker; to this diarist, she does not exist

beyond his narration and experience which impairs her ability to fashion a self outside of

his control. Humbert does not gain enough power by taking on a ‘father’ role and

assumes ultimate authority as her God. Additionally, Humbert’s memoir is devoid of

Lolita’s thoughts or feelings, or even reliable depictions of her actions; throughout this

tale, Humbert filters Lolita’s words and activities through his own interpretations, leaving

the reader uncertain of whether or not he provides a clear and accurate portrayal of her.

Lolita’s chronic immobility represents another way in which Humbert attempts to own

and influence her character throughout the memoir. Humbert’s narrative creates a

problem, however, if the reader fails to interpret the ways in which the narrator

suppresses his victim’s voice and identity. For instance, Rachel Carroll states that, “the

unreliability of Humbert’s narrative voice many have remained complicit in his

construction of Lolita in the image of his own” and many critics like Carroll agree that

Humbert’s narrative speaks to the need for feminist movements against the sexual abuse

against girls (70). The reader colludes with Humbert in Lolita’s abuse should they fail to

see through his attempt to censor her self-hood and steal her youth. If the reader fails to

consider Lolita’s suffering, they fail to see the importance of the dialogue concerning the

abuse of girls.

It is imperative to comprehend how Humbert’s sexual perversions strip Lolita of

her childhood through his dialogue concerning her adolescent abuses; he reduces Lolita

to a sexualized object without thought to the negative impact his actions would, and will,

have on her developing psyche. Humbert’s sole goal is to ensnare Lolita and groom her

into his own liking. In his plot to capture Lolita, Humbert first conspires to steal her away

from her family. Humbert invades Lolita’s life through his ‘love affair’ with her mother,

Charlotte. His narrative is distinctly critical of Charlotte and casts her into a negative

light. Julian Connolly states that, “From his point of view, Charlotte primarily serves as

an obstacle between him and the object of his desire, Dolly Haze. […] He consistently

lampoons her with terms such as ‘bland Mrs. Haze, ‘phocine mama,’ ‘fat Haze,’ ‘the old

cat,’ the obnoxious lady,’ and ‘the big cold Haze” (Connolly 82). Humbert’s verbal

lashings tell the reader how to feel about Charlotte and leaves them with feelings of

distaste for her. Humbert continually throws insults at Charlotte in his memoir in order to

provide credence for Lolita’s abduction; in his mind, Charlotte represents the impediment

between Lolita and himself. Humbert doubles-down on his invectives by pitting Charlotte

and daughter against one another and in a warfare enflamed by jealousy. Humbert depicts

Charlotte “as jealous rival of [her] own daughter and incestuous triangle arise[s]”

(Masing-Delic 181). Through portraying Charlotte as a competitor for Humbert’s

affections, he shapes her into an uncaring, selfish, and sexually deviant mother figure

who is unfit to parent Lolita. Humbert wants the reader to find reason within his quest to

steal Lolita from her mother. Subsequently, when Charlotte uncovers Humbert’s

scheming thoughts about her daughter, she confronts him and ends up losing her life.

Humbert’s actions kill Charlotte and deprive Lolita of the only parent she has left in her

life. Most importantly, Humbert removes the only feminine influence in Lolita’s life,

disconnecting her from a female community and subsequently traumatizing her childhood

development. Without her mother, Lolita is ripped away from her support system, from

her maternal protector. Humbert violently tears Lolita from her own lineage and replaces

it with himself as her patriarchal master; therefore, Humbert becomes Lolita’s sole

creator, provider, and caretaker.

Without reserve, Humbert then steals Lolita’s given name, denying her a self-

hood outside of his command. The novel’s title, Humbert’s opening lines, and the entirety

of the novel emphasize the importance of ‘Lolita.’ Yet, Lolita’s birth name is Dolores and

everyone in her life calls her by its variations except Humbert: “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” (7).

Our narrator chooses this name for an array of reasons and many critics examine how he

calls her “Lolita, while everyone else calls her by the name she prefers, Dolly” (Patnoe

98). First, Humbert inspires a connection with her by bestowing her with a special pet

name and demonstrates his power over her by naming her as an architect titles their

designs. He also metamorphoses her into what he imagines as an adult, ethereal siren.

Unlike Dolores, Lolita would be a romantic, striking name in the American 1940s.

Humbert believes that this new name will transpose Lolita into potent seductress and

justify her eventual rape to the reader; for this reason, her new name objectifies her based

on his artificial manifestation of her sexuality. Irene Masing-Delic accedes and postulates

that the narrative’s focus on the false name veils Humbert’s devious intentions and

Lolita’s suffering at his hands: “Lolita is in its entirety focused on the sexual exploitation

of a child, the fey-like Lolita whose ‘lolly-pop’ name – so erotically and ‘phonetically-

linguistically’ savored by Humbert in the famous opening of the novel – is a sugar-

coating over her real name: Dolores. This name reveals the true reality of her, as well as

her tormentor’s torments” (181). Lolita is Dolores’s magical name that enhances the

realities of her mistreatment and Humbert’s lust for young women. The sickening-sweet

name becomes a reflection of her sexualized personality given to her by Humbert and

transforms her into a mystical creature. Her rechristening significantly suppresses her

original self from the reader. While Humbert chooses the Spanish name for Dolores for

nefarious purposes, Nabokov indulges in word play to covertly reveal the memoirist’s

plot and Lolita’s to the reader. Lolita is the Spanish diminutive of Dolores, which

translates to ‘pains’ or ‘suffering’ (O’Neill 2008). Then, in Catholicism, the Virgin Mary

is famously coined Our Lady of Sorrows, or Nuestra Seora de los Dolores in Spanish,

due to the seven griefs she experiences in her lifetime including the rise and fall of Jesus

Christ and is commonly depicted with seven swords spearing her torso (Awalt 26).

Nabokov not only emphasizes that Lolita’s name reflects her own anguish but likens her

to the Virgin Mary too. In the New Testament, Mary is a perpetual virgin and the ideal

Christian woman. Like Mary, Lolita is an innocent woman who encounters immense

agony at the hands of man. Nabokov contradicts Humbert’s defamation of Lolita by

aligning her with the Virgin Mary. Despite Nabokov’s inferences, however, Lolita’s “life,

fate, and image continue to be supplanted” by Humbert over the course of his memoir

because he uses her name as a means of control (Patnoe 98). He even goes as far as to

name his memoir Lolita in her honor even though his memoir continually silences her

throughout its pages.

Humbert completes his grooming process as he forces Lolita into a submissive

state via physical, emotional, and literary manipulation; in these ways, this diarist seizes

total ownership of her body, mind, and perception. He steals her name and identity, kills

off her mother, repeatedly plies her with drugs, abducts her for a cross-country journey to

California, and rapes her to fulfill his sadistic cravings. Yet Humbert pleads with the

reader that his actions are beyond his control and, despite his cries for salvation, he

categorically admits to his violence against Lolita as he lapses into his extravagant

musings. For instance, Humbert inadvertently illustrates Lolita’s maltreatment and his

power over her when he describes himself as a “a radiant and robust Turk” and Lolita as

“the youngest and frailest of his slaves” (60). This imagery reveals Humbert as a

powerful conqueror and Lolita as his feeble prisoner. Overall, Humbert delineates Lolita

as an aggressor and seducer, but he simultaneously paints Lolita as a slave, revealing the

truth about her abduction; by enslaving Lolita, he restricts her autonomy and undermines

her identity. Humbert fully establishes Lolita as the ‘other’ when he paints her as a slave;

in his text, he objectifies her for her sexual worth, suppresses any chances for her to tell

her own story, and suffocates her voice. He claims that he loves Lolita, but he only values

her for her subjugation and the commodities she represents for him. Humbert, more

accurately, enjoys control. Humbert must defeat his any obstacles standing in his way of

his treasures and his ownership of it. He enjoys dominating Lolita and advertises his

pleasure to the reader: “In the middle of the night she came sobbing into [my room], and

we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go” (142).

Humbert pairs his literary imagery of Lolita’s enslavement with actual depictions of her

captivity. Lolita, still a child, must rely on her captor for everything. When Lolita cries,

he takes satisfaction in how he possesses her and how she has nowhere else to go. He

took away everything from her, leaving her no choice but to succumb to his will; by

stripping Lolita from her previous life, Humbert gains complete supremacy over Lolita

and he revels in his power.

3.2 Lolita’s ceaseless cycle of trauma

Humbert believes that he fools the world with his father-like façade but other

characters notice Lolita’s imprisonment, which reveals Humbert’s evil nature and

Lolita’s traumas. This memoirist considers himself a genius and a master of fooling

everyone around him. Throughout the novel, Humbert arrogantly boasts his cunning

ways: “I felt proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the

morals of a minor. Absolutely no harm done” (57). Humbert pleasures himself without

Lolita, or anyone, catching onto him. He imagines that he is a brilliant, covert pervert,

incapable of being caught by the outside world. Yet when others cast their gaze on

Humbert, they make him uncomfortable and inadvertently cause him to disclose his deep-

seated fears of being exposed for his crimes. For instance, Humbert feels that Mrs.

Chatfield likens him to a high-profile predator: “It was Mrs. Chatfield. She attached me

with a fake smile, all aglow with evil curiosity. (Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what

Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in

1948)?” (272). As Humbert narrates Mrs. Chatfield’s inner assessments, he unwittingly

compares himself to the infamous Frank Lasalle. Nabokov confirmed that Lolita includes

references to real pedophile cases but, because Humbert explicitly names Frank in his

narrative, he implicitly makes a parallel association between the two pedophiles

(Waldman 2018). Frank and Humbert are both con men who use lies and masculine

authority to entrap and torment their young victims. By linking himself with a notorious

offender, Humbert confesses to the extent of his crimes and renders his sins more

tangible to the reader; any reader who is familiar with Frank can comprehend the

disastrous, real-life consequences for Sally Horner and the dangers that Humbert presents

to Lolita and other women. Moreover, Clare Quilty also sees through Humbert’s

pretense. Quilty is an unrestrained, unrepentant pedophile and fully regards Humbert as a

kindred man: "We are men of the world, in everything—sex, free verse, marksmanship. If

you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends […] but really, my dear Mr.

Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather" (283). Unlike Humbert, Quilty is candid

about his desires and his vicious behavior. However, as Quilty points out, these men are

more similar than not, and Humbert is not as innocent as he wants the outside world to

believe. Quilty outrightly points out that Humbert is not the model father figure to Lolita

and that he is a lustful fiend - just like him. As a result, Quilty’s narration nudges the

reader into consciousness and allows them to open their eyes to the true Humbert’s

pedophilic monstrousness.

Despite Humbert’s attempt to mute Lolita, her dialogue reveals that she is more

aware of her imprisonment than he thinks her to be throughout the novel. Lolita’s voice

silently prods through the narrative, demonstrating her acknowledgment of the undulating

torture Humbert subjects her to over the course of her childhood. For example, Lolita

seemingly jests with Humbert about their captor/victim relationship: “’The word is

incest," said Lo—and walked into the closet, walked out again with a young golden

giggle” (112). Lolita calls Humbert out for his incestuous actions towards her. Though

Humbert concludes his conversation with her chuckle, Lolita’s emphasis on her rape

sharpens the fact that Lolita is conscious of his sexual advances and may not be as

comfortable with them as Humbert leads on. She is not naïve and is highly cognizant of

the situation Humbert places her in, despite her inability to escape him. The memoir’s

dialogue further captures Lolita’s abuse through Humbert’s eyes as he contemplates, in a

moment of atypical remorse, how his actions affect Lolita; for instance, Humbert

ponders, “This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-

smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning” (131). The

narrative’s imagery provides a grotesque picture of Humbert’s sexual abuse to the reader,

allowing for a rare glimpse into the very real and abominable ways in which he tortures

Lolita on their trip across the United States after her abduction. Humbert depicts Lolita as

a solitary child and himself as a lustful adult man, prompting the reader to feel grief for

her circumstances. Her genuine portrait underlines her true suffering, contradicting

Humbert’s earlier portrayals of this young girl. Humbert counters his honest descriptions

of Lolita with disingenuous, mythical portraits of his ‘love affair.’ Yet Humbert still

confesses that Lolita does not travel with him willingly: “Despite our tiffs, despite her

nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and

the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise

whose skies were the color of hell flames—but still a paradise” (155). On one hand,

Humbert likens himself to Milton’s depiction of the fallen angel, Lucifer, as he is cast out

of paradise as an epic hero. On the other hand, Lolita scratches and tears at Humbert’s

imaginings, elucidating the reality of her capture and the terror she faces because of her

kidnapping; Humbert fashions them into a romantic paradise, while Lolita silently begs

for her freedom in the backdrop of his idyllic language.

As a direct result of Humbert’s victimization, Lolita lives in relative squalor; her

‘adult’ circumstances correlate to the traumas of her sexual abuse. The Adverse

Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study explains that there is a strong relationship between

high ACEs scores and “mental problems, such as depression, anxiety, and behavioral

disorders,” as well as “physical health problems such as […] a shortened lifespan”

(Maryland Coalition of Families). Humbert subjected Lolita to an array of cruelties in her

youth, leaving her at high risk for acquiring bodily and emotional issues in her adulthood.

Humbert stole Lolita’s life when he imposed his body and mind on her. For example,

after Lolita runs away from Humbert and subsequently leaves Quilty, she settles in a

dilapidated town, marries Dick Schiller, and becomes pregnant at seventeen years old.

Lolita writes to Humbert because she needs money to move to Alaska. When Humbert

arrives at her house, he uses bleak, sullied imagery to set the scene: “Hunter Road was

[…] in an even more dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden,

and shack, and gray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I

stopped at the last ‘house’ – a clapboard shack, with […] a waste of withered weeds all

around” (252). Lolita resides in a run-down part of town, overrun by ramshackle nature

and man-made structures. Humbert forces Lolita into a life she never chose because she

was left without familial support, an education, or even an identity of her own. Lolita

makeshifts her life for a semblance of normalcy, rebelling against her past suffering to

create a life of her own. Lolita never lives a full, healthy existence because of her

childhood mistreatment. Lolita undergoes more than ongoing physical torment; because

of her past distress, her mind suffers as well. For instance, she refuses to speak about her

time with him with any emotion: “She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I

had been a good father, she guessed – granting me that” (256). Lolita declines to talk to

Humbert about their relationship because of the pain it brings her to relive it, especially

given his proximity. She only refers to Humbert as her dad and nothing more, repressing

the memories she buried in her conscious when she escaped him. Theorist, Susan

Suleiman states that, “When attacked in this way, the brain is not able to fully assimilate

or ‘process the event, and responds through various mechanisms such as psychological

numbing, or shutting down of normal emotional responses” (Suleiman 276). Lolita is

fully aware of the trauma she faced as a child and is dull to the pain of her past. Lolita

buries her pain to the furthest recesses of her mind to handle the onslaught of emotions

caused by her abduction and rape. Throughout the novel, the reader can expose

Humbert’s masculine suppression and uncover the real Lolita by analyzing her responses

to situations, or even Humbert’s recollections of events.

When Humbert visits Lolita, she seems content with her life and to have put her

traumas behind her; yet, after time with Humbert, Lolita seems too eerily calm about

facing her captor and rapist, offering subliminal signs that she is not as comfortable with

her situation, or Humbert, as she first appears. Lolita invites Humbert into her house and

the narrative paints her with vivid imagery:

‘Come in,’ she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery

deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she could

(even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment,

looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with round

pommettes, her watered-milk white arms outspread on the wood. I passed

without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell with a faint fried addition.

(254)

Lolita seemingly welcomes Humbert into her house with a happiness and high cheeks,

but she vigorously invites him into her home while avoiding his touch. Lolita’s body

language shows that she is not comfortable with Humbert’s closeness. According to

trauma theory, childhood abuse memories never fade: “Memories of trauma, he claims,

cannot be dissociated or repressed – on the contrary, the more violent the trauma, the

more subjects are likely to remember it, indeed to never forget it even if they want to”

(Suleiman 279). Lolita presents post traumatic stressors to seeing Humbert again, with

how her body avoids direct eye and body contact, as if she is trying to disappear. Lolita

attempts to quash Humbert from her mind and, as such, the suffering of her childhood.

However, Lolita is unable to deny his presence as they continue their conversation in the

house about her life after his abuse. Moreover, the narration is lined by Christian

imagery. Lolita appears as a Christ-like figure, her arms tightly bound to the wood of the

door and her mind is wrought in agony. This literary technique turns her stress-induced

actions into a way for Humbert to turn the situation in his favor. Humbert depicts Lolita

as a Christ-like figure to show her sacrifice for his sins; in this chapter, Lolita lets

Humbert in her house, and, in his mind, she sacrifices herself for him. If Lolita martyrs

herself despite his heinous behavior, he can finally be absolved for his sins. Again,

Humbert turns Lolita’s pain into his own self-gain, distracting the reader from Lolita

remembering her past anguish. Humbert uses his masculine voice and power to diminish

Lolita’s importance and pain.

Despite Lolita’s subtle gestures, she remains kind to Humbert and pushes down

her trauma to survive their final encounter. For example, Humbert asks about Lolita’s life

after she was taken from him and she replies with calm indifference even though her first

abuser sits next to her. Before Humbert’s departure, he asks Lolita to join him, to leave

with him. Lolita reaches to touch him, as if in sympathy: “’I’ll die if you touch me,’ I

said,’ ‘You are sure that you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming?

Tell me only this.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, honey, no.’ She never called me honey before”

(262). Humbert still believes that what they shared is love and he aches for Lolita to go

with him. She responds by calling him “honey” and denies him with fervor (262). Lolita

uses a diminutive term of endearment to convey an effect of disbelief and pity which, in

turn, gives Lolita a power in language she never wielded before. With her short, powerful

words, Lolita shows Humbert that she can and will try to move on from his abuses. It is

foolish for Humbert to think that Lolita would journey off with him like ‘the old times’

and, even though he believes that his actions did not affect Lolita because she was able to

respond so calmly. Similarly, Lolita expresses the same cool, disinterest when she walks

with Humbert to his old car. Humbert observes Lolita and analyzes her to determine if

any traces the car impacts her outward appearance: “She and the dog saw me off. I was

surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had

ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was that it

was getting sort of purplish around the gills” (263). Unsurprised, Humbert claims that

Lolita seemed apathetic to seeing the prison of her youth. Unlike their conversation in the

house, Humbert glosses over Lolita’s appearance as she looks at the car and fails to

describe any sort of physical reaction to the car outside of that it was getting old.

Humbert knowingly decides to dismiss Lolita’s response to the vehicle because of what it

represents to her. Like Frank Lasalle, Humbert ensnared Lolita in his car and forced her

to ride face-to-face with her monstrous captor across the country. The old car represents

all her childhood suffering and he would not be able to explain away her bodily feedback

to an inanimate object like he would be able to with his own person. Therefore, Humbert

baits the reader to believe that he has not caused Lolita undue suffering with his

abduction and rape. However, Humbert fails to realize that his physical presence alone

controls Lolita’s reactionary distress and that she contained her emotions since he walked

through her door.

3.3 Death provides escapism for trauma

Death provides Lolita with a means to finally escape Humbert’s abuses.

Throughout the memoir, Lolita suffers from Humbert’s kidnapping and sexual assault.

The reader can uncover Lolita’s torment by dissecting Humbert’s actions and words, and

especially by paying attention to the consequences both impart on her. At an early age,

Lolita seems to consider dying and what it means. She contemplates that passing is lonely

in a ostensibly casual conversation with a friend: “’You know what’s so dreadful about

dying is that you are completely on your own’; and it struck me, as my automaton knees

went up and down, that I simply did not know anything about my darling’s mind and that

quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight,

and a palace gate” (267). For the first time, Humbert realizes that she has a personality

and selfhood outside of her perceived sexuality but what is more notable is that a child is

considering what their own demise means to her. Lolita believes that the worst part of a

life’s end is being alone, and this strikes her because she feels a similar feeling because of

her abduction and imprisonment. However, her death provides her with freedom from

Humbert and her unpleasant memories of him. For example, Humbert concludes his

novel with an ode to Lolita:

And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one

wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple months longer, so as to have him make

you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and

angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.

Ant this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (291)

Humbert asserts that he survives after Quilty so that he can tell Lolita’s story. He

seemingly places Lolita’s tale above his own even though Lolita’s voice is relatively

nonexistent outside of his own allowances. He claims that he intends to immortalize

Lolita in his art, ensconcing her body forever, even after their deaths, within a tale set to

his own framework. His memoir will become an ode to his lost love. Yet this Lolita’s tale

is not his to tell and he also fails to present any genuine depiction of her in his work.

While Humbert attempts to entomb himself with Lolita, she dies without knowing about

the diary, without knowing that her story, however partial, will be forever inscribed in

Lolita.

Yet, Lolita’s death allows her a certain amount of autonomy, as her body and

mind are now free from Humbert’s manipulation. This liberatory moment opens a space

within the text for the reader to access Lolita’s lived traumatic experiences despite her

forced silence. Throughout his memoir, Humbert depicts his ‘love affair’ with the young

Dolores Haze. Humbert attempts to use psychology and language in order to describe the

events that trigger his pedophilia and presents him as a sympathetic narrator. However,

Humbert masks his criminalities and attempts to silence his victim, Lolita, over the

course of the text. He demolishes Lolita’s household, intrudes into her family and

unwittingly triggers her mother’s death. Also, Humbert deprives Lolita of her youth to

fulfill his sadistic sexual fixations, which take her name and voice, as her life is

perpetually upended within his memoir. Feminists claim that psychoanalysis affixes

women into a fixed identity and fails to account for women’s mental freedom from male

subjectivity. Psychoanalytic feminists suggest that men subjugate women because of their

alleged inferiority and compulsive urges located deep within the male unconscious. As a

result of masculine violence and gendered trauma, women experience insurmountable

mental anguish. In this novel, Humbert stalks and assaults Lolita because he views her as

a youthful, feminine object, or a plaything for his pleasurable amusements; throughout

Humbert’s recollections, he demeans Lolita and entraps her within his physical and

narrative space. Essentially, Lolita becomes a prisoner to be controlled. In the text,

Humbert advises the reader that Lolita holds power over him and entices him. However,

Lolita is powerless to Humbert’s male gaze and domination. Lolita does not exist outside

of Humbert’s recollections and he contorts her voice to help support his deviant behavior.

Works like Lolita create a new perspective for the reader and create a discourse

about the effects of masculinity on women and trauma on childhood trauma survivors.

The reader can learn about “how to go on living, to survive pain, absence, and trauma.

They give us the courage to make sense of a chaotic and violent world even by finding

beauty in it” (Rabate vii). It is important to unearth trauma in texts, to demonstrate the

importance of surviving despite the forces that seek to spark violence and pain. Lolita is a

painful novel for its depiction of violence against women, yet it is a necessary work to

discuss the violent, evil realities of sexual abuse that targets females because of their

perceived ‘weakness.’ In my final chapter, I discuss psychoanalytic feminism and how

this theory applies to the novel. Sequentially, I will explain why it is necessary to find

Lolita within the text and uncover her trauma; in doing so, Humbert can be eradicated

from the text along with his violent actions. I will also uncover why it is even more

necessary ‘re-understand’ Lolita in order to reject the destructive gendered discourse of

sexual abuse.

Chapter 4: Run Lolita Run: A Subversion of Masculine Hegemony

and Lolita’s Feminist Resurrection

Psychoanalysis conceals Humbert’s evil, while trauma theory exposes his

atrocities and Lolita’s subsequent victimhood; in their own way, both lenses uncover

distinct, valuable analyses of the characters in Nabokov’s Lolita. Yet psychoanalytic

feminism provokes a necessitous discussion regarding Lolita’s treatment as a young

woman in this controversial work. Feminists allege that Freud’s theories are “prime

perpetrators of patriarchy” because they fail to account for female psychosexual

development or for the oppression that women encounter as a result of men’s inherent

need to dominate them (Gallop 314). Consequently, feminist writers attempt to confront

phallogocentric approaches embedded in psychoanalysis and depose gendered power

structures within society in their works. For instance, Freud treated eighteen-year-old

Dora, who suffered severe depression stemming from sexual abuse by a family friend,

Herr K (Brown 628). Freud denied that any mistreatment occurred and, instead, believed

that Dora fantasized about Herr K because of her latent desire for him, which induced

‘hysteric’ symptoms because she repressed her carnal yearnings (Brown 628). Dora’s

case portrays her subjugation by Herr K, as well as by her famous psychotherapist

because of the “authoritarian mode of interpretation and therapy practiced by Freud”

(Evans 65). Hélène Cixous reimagines Dora’s case to lambast Freudian theory and craft a

feminist narrative from Dora’s perspective in her play, Portrait of Dora. In this work,

Cixous writes a call to arms, creating a protagonist that overthrows the destructive effects

of male dominance and urges women to rewrite their stories, to take back their narratives,

identities, and freedom. Throughout his memoir, Humbert constructs Lolita and her

mistreatment from his own recollections, skillfully navigating through a maze of biased

memories to purposely veil Lolita beneath his own elucidations, while concomitantly

isolating the reader from her thoughts and the reality of her captivity. However, the

reader can recover Lolita’s silent, subjugated voice and subvert the dominant discourse of

the text by framing Lolita alongside Cixous’s works and unearthing Lolita within her

predator’s narrative. Moreover, as I demonstrate, a psychoanalytic feminist reading

propels this novel into a contemporary discussion concerning the abuse of women within

the context of the MeToo movement.

4.1 Psychoanalytic feminism brings meaning to the text

With a psychoanalytic feminist reading of texts, female characters can undermine

the patriarchy and fully cope with, and overcome, their misery. For example, a family

friend, Herr K, sexually assaulted Dora during her childhood and, upon finding a suicide

note, her father sent her to be treated by Freud (Brown 628). During treatment, Freud

concluded that Dora’s ‘hysterical’ symptoms erupted as a consequent result of her latent

desire for Herr K and failure to prescribe to the feminine function within the Oedipus

complex; as a result, Dora terminated her treatment after eleven weeks (Brown 628).

Freud subsequently criticized Dora for his failure because she ended her therapy early,

but Freud’s misogynistic analysis propagates male violence against women, as well as

entraps the female experience within patriarchal bias (Brown 628). Cixous

reconceptualizes this case study through a feminist lens in Portrait of Dora to

disempower the phallocratic narrative that Freud constructed around Dora. The play

begins as Freud contemplates the lake scene where Herr K tries to seduce Dora, he states:

“These events project themselves like a shadow in dreams, they often become so clear

that we feel we can grasp them, yet they escape our final interpretation, and if we proceed

without skill and special caution, we cannot know if such a scene really took place”

(Cixous 16). Freud concludes that Dora’s chaotic memory does not serve as an accurate

description of events and that they are more than likely indistinct dreams indicative of her

subconscious desires. While Freud expressed that Dora’s disorganized recollections

during their sessions impacted her credibility, Cixous embraces Dora’s fragmented

memories to symbolize her pain (Hanrahan 52). Also, throughout the play, Freud’s

narrative overwhelms the audience and Dora remains relatively silent in comparison. A

critical side effect of hysteria is the inability to speak and, as a psychotherapist, Freud

uses his talking cure as a means to have his patients verbalize recollections and recover

his patient’s lost voice. Dora’s refusal to speak signifies her resistance to masculine forms

of language and she articulates herself in a distinctly feminine way by employing her

mind and body. And finally, Cixous utilizes Dora’s imposed madness to depict the point

in which society connects a woman’s sexuality with her otherness; within this play,

Cixous demonstrates how men attempt to control a women and their sexuality to fit

normative expectations, as well as how men describe women who fail to meet their

gender mold. The audience bears witness to Dora’s suppression, therefore “becom[ing]

part of the system repressing her” (Hanrahan 51). Cixous makes the audience aware of

Dora’s otherness to highlight the ways in which they are participating in the collective

objectification of women.

Nabokov constructs Lolita as an artistic work that ruminates on the problem

women face because of masculine repression. Throughout the memoir, Humbert fashions

Lolita as a plaything to satiate his sadistic urges. Humbert does not treat Lolita as an

individual who can feel her cruelty and maltreatment. He uses his narrative power to

control her and continues to do so even after she escapes from him in attempt to secure

another life. According to David Rampton, “Nabokov shows us all the poignancy of

Lolita’s attempt to build a future for herself in a world that was not of her making. Such a

scene does not ‘solve’ the problem of Lolita […] But it does remind us why Lolita

matters and why we go on talking about it” (115). Nabokov writes a novel from a

pedophile’s perspective in order to call attention to his heinous crimes and point out the

effects on his victim. Humbert “broke [her] life” and erased Lolita’s potential (262). She

managed her life the best she could in her circumstances, demonstrating the importance

of rescuing her from the trauma she endured. Following, Patnoe, “if it is not enough that

Humbert repeatedly violates Lolita and that she dies in the novel, the world repeatedly

reincarnates her – and, in the process, it doubles her by co-opting, fragmenting, and

violating her: it kills her again and again” (82). Lolita is continually wounded throughout

her youth and into adulthood. As an adult, Lolita attempts to hide the wounds from her

past and move on with her meager job, her new husband, and her unborn child. But

Humbert does not allow Lolita to move on and entraps her within his memoir; with his

words, and with telling her story, Humbert traps her in the narrative repetition of sexual

abuse, implicating not only the reader, but the systems of power perpetuating the

objectification and (violent) sexualization of girls and women .Therefore, it is imperative

that modern readers recognize Lolita as a survivor of trauma in order to fight against

phallocratic explanations of her character and to reimagine her within the context of

feminism.

Such an analysis allows readers to see how Lolita manipulates her memories to

regain power over herself and cast doubt on Humbert’s narrative authority. Freud

believes that recollections are constant yet Nabokov states, “that a fully conscious self

both fuels and is itself fueled by the ceaseless absorption of experience into memory, an

on-going process in which past, present, and future are figured in dynamic

interdependency and not simply succession” (Hasty 226-227). To Nabokov, there is not a

sharp distinction between memory and awareness. With his memoir, Humbert attempts to

tell the story of his life and time with Lolita, but his tale is rife with his own thoughts,

remembrances, and interpretations of events. Overall, Humbert fashions Lolita as a muted

creature to be controlled by himself. Yet Lolita’s response to her memories firmly places

her autonomy outside of Humbert’s command: “’Perhaps he is a Trapp. If I were you –

Oh look, all the nines are changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid,’ she

continued unexpectedly, ‘I used to think they’d stop and go back to nines, if only my

mother agreed to put the car in reverse’” (205). Lolita ponders what would happen to the

numbers if the car reversed: would they roll back? Lolita lost her mother, her childhood,

and the rest of her life because of Humbert and these are memories that she cannot erase.

Underneath the surface of her words, she wonders if her anguish would disappear if she

could turn back time. If she could fold time back, she could return to a time where she

had control over her own self and story, as well as release herself from her pain.

Likewise, Lolita uses her graphic novels for escapism. One work she reads tells the story

of Marion: “There was a gloomy girl Marion, […] [and] Marion’s dead mother had really

been a heroic woman since she had deliberately dissimulated her great love for Marion

because she was dying, and did not want her child to miss her” (270). In the beginning of

the novel, Humbert alludes that Lolita and her mother, Charlotte, do not have the closest

or most loving relationship; in all of his accounts, he depicts Charlotte as a woman who is

both irritated with, and jealous of, her daughter, intentionally placing the women at odds

in a battle he will win. By recalling Marion, a tale of mother-daughter love and

empowerment, Lolita reverses Humbert’s patriarchal vision by imagining herself as

Marion. In her conscious, she becomes Marion and alters her reality; she becomes a girl

who knows love and is protected by her mother. Lolita’s visualization places her in an

ideal world where she is genuinely loved – a place she has not known in her life.

Therefore, Lolita takes autonomy over her mind and her own memories and undermines

Humbert’s authorial agency in doing so.

Lolita experiences trauma at the hands of her captor, Humbert; many readings

portray Lolita as a voiceless victim against Humbert’s emotional, physical, and narrative

assaults, yet her silence gives way to resounding power when she confronts him for his

abuse. Lolita does not articulate her emotions directly throughout the memoir very often

and seems to be a passive prey for Humbert. Yet Lolita’s intermittent, indignant

comments directed at Humbert allude that her silence is a form of resistance. For

instance, Lolita condemns Humbert for ruining her life, giving a voice to her subjugation.

After Lolita’s abduction, she out rightly expresses herself to Humbert: “You revolting

creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the

police and tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man” (132). Humbert’s

narrative makes the reader believe that Lolita is playing mind games with him and he

casts off her words. Lolita does not call the police, fails to leave his clutches, and her

anger seemingly wanes. Humbert’s mind interprets Lolita’s passive actions as

acquiescence and shrugs off her ‘child-like’ tantrum. Subsequently, Humbert devastates

the remaining vestiges of Lolita’s childhood with rape. Yet Lolita eventually rises against

Humbert’s control:

She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at me, inflating her

cheeks and producing a diabolical plopping sound. She said I had attempted

to violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She said she

was sure that I had murdered her mother. She said she would sleep with the

very first fellow who asked her and I could do nothing about it. (192)

Humbert accuses Lolita of trying to run away from him and, in a jealous rage, he tries to

confine her to the house. Lolita responds to Humbert with unrestrained fury. While

Humbert does not outrightly use Lolita’s actual voice in this instance, her portrayal and

implied tone rings clear in the narration. She flushes red with anger and slings vitriolic

claims at Humbert. She tells him that she was aware of all the times he attempted to molest

her while he was a boarder, as well as that she absolutely knew that he murdered her

mother. She even claims ownership of her body, denying Humbert’s sexual claim over her.

Lolita transforms into a woman who fights against her abductor, seeking freedom and

autonomy from the confines of Humbert’s obsession; instead, she challenges Humbert as

her own owner.

Claiming her voice, speaking truth to power, Lolita resists the subaltern identity

Humbert has created for her. As “other,” women are in a constant quest to recover their

own voice and agency, which was forcefully taken away from them by the patriarchy.

Patnoe’s feminist argument about Lolita emphasizes that Humbert’s narrative even

condemns cultural mores concerning women’s sexuality: “The Lolita Story and its

discourse have become an ongoing and revealing cultural narrative, a myth appropriated in

ways that validate male sexuality and punish female sexuality, letting some people avoid

the consequences of their desires as they impose desire on others” (84). Society celebrates

masculine sensuality but deems women who express sexuality with an otherness, punishing

any who display sexuality and behaviors outside of their prescribed gender roles. Humbert

depicts Lolita with eroticism beyond her childhood years to convince the reader that he is

not responsible for his sexual transgressions against her. Yet Humber’s perspective shifts

when he encounters Lolita years later and he inadvertently shows how he was responsible

for her portrayal. For example, the last time that Humbert sees Lolita is at her small house.

She is seventeen years old, “with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands

and her gooseflesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits […] she was

only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I rolled myself upon with

such cries in the past” (261). Lolita is no longer the ‘nymphet’ he remembers as she has

been replaced by an adult version of herself. He contends that he loves Lolita but his

critique on her body tells the audience that his drive was merely to consume her, not love

her; to Humbert, Lolita’s body acts as an object and source of pleasure for him. Lolita

reclaims her body in a subsequent conversation with Humbert. Although Lolita participates

in a casual exchange with Humbert, her body language and reactions attest to the trauma

she endured at Humbert’s hand and its imprint on her psyche. At first, Lolita keeps their

discussion airy and nonchalant. When Humbert attempts to give Lolita money, Lolita’s

tone shifts and she becomes defensive. Lolita asks Humbert why he wants to give her

money: “’You mean,’ she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that

may strike, ‘you mean you will give us [us] that money if I go with you to a motel. Is that

what you mean?’” (262). She becomes angry when he offers her money because she

believes that the money is in exchange for sex. He seems surprised by Lolita’s behavior

but, because of her childhood development, men only ever used her body. Humbert used

Lolita for her childhood sexuality and provided her with a ‘father figure’ and Quilty traded

the potential of fame for sex. Lolita grew up with the belief that men would only provide

her with anything of worth if she gave into their sordid requests. Humbert expects Lolita

to be the ‘nymphet’ of her youth yet rears back when she violates his imaginations. Linda

Kauffman states that Humbert turned Lolita into a prostitute by exploiting her sexuality as

a child: “Lolita is as much the object consumed by Humbert as she is the product of her

culture. And if she is hooked, he is the one who turns her into a hooker” (160). Lolita is a

product of a misogynistic culture that values her as an object. Because society treats her as

an object, she feels and acts as such because she is unable to cast off societal projections.

Humbert and so many men objectify Lolita for her youth and demean her body, which

permanently disfigures Lolita’s identity outside of her objectification. Lolita must therefore

continually struggle against the feeling that her worth is tied to her sex and that she must

offer something of herself in order to receive anything from men.

4.2 The uplifting feminist death

Feminists interpret Lolita’s death with varying perspectives; however, her death

frees her from the constraints of her captor and gender. Humbert concludes the novel as an

ode to his love, Lolita. The reader can only uncover Lolita’s death by referencing John

Ray’s preface: The preface reveals Lolita’s death. “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’ died in

childbirth, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement

in the remotest Northwest” (4). Humbert expires due to coronary thrombosis on November

16, 1952. Lolita then dies during childbirth on December 25, 1952. She must die so that

she can be reincarnated through his art, continually reliving her traumas in his memoir.

Once again, Lolita is a reticent object of Humbert’s evil intentions. As a direct consequence

of her victimization, she also dies during the most vital of feminine acts: childbearing.

Additionally, her daughter is stillborn, which represents the womanly vestiges of silence

passed on throughout her maternal lineage. Yet Lolita’s death is much more than a

representation of her feminine subjugation. Instead, her demise frees herself, as well as her

child, from the oppression of masculine hegemony. Once she dies, Lolita is no longer

bound to Humbert’s authority and degradation. The male gaze perpetuated by Humbert and

the reader ceases to exist. Also, according to psychoanalytic feminists, “Psychoanalysis

does not allow mother her selfhood, makes her an object of service, and expects her to

sacrifice herself to her partner’s fantasies about her” (Gallop 327). Motherhood fully

ensnares women within their gender performance and their deference to their male

counterparts, prohibiting women from experiencing selfhood outside of this identity.

Mothers become objects to both the child and paternal figure. Lolita’s fall at the end of her

pregnancy liberates her from the ultimate entrapment of her gender; with her death, she

subverts masculine control and definition based on her sex. Finally, Lolita is free from the

oppression imposed by gender roles, free from Humbert’s narrative control, and free from

the reader’s biased understanding of her life and her trauma.

Psychoanalysis perpetuates Lolita’s traumas by interpreting them with a masculine

bias and stigmatizing her because of her gender; therefore, psychoanalytic feminism is the

only way to recover Lolita from Humbert’s text. Freud’s Oedipus complex implies that

women are essentially different than men because they lack external genitalia, which

suggests that they cannot fully develop through the Oedipal phases and explains their

inexorable ‘penis envy.’ Moreover, Freud theorized that boys feel anxiety when they

realize girls do not have a penis. The boy regards the female genitals as well as the

surrounding hair, which replace the penis and represents the phallic snakes on Medusa’s

head. Horror bubbles up within the boy and he is frozen to stone, realizing that he can be

castrated. With an erection, the boy realizes that he still possesses his penis and

masculinity.

In opposition, in her critical essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous implicates

Freud’s castration complex: “Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and

the feminine sex. That’s because they need femininity to be associated with death; it’s the

jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us” (Cixous

250). Freudian theory fails to encapsulate the female experience and perpetuates male

authority over women because of their ‘lack.’ Cixous references the Medusa effect to argue

that men to shape women’s deficiency to alleviate their own fears over the female sex; to

this theorist, men are afraid of women because they represent their own possible castration

and they need to subjugate women to ensure that their masculinity remains intact.

Therefore, Cixous argues that, “I write woman; woman must write woman” (Cixous 244).

The patriarchy formed language so Cixous calls for a distinctly female language to

overcome the patricentric mods of expression and man’s inherit need to dominate and

silence women. Women must write from their own experiences to ensure that their voices

are heard and inspire other women to do the same. Cixous postulates what this new mother

tongue, écriture feminine, looks like in her works, Portrait of Dora and “The Laugh of the

Medusa;” both works exemplify how women rewrite themselves for themselves and

women.

While a psychoanalytic feminist lens can attribute power to Lolita’s voice, I assert

that Lolita must be reclaimed through a new text that recreates and reevaluates Lolita and

her trauma. Psychoanalysis only harms women by, “repress[ing] femininity (and not so

successful a repression at that – men have made it clear), its account of masculine sexuality

is now hardly refutable; as with all the ‘human’ sciences, it reproduces the masculine view,

of which it is one of the effects” (Cixous 249). Freudian theory manufactures a harmful

culture for women, perpetuating stereotypes about them that society feels obligated to

enact. In opposition to Freud, Cixous elaborates on the importance of écriture feminine:

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a

world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early

childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the

basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a

passionate and precise interrogation of her erogeneity. I wished that that

woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women,

other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim that: I, too, overflow; my

desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of-songs.

(Cixous 243)

For too long in literary history, men implement writing as a weapon to conspire against

and denigrate women. Women are forced to write in secret because writing is considered

silly and not within a woman’s skill scope. According to Cixous, women can explore

themselves and unlock their full potential by writing outside of the language of men; to

Cixous, no longer should women be bound to the constraints of phallogocentric writing.

Alternatively, women must investigate the differences of their bodies and mind to

produce a new textual form. Women writing helps restore the feminine self and create a

language of its own. It seems impossible because of the masculine power over language.

Power of male language backed up by male run publishing houses who tell women they

cannot write, same to capitalism. Cixous inspires a movement as a transcendent escapism

for women, showcasing women’s worth by emphasizing their difference and opposition

to the patriarchy. Ultimately, Cixous contends that women must destroy prior notion on

womanhood, foresee a way past it, and project a new future. When women write

themselves, there is no longer a “salvation narrative” where someone, typically a man,

saves the helpless girl (Gilmore 668). The autobiography, or self-writing, helps the girl

saver herself: “self-representation re-center[s] the narrator and displace[s] the fictions on

which the rescue paradigm depends. […] No longer representative of static subaltern

silence, girls emerge in these narratives as figures of sympathy represented by politically

active women autobiographers” (Gilmore 668). A narrative written by woman, for

herself, allows her to find her silenced voice without prejudice from the liberating party;

also, this type of work helps her to overcome her forced immobility and find freedom by

her own means. Film adaptations and survivor testimonies are imperative to successfully

deliver complete female autonomy to Lolita.

4.3 Recovering Lolita in film and modern narratives

Films by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne reinvent Lolita with dimension and

voice by supplying her with dialogue and depictions not captured in the novel. Kubrick

and Lyne bring Lolita to life and renew her presence with their films. For example,

Humbert accuses Lolita of lying to him about her whereabouts. The following figures

portray Lolita’s response to his allegations in Kubrick’s and Lyne’s respective films. First

in the 1962 film, Kubrick takes on the challenge of interpreting this controversial novel

with the constraints of censorship for film makers. Yet Kubrick illuminates Nabokov’s

written work through his cinematography despite such restrictions on his directorial

pursuit. Kubrick shapes Humbert as a man descending into madness, while he forms

Lolita as a young girl caught in his wicked web. For instance, during one scene, Humbert

drags Lolita home after performance when he finds out she skipped piano lessons.

Humbert believes that Lolita ditches her lessons to be with a boy named Roy and begins

to grab at her arm and yell at her, asking where she went if she did not go to play piano

with Miss Starch. Humbert plays the doting father figure but his lust for control is barely

concealed in the scene. Lolita retorts with anger, shouting back at him, “Stop that

shouting. I hope the police do come here. You freak!” (Kubrick 1:53:23-25). Lolita’s tone

and gesticulations match her irritation with Humbert. She blatantly calls him out for his

impetuousness and monstrousness. Their fight sizzles down as Humbert watches a

melancholy Lolita. He begins to speak softer and plead with her to run away with him

from their ‘new home.’ Yet this inspires Lolita into a frenzy of rage: “No! I hate you! I

hate you!” (Kubrick 1:56:55-1:57:02). The actress, Sue Lyon, paints a vivid picture of the

scene that Humbert’s memoir only glosses over. Lyon gives life to a character that

Humbert typically mutes with his narrative, crafting a three dimensional and strong

portrait of Lolita.

Figure 5: Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1962

Conversely, Lyne’s 1997 production incurred fewer constraints with censorship than the

1962 film. The film implicitly presents Humbert sexually abusing a young girl and

treating her as his personal prostitute, with the audience observing in terror. Like

Kubrick’s film, however, many of the plot points remain quite similar. For instance, in

the very same scene sequence, Humbert confronts Lolita about rehearsing in the park

with her friend Mona. Humbert does not believe Lolita and he is determined to find out

the truth about what she is hiding. Lolita appears nonchalant at first, knowing her friend

will cover for her. Humbert continues to push Lolita until she reaches a breaking point.

“Leave me alone, you pervert! […] Anyone'd run away from you!” (Lyne 1:20:55-59).

Dominique Swain matches Sue Lyon, emphasizing a performance about a young girl

trapped by her ‘stepfather’ and at her breaking point. The actress, however, takes her

performance a step further. Swain fully encapsulates Lolita’s anger and does not back

down from Humbert; alternatively, she strikes Humbert with the full force of her rage and

expresses her powerful voice. Humbert smacks Lolita and she falls back to her chair in

shock and hurt. Instead of cowering against his authority, she starts screaming at him

amidst blows to his chest: “Go ahead, murder me. Like you murdered my mother. Murder

me! Murder me!” (Lyne 1:21:14-1:21:59). Milk, a reminder of her youth, streams out of

her mouth. Lolita continues to scream at Humbert until, her face wild in frenzy and fear;

in this moment, the film captures just how terrified she is of Humbert and reminds the

audience what he is capable of. She runs down the stairs and out the door, away from

Humbert.

Figure 6: Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne, 1997

Lyne’s later adaption portrays a gripping, bleak tale compared to Kubrick’s earlier dark

comedy, yet both films depict Lolita with a voice that rings through Humbert’s abuses.

Unlike the novel, these depictions of Lolita capture the audience as her agonizing

emotions flicker across the screen. The audience cannot look away from her face and

become uncomfortable voyeurs into her most traumatic life events. Humbert can edit

Lolita’s voice, actions, and identity but film brings Lolita to life and uncovers her in ways

not achievable in the original text.

Survivor testimonies empower women to tell their stories and provides them with

a voice against their aggressors. When Tarana Burke began the MeToo movement in

2016, she first sought to support and inspire survivors of sexual abuse. As the effort grew,

and after MeToo went viral on Twitter in 2017 amidst allegations against Harvey

Weinstein, it also became a platform for awareness and reform: “The most powerful

movements always been built around what’s possible, not just claiming what’s now.

Trauma halts possibility. Movement activates it” (Burke 2018). Many victims fear that

they cannot tell their accounts because they will not be believed by authorities, family

and friends, or society. However, by declaring, ‘me too,’ victims of assault can finally be

heard and understood. Acknowledging the trauma allows the victims to take the first step

towards catharsis. When multiple individuals stand together and proclaim, ‘me too,’ they

initiate a movement to confront and stop an end to masculine violence against women.

This effort calls to an end of the perpetual trauma that survivors feel by giving them hope

and helping them call for justice. Nabokov’s novel exposes the genuine need for survivor

testimonies. Throughout Humbert’s memoir, he focuses on his own life and obsession

with the young Lolita. Despite her attempts to break through the narrative, the most

effective way to reclaim Lolita is through a testimony of her own and outside of

Humbert’s manipulation. When Lolita recalls her memories about Humbert and Quilty

with a reverberating, “yes,” her tone implies that her story is so absurd no one would

believe it: “Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up

her life nobody would ever believe it” (256). Throughout the memoir, the narration

repeatedly reminds the reader of the many times that Lolita does not call for help and the

extent of her entrapment. Lolita never calls the police or even tells her teachers or friends.

She also introduces Humbert to her husband as her father; overall, Lolita only confides to

Quilty about her forced ‘relationship’ with Humbert. Lolita keeps her anguish a secret,

fearful of fashioning herself further into a sexualized object or being entangled within

victim blaming. However, if Lolita wrote her story from her perspective and articulated

the cruelty she experienced with her own words, she could completely reclaim her story

outside of Humbert’s manipulation and attempt to heal from the events that dictated her

life.

4.4 The strength of survivor testimonies

The power of survivor testimonies resonates with many women especially with

the advent of high-profile sexual assault cases against Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein,

R. Kelly; with their testimonies, women can tell their stories, confront their rapists’

narratives, and inspire others to do the same. Specifically, Jeffrey Epstein raped and

subjugated numerous women by using his power and authority against them: “many of

his survivors were underage, there were countless others who were 18 to 23, a group of

women who have been reluctant to come forward because, despite the ordeal they went

through, they are ashamed and believe that the public doesn’t look at them as victims at

all” (Brown 2019). Epstein chose women he could exploit without fear of consequence.

Yet many courageous women started to share their stories about Epstein and exposed him

as a predator to the world. Marijke Chartouni recalls Epstein’s attack:

‘I think I just kind of froze, I was just so confused, ‘what was going on?’ I

don’t know where I am and there are staff members there, they are asking

very unusual questions. [Rena] initiated the assault. I just disassociated. I

remember thinking: ‘I’ve never done this before, what’s going on, I just ...

don’t know.’ […] An assistant called her a few days later and told her

Epstein wanted to see her again. She declined and never returned. ‘I just

pretended it didn’t happen. And I haven’t talked about it since.’” (Brown

2019)

Chartouni encountered Epstein at his office where he sexually abused her. Her first-hand

account offers insight into her confusion and detachment during the attack made by

Epstein, allowing the audience to consider exactly what she went through during one of

her most vulnerable and emotional experiences. She also provides an account of her

subsequent refusal to speak about what happened to her afterwards, further elaborating on

the trauma that she endured as a result of Epstein’s malice. Chartouni’s statement, just

like many others who came forward about Epstein, illustrate the effects of sexual

violence against women and the ways in which women persevere despite it. Similarly,

Kiki Doe shares her own story about Epstein. During an interview about her experiences,

she states: “’I mean, imagine having to sort of re-invite this trauma into your life every

time that you retell the story,’ explains Doe. ‘[…] and you're sharing some of the most

intimate trauma experiences of your life, that continue to affect you’” (Easton 2020).

Once Doe shares her personal pain, she must share it over and over again with audiences.

She reveals that the constant discussion about her rape reopens old wounds and reopens

the wound of sexual assault. This survivor shares her agony so that other women are

encouraged to speak out and give their side of the story and to confront their attackers.

Chartouni, Doe, and many other women came forward about Epstein, displaying

immense bravery and strength. Many sexual assault victims may decide not to come

forward for fear of reliving one of the most traumatizing events of their lives or for fear

of not being believed.

Throughout Lolita, Humbert maintains complete control over the narrative and

diminishes Lolita’s presence. With this novel, the reader can gleam the atrocities

committed by a predator and reveal the genuine traumas they inflict on their victim. The

reader can also see the potential ways that Lolita becomes the novel’s heroine due to her

bravery in the face of adversity. Psychoanalysis and trauma theory are insufficient to

support an accurate, in-depth analysis of Lolita or salvage her narrative. Feminists

contend that Freudian theory aggregates women into oppression. According to Freud,

women lack and are essentially different from men, affirming their lesser position in the

gender power dynamic. Trauma theory also fails to account for the recovery of Lolita’s

lost narrative by sharing the focal point with Humbert and his atrocities. A

psychoanalytic feminist perspective allows the reader to free Lolita from the trappings of

Humbert’s narrative and control, thereby reclaiming her repressed identity and redefining

her existence. Feminist writers defy phallocentrism in psychoanalysis and topple gender

binaries that uphold the patriarchy with their combined efforts. In response, Cixous,

claims that, “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women into

writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as their bodies” (Cixous

242). Men force women from their pens, as well as their bodies; yet women writing

promotes women’s ability to command both. Cixous’s works demonstrate a call to action,

inspiring women to write and reclaim themselves. By linking Nabokov’s novel with

Cixous feminist works, we can recover Lolita’s body and voice from her malevolent

captor. Furthermore, Cixous’s theories also encourage a modern investigation into the

novel, which inspires a revisioning and retelling of Humbert’s infamous narration to

focalize attention on Lolita and her story instead. As I have shown, contemporary film

adaptations, through a revitalization of the text through Lolita’s point of view,

demonstrate how she can rescue herself and fashion a new, visceral identity. This type of

textual analysis brings Lolita to the forefront of our conversation regarding brutality

against women, poignantly connecting her to the MeToo movement. Nabokov published

Lolita approximately sixty-five years ago and, to date, this novel remains a testament to

the importance of the female voice in the face of male violence against women. Today,

more than ever, women are coming to the forefront to show the importance of their

voices, share their stories with other women and the world, and make a stand against

sexual violence.

Chapter 5: Girl, I Believe You: Illuminating Survivor Testimonies

to Mend the Cycle of Sexual Trauma

Nabokov’s Lolita is a controversial work that inspires many different readings.

Most importantly, Nabokov uses Humbert’s memoir to critique his treatment of Lolita,

prompting an important discussion about the treatment of women in literature and in

society. Psychoanalysis and trauma theory are insufficient lenses to help Lolita climb out

from her captivity. Yet, with psychoanalytic feminist criticism, Lolita can liberate herself

from Humbert’s manipulative narrative and subvert her subjection. It is crucial to retrieve

Lolita from the text and to help her tell her own story so that she can thrive as a fully

formed woman within and beyond the confines of the text. Feminist critical theory, as I

have demonstrated, can also be applied to modern culture. Today, sexual assault is a

prevalent topic and many survivors still struggle against their predators, the stigma of

sexual violence, and expressing themselves. However, by reshaping the perception of

survivors and providing them with an opportunity to write their own stories, they can

start healing and trigger a new trend in the fight against sexual violence against women.

Television and film take the forefront of the march to kindle cognizance about sexual

assault throughout society that is unmatched, especially after the advent of the MeToo

movement and attention to the awareness platform; with their medium, writers and

directors bring the survivors to the forefront, support them as they come forward and

claim their powerful narrative back from their abusers, inspire others to come forward

and stand together as a community, and help incite change with their testimonies.

5.1 The significance of the survivor’s voice

Women often suffer immensely because of sexual violence and struggle every day

to overcome it. The pain lingers within their mind and consumes their daily thoughts, as

shown in Audrie Pott’s and Daisy Coleman’s stories as they intertwine in the Netflix

documentary, Audrie & Daisy. While Coleman never met Pott, they were connected by

their narrative and both became symbols in the fight against sexual violence against

women. Fifteen-year-old Pott was raped while unconscious by three boys at her school.

The boys shared photos of her rape with other students at area schools (Audrie Pott

Foundation). Pott confronted the boys by posting a Facebook status, “’These guys did

(expletive) to me while I was sleeping,’" […] ‘This is the worst day of my life’ was

another” (Sulek 2013). Pott took to social media to defend herself and to express her

anger at what happened to her, yet eight days later she committed suicide. Pott’s mother

participated in the documentary to give her daughter the voice that the boys took away

from her. Similarly, Daisy Coleman gives her first-hand testimony in the film. An older

boy, Matthew Barnett, raped Coleman when she was fourteen years old at a party (“Daisy

Coleman”). Her rapist violated her in the most callous way; the following morning, her

mother discovered her, “left outside on the porch, with wet hair and wearing just a T-shirt

and sweatpants in sub-zero temperatures” (“Daisy Coleman”). Following this crime,

Barnett was charged with “felony sexual assault yet those charges were consequently

dropped to a “lesser charge of child endangerment, arguing his intercourse with Daisy

had been consensual” (“Daisy Coleman”). However, when Coleman’s trauma gained

national attention, it was not outrage over her rapist’s charges. Instead, mass awareness of

her case gained momentum when she reported harassment at school stemming from her

rape case. Coleman fell subject to caustic slurs because of the mere fact that she reported

Barnett and his crimes against her. Coleman claimed in an interview with Seventeen

magazine that her classmates and neighbors called her a “bitch” and a “slut every single

day” (Zoellner 2020). Coleman, inspired to help others who have been sexually assaulted,

cofounded SafeBAE, became an advocate for young survivors, and prompted a viral

discussion about rape and victim blaming with the Netflix documentary. Coleman,

however, committed suicide in 2020 after a decade long battle towards healing. Her

mother appeals to survivors everywhere, “’Please know that above ALL ELSE, she did

this work for you ... She would want young survivors to know they are heard, they

matter, they are loved, and there are places for them to get the help they need’” (Zoellner

2020). Her mother encourages individuals who suffered assault to keep moving forward

despite the hurdles and move towards recovery because – one step at a time - it is

possible.

5.2 Survivors reclaim the narrative from abusers

Docu-series also deliver a painstaking examination of predators while also

granting survivors a platform to speak against their rapists. Lifetime’s 2019 Surviving R.

Kelly documentary brings the women at the forefront of the allegations against the R&B

singer; as a result, the network gave them the opportunity to expose him as a criminal and

finally have their voices heard by the public while they await justice with the legal

system. Nigel Bellis and Astral Finnie direct this docu-series through the survivors’

perspective, presenting testimony about Kelly’s abuse and advising how those around

him facilitated his behavior by not intervening and helping these women. The women’s

reactions to their trauma are unequivocally depicted through the series, opening the

audience’s eyes to how their lives were negatively impacted by him. Before this film,

Kelly still toured with large attending crowds despite the heinous allegations against him.

A vast majority of individuals were unwilling to believe that their icon was a predator

and could not believe the claims in the news. Yet few weeks after the series aired on

Lifetime, “Kelly [was] dropped by his record company. Planned concerts in the US and

New Zealand [were] cancelled (Savage 2020). Finally, the survivors’ stories were heard

and they received the attention they deserved. After the documentary’s release,

videotapes and sex trafficking allegations surface and Kelly is indicted on federal

charges. The women in this film revealed Kelly to be a predator and changed the world’s

perception of him, prompting change and actual charges against the singer. Similarly,

Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich in 2020 to examine how Epstein used his

power to abuse young women and to provide an outlet for the women who did not get the

chance to speak against him in trial. The docu-series tells the tale of a rich and powerful

man who uses his means to methodologically assault women and ensure their silence, as

well as shares how the American financier conned his way out of detection for many

years with the help of influential friends. Like Surviving R. Kelly, this documentary offers

insight into Epstein’s notorious history and gives the victims an opportunity to tell their

sides of the story. The director, Lisa Bryant, presents numerous victims who illuminate

Epstein’s criminal pathology and how he treated his victims. When Epstein died by his

own hand in August 2019, Bryant felt shattered for the victims: “I don’t think they’ll ever

get the closure that they truly deserve. He didn’t have to ever really answer for his

crimes’” (Gajanan 2020). Epstein continually got away with his evil misdeeds and, even

on the brink of a federal trial, found his way out of facing his victims too. Bryant helped

the women find a semblance of justice by giving them an outlet to tell the audience what

happened to them and how Epstein affected their lives.

The Guardians of the North hunt pedophiles to protect their community and fight

the trauma from sexual violence at its source. Anonymous is the Guardian’s ‘decoy.’ She

manages different profiles across social media platforms to lure predators. These

accounts apply fake names, indicate that she is fourteen years old on each, but showcase

a normal portrait of her own youthful face. She waits for people to message her and she

states, “’There are more people contacting me than I can reply to. I get at least 10 people

messaging every day and the most I’ve ever received is about 30 in a day, from different

people’” (“The Decoy”). Anonymous receives numerous messages per day from users,

utilizing her teenage persona and building rapport with them. Sometimes, people get

angry with her if she does not comply with their requests for lewd photographs: “I’ve

been threatened before. One man asked for indecent images and said if I didn’t send any

he’d hurt my mum” (“The Decoy”). These predators use threats of violence to get their

way and intimidate her, simulating the realities that young women can face when targeted

by online criminals. Once Anonymous agrees to meet these uses, the Guardians set up

their trap. They meet at a nearby park with the team watching and filming the entire

ensuing scene. Once the Guardians get the information that they need to take down

pedophile, they call the police. While the data is verified, the Guardians claim to help

arrest a couple hundred offenders: “’Our work has led to more than 200* arrests and in all

that time I have never been hurt’” (“The Decoy”). This work is dangerous but, if the

numbers are correct, their work has had a significant impact on their community. These

Guardians seek to end child sexual abuse by starting at the source and exposing

pedophiles to the authorities.

5.3 Reframing the narrative around sexuality and abuse

Dick Wolf created Law & Order: SVU in the 1990s to explore human sexuality

and motives for sexual criminals, pushing the limits of regular daytime television. The

series follows Special Victims Unit detectives in New York City as they investigate rape

and sexual assault cases, as well as special crimes for the youth, elderly, or disabled.

Some episodes are purely fictitious, while the show’s writers fictionalize real and

culturally significant court cases. As of fall 2020, Law & Order: SVU premiered their

twenty-second season and is the longest-running live action series with a cult following.

Wolf’s creation transformed the way everyday viewers regard sexual abuse. For instance,

academic studies “Stacey Hust, a professor of communications at Washington State

University who published a study in 2015 showing that viewers of SVU had healthier

attitudes towards sexual consent and a better understanding of the causes of sexual

violence than those who watched shows like NCIS or CSI” (Gajanan 2020). The

detectives are compassionate with victims, actively seeking to prove their truths and

catch the perp. The detectives prove the importance of listening to a survivor instead of

victim shaming. This show and its writers also demonstrate how, “’sexual violence does

not discriminate,’” […] “’It happens in all socio-economic statuses, all religions, all

cultures and all groups. It also highlights aspects, like grooming, that lead to sexual

violence’” (Gajanan 2020). Abuse happens at all social intersections and puts the

audience in the victim’s shoes, making the plot relatable to each type of viewer.

Additionally, the audience is also taken through the legal system as Manhattan’s

Assistant District Attorney, who gently helps the victim fight their case court room. This

show illustrates the severe facts surrounding sexual assault but, in many of the episodes,

the predator is sentenced and the victim receives the peace they need to begin rebuilding

their lives. As a result, audience expects the perpetrator to face the consequences of the

law. With the dawn of the MeToo movement in mass media, the world took extra notice

of how survivors are treated by the criminal justice system outside of SVU. However,

“Victim blaming and shaming continue, despite the advances of #MeToo and the

popularity of an influential TV show like SVU and “’Sexual violence survivors still have

an uphill battle’” (Gajanan 2020). Despite the advances in discussions in film, television,

there is still much work to do by turning the narrative for survivors of sexual attacks.

Maïmouna Doucouré wrote and directed the 2020 film, Cuties, to drill down into

the issue of sexuality and how it impacts adolescent development. Doucouré tells the

story of an eleven-year-old Senegalese immigrant, Amy, living in Paris, France.

Throughout the film, Amy struggles between her family’s traditional, religious values

and the harsh realities of modern youth culture. Amy wants to fit in so badly with a group

of girls who dance at school and who call themselves the ‘Cuties.’ These girls prescribe

to, “Hot pants, hair dye, and twerking” (Conner 2020). The Cuties learn to dress and act

like their favorite pop culture icons from television and social media. Amy follows along,

fervidly wanting to be accepted by the group. However, at the movie’s culmination

during the Cuties’ provocative dance routine, Amy sobs and decides to leave mid-

performance. She runs to her mother and finds reassurance in her arms – everything is

okay now. The film concludes with Amy adorning a basic shirt and jeans as she plays

jump rope. Doucouré comments on how sexually charged culture influences young girls’

self-image and distorts their ideas of self-worth, taking a stand to start a discussion about

it within society. This movie intends to cause the audience discomfiture as the film

explores girlhood in the throes of discovering sexuality in all of its awkwardness and

hurtfulness. Like her mom, the audience accepts it and embraces Amy for what she learns

from this life moment. Cuties received numerous accolades based on its screening at the

2020 Sundance Film Festival and Doucouré won an award for her direction (Conner

2020). However, Netflix bought the rights to stream the film on its platform and was set

to release it worldwide on September 9, 2020 (Conner 2020). Prior to its release date,

Netflix published a poster to promote the film on its site and the advertisement went viral.

As shown in the left image in figure 7, the poster depicts the Cuties in their final stage

performance with an excess of visible skin, tight clothing, suggestive stances, and sultry

glances to the audience. The picture presents a stark contrast to the original poster shown

in the right image in figure 7, portraying young girls celebrating in the streets.

Immediately, #CancelNetflix trended on Twitter for “promoting child pornography,”

Doucouré encountered threats to her life, and those who defended Cuties were

called rapists or pedophiles” (Conner 2020).

Figure 5: Comparison of Cuties film posters for Netflix (left) and Sundance

(right)

Netflix’s poster fostered moral outrage before viewers could even decide to digest the

film’s intent. Cuties is, “a movie about girls not wanting to be little girls anymore. About

girls spying on classmates in the bathroom, girls who want to wear tight pants and hump

the dance floor, […] The roughness in the slow transition from girl to woman—the

fumbling, the misunderstanding, the pain” (Conner 2020). At times, culture imparts a

sexuality onto all of its inhabitants including those too young to comprehend it. Doucouré

also reminds the audience of the brutal truths of being a girl emerging into ‘not-quite-

adulthood,’ presenting them with a glimpse into their own past and how their fashion,

music, and television icons shaped their adolescence; yet the film also advises the

audience how this media poses a danger to how girls evaluate themselves and their

confidence, earing at their confidence if they are not ‘good enough.’

Lolita opens a dialogue about not only the mistreatment of women at the hands of

men, but also speaks to the maltreatment of sexual abuse survivors in society. Facing

trauma head on can be daunting and, at times, it can be safer to hide from them instead of

repeatedly reliving the experience. Sexual assault victims may encounter even more

hurdles due to the negative stigmas associated with their type of anguish. What was she

wearing? I bet her clothes were too revealing. Was he drunk when this happened? Why

would she put herself in the position to be raped in the first place? Why didn’t she just

say ‘no?’ Survivors of sexual abuse are met with criticism simply for being a target for a

violent, deviant criminals. They are then victims of victim shaming. It is time that the

narrative changes for these victims and that they retrieve their power back to tell their

own stories. Survivors demonstrate immense bravery when they come forward and speak

up to the world and they also help foster community by using their voices to support

other survivors of sexual violence. If you’ve been raped or sexually assaulted, you can

contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline by phone at (800) 656-HOPE or by live chat

at www.rainn.org. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, call 911for

immediate help or contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by phone at (800)

273-TALK or by live chat at https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat/.

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