Lolita
Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov first published in 1955. The novel is famous both for its extraordinary stylistic innovation and for its controversial subject matter. The novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, is sexually obsessed with pubescent girls. The novel focuses on Humbert Humbert's relationship with a pubescent girl called Lolita.
Humbert tells the story of his young first love and his later attempts to recapture that innocent experience, culminating in his inability to have mature relationships. Despite being in his late thirties and having had various relationships with mature women, Humbert explains that his emotional senses and amorous attractions remain frozen in a state of perpetual, idealized, pubescence.
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2 Style 3 Publication and reception 4 Literary allusions 5 Influence 6 See also 7 Lolita-Themed Films 8 References |
Warning: Plot details follow.
A scholar, Humbert leaves Europe for America and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after meeting her, and spying her twelve-year-old daughter (Dolores Haze, affectionately shortened to "Lo," or Lolita) sunbathing in the garden. Charlotte Haze, a lonely widow, becomes Humbert's unwitting pawn in his silent quest to be near her young daughter. Charlotte soon marries Humbert. Upon a search of Humbert's room, she finds his diary, and Humbert's written confessions of indifference to his new wife and impassioned lust for her daughter. She runs away in disgust and, in fleeing the home, is hit and killed by a passing car.
Humbert begins traveling around America with Lolita, with whom he is now having a sexual relationship, going from motel to motel. This relationship ends when a rival adult suitor, Clare Quilty, convinces Lolita to leave Humbert and run away with him.
At the end of the novel, when Humbert Humbert briefly reunites with Lolita, it is only to give her the money she has requested so that she and her new husband, Richard Schiller, can make a fresh start in Alaska. Humbert realizes that he still wants her, not because she was one of the class of young girls he refers to as nymphets, but because he has truly fallen in love with her.
The novel is a tragi-comedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries.
Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of "erotica" in Paris, which published Lolita in 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual American publication on August 18, 1958, by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century.
Lolita has been filmed twice, in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick (starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers and, as Lolita, Sue Lyon), and in 1997 by Adrian Lyne (starring Dominique Swain, Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith).
Lolita is the book referred to as "that book by Nabokov" in the song Don't Stand So Close to Me by The Police.
The term lolita has come to be applied, especially in the marketing of pornography, to any attractive woman who has only recently reached, or is still younger than, the age of consent. For this reason, it is especially worth noting that Nabokov's Lolita is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as "a hateful person" (see Humbert Humbert).
Plot
Style
Publication and reception
Literary allusions
Influence
See also
Lolita-Themed Films
References