"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate
to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." Sets the stage of Lolita a
novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It showcases
Humbert's obsessive behavior along with the portrayal of
main themes of gender and power.
In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert, has his need to prove himself master of
everything: other people, his own desires, fate, and language itself.
Time to time again through Lolita we see Humbert’s most extreme
actions and emotions not as a result of his physical desires but rather his
psychological need to win, to possess, and to control. Gender relations are
quite simple for him: women are to be possessed, and men should compete for the
possession of women. By the end of the book
we see that Humbert’s hunger for domination overpowers the peculiar
particularities of his desires and is the real cause of his woes.
Humbert wastes no time letting us know of his potency: “I
was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male… I
could attain any adult female I chose” (25). He reminds us of this fact
numerous times. He uses it to explain how he is able to beat the competition by
seducing any woman he wants, though he may want them for unconventional
reasons. He marries Valeria for unconventional reasons: “It occurred to me
that…all the conventions of marriage…might help me, if not to purge myself of
my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific
control” (24). He chooses her in particular because of “the imitation she gave
of a little girl” (25). And he shortly admits that she grew older, fatter,
hairier, and he stopped having sex with her—there is no doubting his lack of
respect. Two pages are spent mocking Valeria and their attempt
at marriage before he explodes in fury at the fact that she is having
an affair and wants a divorce. He even addresses the peculiar reasoning of his
anger:
“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, and here
she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way
of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover’s name.” p.28
From this passage we may see two reasons for Humbert’s
anger: first, that a woman, whom he believed to be in his possession and
control, could by her own independent actions so tremendously impact his
“comfort and fate,” and second, that another man should so easily intrude on
his territory. In essence, he is furious because he has been beaten by both of
them and made to look ridiculous through his ignorance. It does not sit well
with his self image, and he cannot let this state of affairs last: “But no
matter. I had my revenge in due time” (30). It
settles the scene for Humbert—what better revenge can there be than the most
bizarre, hilarious, degrading four years of torture one can possibly imagine? Humbert
is able to move on only because he knows he has beaten the competition. L
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