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“What is extraordinary about Lolita is … the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert’s side. … Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder.”
-- Alfred Appel, Jr.
“We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”
-- Lionel Trilling
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I have read of women readers who feel the same way, including adolescent girls, and I imagine one reason why there is this sympathy for Humbert is because the man’s whole life is consumed in his passion for Lolita, so that he burns in his own fire. He doesn’t just pick her up at a school yard and then dump her on the side of the road when he is through. He wants to spend his whole life with her. He is still a criminal and Lolita is a victim, but he loved nothing and nobody more than he loved that girl, even when she was pregnant with another man’s child and was no longer a nymphet. In this regard, the novel becomes a sort of perverse romance.
[Source: Nomi Tamir-Ghez, “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita” in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer]
“What is extraordinary about Lolita is … the way in which Nabokov enlists us, against our will, on Humbert’s side. … Humbert has figuratively made the reader his accomplice in both statutory rape and murder.”
-- Alfred Appel, Jr.
“We find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents … we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”
-- Lionel Trilling
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I have read of women readers who feel the same way, including adolescent girls, and I imagine one reason why there is this sympathy for Humbert is because the man’s whole life is consumed in his passion for Lolita, so that he burns in his own fire. He doesn’t just pick her up at a school yard and then dump her on the side of the road when he is through. He wants to spend his whole life with her. He is still a criminal and Lolita is a victim, but he loved nothing and nobody more than he loved that girl, even when she was pregnant with another man’s child and was no longer a nymphet. In this regard, the novel becomes a sort of perverse romance.
[Source: Nomi Tamir-Ghez, “The Art of Persuasion in Nabokov’s Lolita” in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook, ed. Ellen Pifer]
