Lolita Overview

1. Lolita Overview Shayna Friedman, Emma- Kate Greco, Lauren Moody

2. Not So Short Biography • Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, was born on or about April 23, 1899 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was the eldest of five children, he grew up in a wealthy and grew up in aristocratic family. At the time of Nabokov's adolescence, Russia was under the rule of the doomed czar, Nicholas II. In 1911, Nabokov entered the highly regarded Tenishev School. He has been described as an arrogant student. He wrote his first poem at the age of 15 and privately published two books of poetry before leaving the school. This childhood of privilege ended with the Bolshevik revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. Political unrest forced the Nabokov family to leave Russia for England in 1919. Nabokov and his brother enrolled at Cambridge University, where Nabokov majored in French and Russian literature. Nabokov's first Russian novel, Mary, was publishedin 1925, but received little attention. The rise of the Nazis interrupted his growing literary career and forced him to move to Paris.

3. Biography Continued • However, the eruption of the war soon caused him to flee Paris for New York in 1940, along with his son Dmitri who had been born in 1934. In 1941 Nabokov accepted a position at Wellesley College as a resident lecturer in Comparative Literature. He also published his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which is full of references to chess. Over the next few years, Nabokov continued to lecture at both Wellsesley college and Harvard. He also had a a fasination with butterflys and would collect them from various that he traveled. In 1948 is when Nabokov published his masterpiece, “Lolita”. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, in an effort to escape American publicity. He spent his last years publishing several novels, including Pale Fire in 1962. Nabokov remained in Switzerland until his death in 1977 of a viral infection, leaving an unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura. During his life he published eighteen novels, eight books of short stories, seven books of poetry and nine plays.

4. Summary of Lolita • Humbert's memoir begins by describing his childhood in the Riviera, where his father owns a luxury hotel. He falls in love with a "nymphet" girl-child named Annabel Leigh, who is at the hotel on vacation with her parents. Thwarted consummation of his sexual urges creates a life-long obsession with nymphets. Humbert receives an education in France and England. He marries Valeria, who ends up leaving him for a Russian cab driver. Humbert moves to the United States and spends most of his time writing and dipping in and out of mental institutes. He finally decides to settle down in Ramsdale, where he moves in with the widow Charlotte Haze and her nymphet daughter, Lolita. Humbert fixates on Lolita while barely tolerating her mother. Charlotte packs Lolita off to Camp Q and issues Humbert an ultimatum: love me or leave me. To stay in Lolita's life, Humbert marries Charlotte. Charlotte is then hit by a car after reading Humbert's diary and discovers his dark lust for her daughter and deep hatred of her. Humbert picks up Lolita at Camp Q and spirits her off to The Enchanted Hunters hotel. They have sex, which, according to Humbert, she initiates. Humbert and Lolita spend a year driving all over the United States.

5. Summary Continued • Lolita starts challenging Humbert's sexual demands; he threatens to send her to an orphanage or reform school if she doesn't straighten up. Humbert and Lolita move to Beardsley. Lolita takes up an interest in boys, but is even more eager to join the school play, The Enchanted Hunters. Humbert starts getting nervous about Lolita's fidelity to him, so they go on a trip. This time she plans the itinerary. Along the road, they are shadowed by a man in a red car who resembles Humbert's Uncle Trapp. Lolita becomes sick and goes into a hospital. While Humbert is back at the motel, Lolita leaves with a strange man. Humbert begins his obsessed hunt for Lolita, tracing back through every motel they visited. He spends years looking for her. Humbert then receives a letter from Lolita; he tracks her down to a shanty in Coalmont. Humbert meets with a very pregnant Lolita, gets the story of her escape with Quilty, begs her to return to him, and gives her money from the sale of the Haze home. Humbert tracks down Quilty and kills him in his family home. Driving the wrong way down the street, Humbert is arrested. In jail, he writes his memoir.

6. Themes • Love: Humbert spends a lot of time talking about love, especially when describing his feelings for Lolita. Is it even possible that he loves her? The fact that the narrator controls all of the images we see makes it difficult to know if he is using love as some sort of perverse excuse for his behavior. • Sex: The book has often been referred to as porn, but the author of the Foreword insists that the sex must be kept in for moral purposes, noting that "not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work".

7. Themes • Innocence: Humbert is sexually obsessed with youth in Lolita. He doesn't care that he is aging. He is obsessed with "nymphets," young girls aged nine to fourteen. He does not hesitate to mention that once girls get past that age they are no longer attractive to him. The facisnation with youth is a a prominent theme in the novel because it shows how youth has an impact on all of the characters.   • Innocence: There is very little true innocence in Lolita and the sad part is that Humbert's attraction to innocence always means that he wants to take advantage of it. The idea of innocence in the novel refers first to Humbert's lack of it. Innocence also emerges as a theme in connection to America, a country that has fully embraced consumer possibilities, shallow movie magazines, and popular culture. Humbert links Lolita's lack of innocence to all of this American-ness, but he also makes a point of explaining that Lolita was not a virgin when he got to her and that she seduced him. In other words, thus he did not steal her innocence. So really, the theme of innocence is not meant to be seen as it being taken away, but what life is like without it.

8. Themes • Morals and Ethics: The lack of morals Humbert displays in the novel are a prominent theme. Humber knows he has committed serious crimes but continues to commit more anyways. The real question is “Is Humbert a pedophile, or is his obsession much deeper than being attractive to young girls?” • Visions of America: Clearly Humbert has been obsessed with America from an early age, exposed as he was to idealized images of it. His trips across America in Lolita detail this fascination. He scrutinizes every absurd tourist trap, crappy motel, consumer habit, national compulsion, and stereotype of American culture. America is the land of mass culture, a modern society of consumer goods, a nation of tourist sights and souvenirs, where everything is commodified and collectable.

9. Main Characters • Humbert Humbert- He is the narrator and protagonist. Humbert suffers mental illness, but is very intellectual. While being able to seduce the reader, he is still capable of murder and other vile things. He comes to a realization towards the end of the novel that he has ruined Lolita’s life and writes about it in his prison cell, where he dies of heart failure. • Dolares (Lolita) Haze- Lolita is a flirtatious, capricious adolescent who at first has some attachment towards Humbert. After he begins to pressure her, her attachment wears off. After refusing to participate in child pornography, Humbert abandons her and she runs off with Clare Quilty, later marrying Dick Schiller and dying in childbirth.

10. Main Characters • Clare Quilty- Clare is a successful playwright who takes a liking to Lolita. He is also a child pornographer. Throughout the novel, he follows Lolita and tries kidnapping her from Humbert. He is corrupt and completely amoral. • Charlotte Haze- Charlotte is Humbert’s wife and Lolita’s mother. She is nothing more than a middle-class housewife, striving to be sophisticated. Her relationship with Lolita throughout the story is very strained. She is blind to the fact that Humbert has pedophilia until she discovers his diary. Soon after discovering his diary, Charlotte dies in a car accident.

11. Conflicts • ·Humbert Humbert and society- Society does not approve of his incest and pedophilia • ·Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty- Clare competes with Humbert for Lolita’s affection and attention • ·        He is in love with Lolita but knows he does not have a chance while Mrs. Haze is alive.

12. The Time Period and it’s Impact • During the time Lolita was written (1955) the evolution of psychology was bringing themes such as sexuality and repression into the center of popular culture. While writing Lolita he could not ignore this impact psychology and human emotions had on society. Therefore Nabakov attempts to set aside the traditional views of sexuality and psychology while pretending to praise to them.

13. Other Works by Nabokov • LECTURES ON LITERATURE (1980) • Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defense) • OTCHAYANIYE (1936; Despair, 1937) • The Gift (1937-38) • MASHENKA (1926), • Invitation to a Beheading (1938), • THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT (1941) • BEND SINISTER (1947) • SPEAK, MEMORY (1966) • PALE FIRE (1962) • PNIN • ADA (1969), • TRANSPARENT THINGS (1972) • HARLEQUINS! (1975) • Eugene Onegin (1964),