Sexual Deviance and Normality in Nabokovs Lolita

In one of the most mischievous novels in the English language, Vladimir Nabokov weaves an enigmatic tale about a precocious early adolescent and a middle-aged pedophile with a fancy prose style. Humbert loves Lolita, or at least his artful image of her. Meanwhile, the mysterious Quilty, playwright and pornographer, shadows the mismatched couple and reads Humberts mind. Humbert loses Lolita to Quilty. Eventually, Humbert catches up with Quilty and murders him, or so it seems. Finally, Humbert recounts the whole affair in his fancy prose and dies of a broken heart. Lolita parodies classic romantic stories about ill-fated passion and struggles with Doppelgnger; it turns in on itself in self-parody of the artist manqu; and it parodies psychoanalysis, especially oedipal theory. While these elements are apparent, just what Nabokov was trying to accomplish with them, if anything, is far from clear. Nearly fifty years since the publication of Lolita (1955), and despite much scholarly exegesis, the novel remains a perplexing read. One possibility is that the parody, literary allusions, and wordplay represent nothing more than an especially strong form of literary aestheticism. It seems more likely, however, that the novel conceals an inner design or thesis. Nabokov himself likens Lolita to a riddle with an elegant solution (1990), and he warns his readers to expect not only wordplay and artifice, but also deceit bordering on diabolism (1967). Humbert's perversion is not so much pedophilia as narcissism: he seeks not to obtain love objects proper but docile providers of sexual gratification. Being incapable of loving anybody but himself, not even Lolita at first, he cannot be loved by anyone either. His acts of cruelty against Lolita as he tries to keep her for his sexual needs and to fan his waning desire work havoc upon him. When he meets her again after their separation, he discovers that what he desires most from her is not sex but love. As a narrator, he does his utmost to transmute his sexual desire into an aesthetic one in an attempt to gain our understanding as well as Lolita's forgiveness beyond the grave.

Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita shocked and appalled its American audience upon its publication in 1955. In its blurring of the fine line that separates normal sexual behavior from deviance, Lolita touched, and still touches, a peculiarly American nerve. Another work that examined the boundary between abnormal and normal sexual activity was Alfred Kinseys controversial scientific surveys of sexual behavior among men and women, published in 1948 and 1953.1 These studies, the so-called Kinsey reports, also raised a furor in 1950s America. Both Kinsey and Nabokov essentially challenged myths about the presumed innocence, or sexual naivet, of American women. Although Lolita is presented through the eyes of a pedophile who sees her as an American Eve, the novel appropriates the language and scientific perspective of the Kinsey reports to undercut this mythological view of her. While Humbert presents Lolitas sexuality as deviant or precocious, Nabokov invokes statistical, scientific studies of female sexuality similar to the Kinsey reports; the effect of this perspective is to suggest that Lolitas sexuality is in fact normal. Failing to recognize this scientific view of Lolita, clearly represented in the novel, critics sometimes see Lolita exclusively from Humberts perspectiveas an archetypal temptress, a modernday femme fatale. Indeed, critics have sometimes conflated Humberts view of Lolita with Nabokovs, ignoring the ways in which Humberts mythologizing of Lolita and his construction of her sexual deviance is one of Nabokovs many targets in Lolita. The way Nabokov deconstructs Humberts myths about Lolitas perversity eluded these reviewers, who ultimately adopted, rather than condemned, Humberts view of Lolita. Some contemporary feminist critics have also misjudged the novel, erroneously conflating Humberts view of Lolita with Nabokovs. Linda Kauffman, for example, argues that the novel allegorizes Woman and feels as though Nabokov elides the female by framing the narrative through Humberts angle of vision. It is not the novel that allegorizes Woman, but Humbert. And Humberts angle of vision is not the only one we have of Lolita, although it predominates. Nabokov, I suggest, utilizes the sexology that was so controversial in the 1950s to suggest an alternative interpretation of Lolita, one which views her not as a special, nymph-like girl already perverted before Humbert exploits her, but rather as an ordinary, juvenile girl whose normal sexual development is warped by a maniacal, myth-making pedophile. By interrogating the boundary between sexual

deviance and normality, Nabokovs Lolita, like Alfred Kinseys studies, exposes cultural myths, like the Edenic one Humbert Humbert creates, that turn normal sexual behavior into deviance. In giving us not only the misogynistic, mythical perspective of Humbert for Lolitas sexual behavior, but also that of the new science of sexology, which normalized supposedly deviant behavior, Nabokov exposes the volatility of the subjective, social constructs of deviance and normality. Lolita poses the question of how a womans sexual awakening should be viewed. Specifically, through what interpretive or epistemological frame should readers view Lolitas sexualitythrough what Humbert and myth tell us, or through a more prosaic lens? Through conscious and obsessive allusions to the Garden of Eden, Humbert creates a distinctly Edenic framework, an epistemology, for interpreting Lolita and her troubling sexuality. But Nabokov provides (without endorsing) an alternative interpretive frame. Among these critics, Bayma and Fine note, was Lionel Trilling, who stated that Lolita had few emotions to be violated by Humberts exploitation of her. As Eric Rothstein notes, Lolita complicates and compromises normativity. It does so by the paradoxes and slippages in Doloress and Humberts norms, the uncertain status of the many cultural references, and by toying with reading practices, aesthete and philistine alike. The role of myth and science in such shifting and slippages of normativity and deviance, I will argue in what follows, is clearly on display in the novel. Modern science, or, more specifically, sexology, provides a competing epistemology by which to understand Lolitas sexuality. The science of sexology undermines Humberts Edenic perspective of Lolita and establishes her behavior and development as normal. Rather than being a nymphomaniac who seduces Humbert, from this perspective she becomes a normally developing young woman who is exploited by an imaginative man who ironically sees her as the deviant. In highlighting Humberts ironic interpretation of Lolita as deviant (and himself as helpless as Adam) and showcasing his clever arguments about the normalcy of his own apparently deviant behavior, Nabokov suggests that the concepts of deviance and normalcy are disturbingly fluid, contingent upon our social perspective, and shaped by our own prejudices and desires.

From Humberts literary and mythic perspective, Lolita is a modern avatar of a long line of wayward, deviant women. From the perspective of Alfred Kinsey and other sexologists of Lolitas day, she is a normally developing female experimenting with her sexuality. The Apple Trail in Lolita Apples plague Lolita; and these apples become symbolically important because Humbert, a man conscious of his role as Adam and even more conscious of Lolitas role as Eve, appropriates them into myth and arranges them in an Edenic setting of his own erudite imagination. While it is Nabokov who provides the actual apples, so to speak, the literal gardens, it is Humbert who imposes symbolic weight and importance on these elements of Eden in the modern world. Ultimately, Humbert provides an archetypal context for Lolitas sexuality to justify his own perversion of her. Humberts romance with archetypal gardens begins with his tryst with Annabel, a girl with whom he has a frustrated adolescent romance while Humberts consummation of this romance, however, is interrupted as he is about to lose his virginity with Annabeland this interruption is the origin of Humberts obsession with sexual transgression. His original meeting with Lolita also takes place in a garden. Mrs. Haze (Lolitas mother) eagerly purrs, Let me show you the garden. In Humberts description, Mrs. Haze seems to be an Eve, a temptress, even before her rival daughter usurps her place. He remarks, Her smile was but a quizzical jerk of one eyebrow; and uncoiling herself from the sofa as she talked, she kept making spasmodic dashes at three ashtrays and the near fender (where lay the brown core of an apple) . The images of a ravished apple and a serpentine Charlotte Haze are ambiguous. Is the apple Mrs. Hazes detritus or Lolitas? In either case, the imagery establishes that Humbert has entered the domain of a fallen temptress. As the apple trail grows, it becomes strewn with allusions to Eden. Humbert is rarely subtle about his Edenic fantasies: shortly before his first clandestine orgasm with Lolita as she sits playfully on his lap, Humbert describes her holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. The apple that Humbert tinges with Edenic colors becomes a playful object of flirtation between the mismatched pair. Humbert snatches the apple away from Lolita, who

soon retrieves and bites into it. As the flirtation continues, Humbert becomes more and more excited as he watches Lolita devouring her immemorial fruit (59). Why the fruit should be considered immemorial by Humbert isnt evident until we recognize that Humbert is fitting Lolita into a long line of mythical temptressesbeginning, here, with Eve. The scene develops serious overtones as Humberts climax and Lolitas abolishment of her apple coincide: As she strained to chuck the core of her abolished apple into the fender, her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap; and all of a sudden a mysterious change came over my senses. I entered a plane of being where nothing mattered, save the infusion of joy brewed within my body [] The least pressure would suffice to set all paradise loose. The name is similar to Miranda, the Shakespearean heroine who has come to symbolize youths process of discovery. In this context, the subtle reference can be seen to reflect the passage of youth into a distinctly brave new sexuality. And yet despite Humberts portrayal of an Edenic transgression, it is not followed by an Edenic fall. Humbert prides himself on his theft of sinful pleasure without incurring any of the sin and boasts about his supposedly innocent transgression: I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a minor [] and still Lolita was safe and I was safe. Humberts version of the Edenic consumption of the forbidden apple without the subsequent fall, therefore, both invokes and subverts the myth in a way that exonerates him from blame. The next mention of apples occurs in an equally significant context; but on this occasion, Lolita is fully aware of Humberts sexual excitement. After Lolita has seduced Humbert for the first time, Humbert imagines what kind of scene he could paint to express his ecstasy, again transforming the experience into myth. There would have been nature studiesa tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat.

There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony [] helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx [] There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. Humbert imaginatively fits his pedophilic conquest into the framework of mythology. Mythically evocative words in Humberts tableau, such as snake, paradise, and Sunday, as well as apples, all invoke a specifically Edenic framework for his sexual intercourse with Lolita. While Humbert never is able to transcend this mythological reading of Lolitain the end of the novel describing her, retrospectively, in similar terms Nabokov does provide alternative contexts Lolitas sexuality. Humberts self-conscious references to apples and Eden, however, develop his interpretation of Lolita further before any alternative suggests itself. When Humbert and Lolita are at Beardsley, for example, he suddenly fears, when Lolita shows signs of interest in high-school boys, that she has become sexually active with those her own age. Strangely enough, Lolita appears to Humbert as suddenly similar to his Parisian prostitute: Lolita has lipstick on her teeth, and this red stain triggers an uncanny comparison in Humberts mind. He compares Lolitas cheeks to the prostitutes pommettesin French, literally, little apples. While Humbert is idiomatically referring to rosy cheeks, he also evokes the image of apples, and, consequently, again casts Lolita as a post-lapsarian Eve, a fallen or depraved woman. By likening Lolita to a prostitute, Humbert furthers his own need to justify his exploitation of her by establishing her as a deviant. The beginning of this view, interestingly, is his consideration that Lolita may have become sexually active with those her own age. Such activity, for Humbert, is a sure sign of deviance. The process of Lolitas discovery of her sexuality, not nearly so perverse and unique as Humbert would like to believe, is irreversibly warped by Humberts exploitation of her. While Humbert establishes himself as yet another Charlie Holmes, happy that he is not the one to despoil her, he is clearly not just another tentative and normal experiment in Lolitas sexual awakening. Lolitas fall and perversion begins and ends with Humbert. Humbert takes pains to stigmatize normal social interaction between Lolita and her peers while taking equally great pains to normalize his bizarre exploitation of an innocent by referring to the practice of pedophilia, for example, in ancient Roman and Oriental cultures. But while he struggles

to establish the cultural relativity of sexual deviance and normality, ordinary juvenile flirtation and courtship constitutes perversion for himhis progressive relativism, we realize, extends to his own bizarre behavior but is denied to Lolita. For example, when it is suggested that he accept and welcome juvenile suitors to his house, his comment is telling: Welcome fellow, to this bordello . That Lolita slowly does learn the clear distinction between her early experiences with others her age and her experience with Humbert is made painfully evident by her fits of crying, which Humbert keeps in the background of his mythical references and recreations. For Lolita, the transition from sexual awakening to sexual perversion and deviance is briefa transition that Humbert does his best to efface. But Lolitas short-lived awakening is clearly distinguishable and distinct from Humberts assimilation of her experiences into an Edenic myth of a fallen woman. Humberts guilty motives for casting Lolita as a fallen woman make the validity of Edenic myth as a context for what goes on questionable. Is it really Lolita who seduces Humbert? Is she really a depraved Eve who beguiles a nave, helpless Adam? While Humberts perspective dominates the novel, Nabokov suggests another interpretation of Lolita by introducing a scientific, rather than a literary and mythical, view of her sexuality. Instead of participating in or perpetuating misogynist myths about female sexuality Nabokovs Lolita exposes them for their elision of the person behind the sexuality so boldly on display. That many critics have adopted, and perhaps still adopt, Humberts mythological framework for viewing Lolita is perhaps not surprising given the fact that Humberts perspective suffuses the novel.

Bibliography

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