Rape and Regret
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the adult female is a figure out of control. The little girl however resonates
inside us all, tells the truth of our own constant sense of helplessness and asks if
we treat ourselves well when we are at our weakest points. Humbert cannot cope
inside relationships with those who maintain independent identities. Because
adult females cannot be subsumed by his reflections, they are dragons. They
claw and harp. Little girls, though, are glowing, beautiful items that only turn
ugly whenever they assert themselves. Lolita is vicious, sulky, the “immortal
daemon” when she resists. She is, in the end, the shape of male fear. Humbert is
justifying his crimes because he is about to be judged and he is very ill. It is
telling that he dies of a heart attack, a victim of heart sickness where the soul is
said to lie, and telling that Lolita dies at the moment of creating what would be,
in Humbert’s eyes and in those of his ilk, another endangered victim. Her final
refusal to participate is in dying. Sucked of the fortitude to control her or her
child’s destiny because that part of her has been destroyed by her rapist, Lolita
expires before she can become a part of the chain of disgust that has shaped her
world, the mind of her rapist, and the world the man who is writing the book
reflects. And we are relieved both of the view of the dirtied girl and of our
responsibility for her existence when she does die, because we no longer need to
save her. But we are still left wallowing inside Humbert’s fantasy, one that he is
willing to kill to protect. “Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a
scanty balding” (Nabokov, 4858-65). Quilty, the book’s other pervert, is the
hoary monster that peers out of Humbert’s eyes when he lets down his guard.
During their life and death struggle for the gun Humbert can in fact not
determined who is who during their struggle. “. . . he rolled over me. I rolled
over him. We roll over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us” (Nabokov,
4944-52). And it takes many bullets to kill Quilty because Humbert fails to take
dead aim at himself so killing his “other” is a hard job.
Humbert took Lolita from her life but he never entirely subsumes her.
Quilty conspires with her and when she wants to leave, she does, making her a
more proactive creature; therefore, creating a hole in Humbert’s fantasy where
guilt peers through. Lolita is a dangerous girl at their last meeting. He passes her
without touching her: when they meet after she is married. He calls her a
“blurred” and “washed out” beauty (Nabokov, 4482-91). She is the woman who
exercised agency, and in so doing allowed a glimmer of the truth of the monster
Humbert is to shimmer to the surface. Humbert needs a worldview in which
captives imprison the captors. When Lolita uses choice to escape, he completely
loses control. He has one last card to play. Arrested for driving on the wrong
side of the road, not an act of a man evading the law, he uses his last moments to
once again rewrite the view of the girl child and we read to the end to see if he
succeeds. It can be supposed that this girl will not age well, but what horrifies
Humbert is that she matures and this he cannot allow without recompense.
Lolita as a grown-up becomes a coarse beast in Humbert’s view. “I kept
retreating in a mincing dance [as she advanced]” (Nabokov, 4622-32). He
expresses less fear of dying and imprisonment than he does of losing control of