Reading ‘Lolita’ in the West
by Zachary Snowdon Smith.
Like many women, Lolita’s interest is sex is transactional whereas Humbert, poor sap, is truly in love. Why anyway would we need laws governing the permissible age for sexual activity if children lacked sexuality and men were not attracted to them.
https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/reading-lolita-in-the-west/
A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs — the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate — the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/reading-lolita-in-the-west/#comment-63039
What terrified the critics so much – eager readers less so given sales – were the intimations of childhood sexuality and their destruction of our myths of innocence.
The curvacious and vampish Sue Lyons who played the girl in the film wasn’t Lolita. The book’s Lolita was a child in early pubescence with her scarcely developed breasts and vestigial pubic hair (“down”, I recall, rather than the wire brush real thing). The depiction of such a creature would never have been tolerated by either our moral arbiters or the cinema-going public because it would have told them too much about themselves.
If I remember rightly, on the morning after Humbert’s failed first seduction attempt and he is lying with her in bed wondering how to renew it, it is Lolita’s hand that reaches for him. Is that really rape? Nabokov posed a complicated question.
Like many women, Lolita’s interest is sex is transactional whereas Humbert, poor sap, is truly in love. Why anyway would we need laws governing the permissible age for sexual activity if children lacked sexuality and men were not attracted to them.
If you read the underage sex cases that get to court, you notice that the male offenders mostly are not Humberts but boys and young men close in age to the girls involved. It’s no secret nowadays that 12-year-old girls are sexually active and are openly sexualised without complaint by the fashion industry and its magazines which constantly push the limits of what is permissible.
https://quillette.com/2019/01/26/reading-lolita-in-the-west/#comment-63047
Sofka Zinovieff recently published a very good novel called Putney which deals with some of the themes in Lolita. In Zinovieff’s novel a composer in his early 30s has an affair with the 13 year old daughter of one of his bohemian friends, after grooming her for some years. But this is the 1970s, when sexual permissiveness became de rigeur among the middle class bohemians. In the novel, the girl’s parents are so busy being “cool” and having affairs that they leave their daughter much to her own devices. This attitude makes it easy for the composer and the girl to have their affair.
Flash forward to 2016 and the one friend of the girls who knew about the affair persuades the heroine that she should charge the composer, nor in his 70s and being treated for cancer, for rape.
The book is very good at showing the difference between the attitudes to sex and childhood then and the puritanical mores of modern “progressives”.