The predominant profile that came out of Nabokov’s novel
Lolita, was that
of a vixen, a young girl on the cusp of womanhood, willing to use her charms to entice and snare a middle-aged man into sexual seduction. Thus, the
nymphet was born. But as Nabokov, himself, acknowledges there is another seduction going on and he describes it as “Old Europe debauching Young America.” Nabokov offers us a rare and fascinating glimpse into the mind of a pedophile.
The protagonist, Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged savant, who, at first, begins a long and emotional seduction of an adolescent girl, Lolita. Later, Humbert takes his obsession further with the girl by initiating a sexual relationship.
The story is written as a memoir. Humbert begins his erotic
prepubescent musings with the sentence: “Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of 9 and 14 there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.” He goes on to reveal his fantasy of an “enchanted” island, “mirrory beaches and rosy rocks” “haunted’ by “these nymphets and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.”
Humbert states that “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!)... Is the “artist” and “madman” also a pedophile? He knows his desires are forbidden for he says “Oh, how you have to cringe and hide!” This “artist” can identify the “ineffable signs” of these nymphets: “the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices” which bring the “artist” to “tears of tenderness”. According to Humbert, these nymphets stand out among a group of children; he states “a demon among the wholesome children”. Furthermore, he admits that the so-called nymphet is unaware of her charms “and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.” She is not deliberately trying to be seductive of anyone.
Humbert goes on to instruct the reader, whom he calls the “student” in the rules of the game: “The student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell.” It is generally known that the sexual thrill that a pedophile derives from a child, at least in part, comes from the inequality of power and status between child and adult, with the child being, of course, less powerful. The potency and beauty of Humbert’s childhood romantic and sexual experience with his sweetheart, which ended in tragedy, leaves an indelible imprint on Humbert’s soul and mind. He seeks this kind of experience again; however, he is no longer an adolescent but a middle-aged man and he seeks a replay of this experience with prepubescent girls.
An important characteristic of some pedophiles is that they can sustain sexual relationships with adult women. Humbert states that “overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts”...He states that he was just like any other adult male who had adult sexual relations with women: “I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates...However, he admits to harboring a secret knowledge and desire and it is much more sexually powerful than the outward one: “The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine.” This too, is true of a pedophile; their sexual fantasies of children are much more sexually arousing and powerful to them than their adult sexual encounters, thus the word “bliss” that Humbert uses. He even describes the fascination he has with the body of a prepubescent girl: “The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles.”
Humbert’s character is not without sympathy; he has suffered much in his life, he still carries a wound that will not heal. It is this very wound that attracts Lolita to him, her youth reminds him of his first love, who died tragically.
With this intriguing beginning, the story of Lolita continues. Its depiction of a middle-aged English professor having an illicit affair with a young girl, Lolita, is to say the least, a page-turner. Nabokov’s novel Lolita is intriguing, mesmerizing and disturbing and remains a classic still. It is definitely worth the read.