Who is actually the scandalous Lolita?

21.09.2012 | By: Z. J.

On the Internet Lolita is shown in a very erotic or even pornographic context as a sexually active teenager. But what does the term Lolita actually mean?

In Kubrick’s adaptation, the main heroine first shows herself lying on a meadow – an image of innocence and seduction melted into one. (PhotoXpress)

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One film critic said: “Lolita is the perfect allegory of the 20th century and its obsessions – its obsessions with getting younger, the Peter Pan syndrome, Michael Jackson, ‘rediscovering your inner child’, infantilising everything, voyeurism and image.”

Lolita is a very common name in popular culture. It’s attractive probably because it sounds exotic, but that’s a poor excuse for using it as a generally accepted term for a “precociously seductive girl”, as Webster’s dictionary phrases it. It might be said that not all Lolitas are Lolitas, but such a statement seems rather naive – if we believe this, we can also believe that not every Frankenstein is a Frankenstein.

So who is Lolita?

Lolita is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which caused a stir before it even came out. In 1955, it was published by Olympia Press from Paris, an erotic book publishing house. The book wasn’t published in the USA and Great Britain – these books were usually nothing more than ordinary pornography, so Lolita was understood as such at first and the American media wasn’t that favourably disposed towards it.

Humber Humbert, our narrator, is an educated middle-aged European with a love for girls between the ages of 9 and 14. He calls them nymphets. According to him, these tendencies are a result of an unfulfilled teenage love for Annabel Leigh. When he comes to America, he falls in love with a twelve year-old American girl Dolores Haze – Lolita. After a bunch of lucky coincidences (for him), they start having a sexual relationship. One day, Lolita disappears with their pursuer and writes to Humbert in a few years that she and her husband need money. Humbert plans murder, but changes his mind when he realises that this man isn’t his Doppelgänger. And we’re in for a surprise here. Humbert loves the seventeen year-old, obviously pregnant Lolita, who is no longer a nymphet. He gives her money and forces her to tell him the name of the man who took her away from him. He finds this man in the end and kills him.

This is where Humbert finally realises that he destroyed Lolita’s childhood and pushed her into adulthood too soon. One of the most touching moments is his “anagnorisis”, when he listen to children playing: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” (Nabokov 2005: 364)

Lolita in popular culture

French music is famous for singing praises to love of older men for much younger girls. That’s how the lyrics of Moi ... Lolita (I... Lolita), sung by teenager Alizee (she enumerates attributes which show her youthfulness and seductiveness: she doesn’t tell her secret to her mother and she wears seductive clothes), explain, in first-person narrative, that everyone calls her Lolita and everyone wants her, but she stresses that it’s not her fault or mistake.

The main theme of Celine Dion’s song Lolita is that “you can’t be too young to love” (the emphasis is on physical love!). The idea becomes unusual because the authoress uses Lolita’s name in the title – this makes us think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who is old enough for love – but not the kind Humbert is offering her. In this part, the discrepancy between love (or sexuality, if you like) as understood by children and adult love is very obvious, so choosing this name in connection to this theme is slightly unusual.

Suzanne Vega appeals to Lolita not to beg for attention and stand up for herself as an almost adult girl who wants to appear older than she is by wearing her mother’s clothes. Lolita is, therefore, again a girl who’s matured too soon and wants love.

Cosmopolitan uses Lolita as the “etymology” for lolicon in its article on child sexual abuse.

In fashion magazines, women are shown seductive lingerie in pink hues, which supposedly turns them into versions of Lolita, but it’s nowhere near what Humbert Humbert would buy his nymphet in white stockings.

Popular culture always oversimplifies: it picks one side of the story and makes it its own. In pop culture, the most attractive image is that of a young seductive woman because this is probably a good marketing ploy: she is the fantasy of adult men, but she’s also influential on young girls who want to grow up as soon as possible and become like movie stars.