‘Lolita’: what is the real meaning behind Vladimir Nabokov and Stanley Kubrick’s controversial tale?
Since its publication in 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has remained controversial. In fact, the text is perhaps one of, if not the most widely questioned works of literary history. At the heart of that argument, and as the key to the entire debate as to whether the text should be considered problematic, is the question of what Lolita is actually about or what the story means.
In short, Lolita is a tale of obsession. It is told through the eyes of an anonymous man, given the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, as he presents his life’s story. Specifically, he presents the story of his meeting and falling in love with Dolores Haze, a 12-year-old. As he becomes the girl’s guardian while also entering into an obviously wildly inappropriate relationship with her, the novel is a disturbing narrative of abuse.
Even from that brief synopsis, it’s easy to see why Lolita has always sparked so much debate. There are points in the novel where sequences of sexual encounters between the narrator and the child are told as if it’s a romance novel. Their interactions are dramatised and often romanticised to a point that has made generations of readers uncomfortable. When the story was then put into film, as Stanley Kubrick created the most famous adaptation in in 1962, that discomfort was only levelled up when these scenes were captured and stylised for cinema.
There is no denying that Lolita is a troubling tale. However, that’s entirely the point. The novel is a work of fiction, with these characters created and their dynamic written to provoke a strong emotional reaction. However, the controversy attached to Nabokov’s story is the shocked response that often comes with being the start of something.
Throughout Lolita, the reader is forced inside the narrator’s mind. From start to finish, the tale is told by Humbert, meaning that every action, thought and emotion is coloured by his unreliable eyes. It’s also affected by his feelings and obsession. His interactions with Haze, whom he nicknames Lolita, are romanticised because the reader sees them through the fog of his love or lust for her. He views it as romantic, so it is written as such. In this way, Lolita is one of the first ‘sympathy for the devil’ novels in which the reader sees everything through the mind of the villain. From that viewpoint, they’re dragged along and swept up in their mindset as they attempt to justify their actions or fail to see how evil they are.
That’s where a lot of the controversy surrounding Lolita comes from, with people throughout history accusing Nabokov or Stanley Kubrick of dangerously glamorising sexual abuse. However, that critique fails to acknowledge the fact that the veil we see the story through is a vital part of that story. It is through Humbert’s disgusting and disturbing brain that Lolita becomes the gripping tale it is.
Another potential meaning assigned to the story dives deeper into theory. To some, Lolita is a deeply Freudian tale. As the story begins, long before the reader meets Lolita, they’re given Humbert’s sob story origins. He recounts his first love, Annabel, and the closeness he had with her. So then, when Annabel abruptly died when they were 12, Humbert was traumatised.
In Freudian theory, the age a person experiences trauma at has a freezing effect, trapping them at that age forever. Through this lens, Humbert and his romantic interests are stuck at 12, and his interaction with Lolita is a desperate and disgusting attempt to relive that first love. But even through that retelling, the novel is still a blood-chilling tale of abuse, as Lolita is trapped in a horrific power dynamic with the man who is her legal guardian.
No matter how Lolita is viewed, it is a tricky one to navigate. It’s easy to see why Nabokov and any cinematic adaptors like Kubrick or Adrian Lyne have ended up facing outrage over the controversial story. Despite still being a divisive tale, it has spawned an entire cultural identity and stylistic endurance attached to the reference. Singers like Lana Del Rey regularly borrow from the text, while heart-shaped sunglasses and polka dot sundresses have birthed a Lolita style from Humbert’s disturbing obsession with “nymphets”.
However, its existence in culture requires nuance and careful consideration of who tells certain stories, how they’re told and why they’re told. It’s only by understanding the intention of the ‘sympathy for the devil’ trope that Lolita is saved from being a disgusting piece of writing and transformed into an interesting literary experiment and a layered novel. It’s only by understanding that Humbert is a villain, no matter how charming or engaging his viewpoint is, that Lolita is seen as a critique of his obsessions, not a celebration of them.
