The scandalous literary classic we've never stopped arguing about

Vox

5 hours ago

is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
When Lolita first appeared 70 years ago, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American publisher was willing to touch it. Today, Lolita is hailed as a classic, a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the English language.
Yet Lolita also comes with a sense that it is still, perhaps, too controversial to touch. A book about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all told in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? 'They'd never let you publish that now,' writer after writer has declared. In a development that seems almost too on the nose, it was recently reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his home, under glass.
'I love that book,' someone told me recently when he saw me rereading it. Then: 'Am I still allowed to love that book?'
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We certainly read Lolita very differently than we used to. For decades after its publication, readers both nodded to the horror at the center of the novel but also believed it was a little unsophisticated to dwell only on the assault. In pop culture, Lolita became synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves whatever she gets. Today, however, the received wisdom is that Lolita is not a romance but a horror story.
In the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — lovely, sensual Lolita; obscene, monstrous Lolita; bleak, tragic Lolita — has become a barometer of sorts for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov's novel is so multifaceted that it reflects the priorities of its readers back at us, showing us what we value and fear most at any given moment in time. We're still arguing over Lolita today, and our debates mirror the contours of our current culture war: a horror at an abuser's attempt to cover up their abuse; a terror that all that is pleasurable will be moralized into oblivion.
What kind of book could plausibly be experienced both as an erotic comic romp in the 1950s and a searing dismantling of rape culture on its 70th birthday? Only ever Lolita.
How did they ever publish Lolita?
Lolita was born a scandal.
Initially, Nabokov planned to publish the novel anonymously, with the only clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose name, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. But Lolita was so characteristic of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov's friends convinced him that everyone would know he wrote it anyway.
Four American publishers, likely fearing expensive obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita. Nabokov sent the manuscript went off to Paris's Olympia Press, which knew how to publish obscene novels, and there it became an underground cult object: the book too scandalous to be published in the US, the literary novel from the pornographic publisher.
In 1958, when it finally came out in the US, it shot to the top of the bestseller lists and transformed Nabokov from an obscure Russian-born writer of tricky novels into a wealthy household name.
Not to say that Lolita is not a tricky novel. Lolita is narrated by one Humbert Humbert, a smooth-talking charmer who confesses to us early on that he is sexually obsessed with little girls between the ages of 8 and 14: 'nymphets,' he calls them. His landlady's 12-year-old daughter Dolores Haze — nicknamed Lolita by Humbert — is just one such nymphet, and Humbert is so obsessed with her that he decides to marry her mother in order to have more access to Dolores. After Mrs. Haze dies, Humbert seizes the moment to kidnap Dolores, taking her off on a demented road trip back and forth across America, going from one motel to the next, debauching her all the way.
Critics were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story.
Humbert is such a strange, unstable figure that the term 'unreliable narrator' was coined in part to describe him. He narrates his depravities in luxuriant, beautiful sentences full of wordplay and neologisms, funny and mordant. He plays constantly for our sympathy: at one moment calling himself a monster, the next swearing he loves Lolita with a deep and undying passion, the next informing us with an air of triumph that it was she who seduced him. You can tell, reading Lolita, that Humbert wants you to like him. It's harder to tell if Nabokov wants you to like Humbert, too.
Early critics by and large agreed that Lolita was a masterpiece (with some notable exceptions). But they were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. How was anyone supposed to read it?
One of the most influential early readers who laid the blueprint for how Lolita would be received was legendary literary critic Lionel Trilling.
For Trilling, the pleasure of the novel was the point. He was part of a generation of young, au courant critics who carefully prized such pleasure, who took it as a point of pride that they were not dreary old Victorian killjoys who feared every book might corrupt the morals of the young. If it was pleasurable to read Humbert's words, to fall into his point of view and learn to see the world as he did — well then, that was the correct way to read the novel. It didn't mean that you condoned child sex abuse. It meant that you understood allegory.
Trilling eventually concluded that Lolita was, in a generic sense, a story about love: following in the literary tradition of courtly love, it was about a forbidden romance so scandalous that it could never end in marriage, like the love between Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, married to another man, and Vronsky. Readers were no longer shocked when novelists broke the taboo of adultery, Trilling reasoned, and so Nabokov had to be extreme with Lolita.
'The breaking of the taboo about the sexual unavailability of very young girls has for us something of the force that a wife's infidelity had for Shakespeare,' Trilling wrote. 'H.H.'s relation with Lolita defies society as scandalously as did Tristan's relation with Iseult, or Vronsky's with Anna. It puts the lovers, as lovers in literature must be put, beyond the pale of society.'
Trilling's argument lived on, in an ever-more-flattened form, for the next 50 years or so.
It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view.
As Lolita entered into popular culture, it was largely understood through the lens of forbidden romance and adolescent lust. 'Lolita' and 'nymphet' both entered the dictionaries to mean a sexually precocious girl. Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation made iconic the image of Dolores Haze licking a lollipop, sending the camera a piercing, erotically charged gaze over the rim of her heart-shaped sunglasses. The reading would persist unchanged for decades. In 1997, Adrien Lyne's adaptation played out the story in front of a vaseline-smeared lens, misty and nostalgic and lovely. Lana Del Rey would play repeatedly with Lolita imagery in her early career, singing about how romantic it was when she played Lolita to her older boyfriend's Humbert Humbert.
It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view.
James Mason and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita, which was released in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Seven Arts Production/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
In 1995, literary scholar Elizabeth Patnoe describes finding her classmates angrily, belligerently resistant to the idea that it might be possible to despise Humbert Humbert as an unrepentant child sex offender. The men in the classroom, she says, found Humbert relatable and worthy of compassion, and were shocked when she said she hated him because of what he did to Dolores. One accused her of having 'cheated the text.'
At the time, to take a moral reading of Lolita was to be embarrassingly Victorian. It was to deny oneself the pleasure of Nabokov's language for no particular reason.
Twenty years later, however, Patnoe's interpretation has picked up steam. It has become, for many readers, the dominant way to read Lolita: by understanding it as a book about the rape of a child, and Humbert as the monster who is trying to fool you. In this reading, the pleasure is a trap.
Finding the pain under Lolita
There's plenty of evidence within Lolita to suggest that we are meant to be looking beneath Humbert's playful sentences for the pain of Dolores Haze.
Even as Humbert insists that it was Dolores who seduced him, he also tells us that Dolores finds her sexual encounters with Humphrey painful, that she cries every night when she thinks that he is asleep, that she hoards her allowance so that she can run away from him. (He steals it back from her, but she runs away from him regardless.) Dolores does seem to have a crush on Humbert when she first meets him, but it vanishes as soon as she is faced with the reality of what exactly he means to do to her.
Under a reading that focuses on Dolores and her pain, even the novel's title and Humbert's repeated invocations of 'my Lolita' are an attempt from Humbert to control Dolores as brutally and totally as possible: He has taken even her name from her, and he has made us, his readers, complicit in it.
There is also some evidence that Nabokov endorsed this reading of his book. Speaking to the Paris Review for a 1967 issue, Nabokov appeared appalled when his interviewer suggested that Humbert Humbert had a 'touching' quality.
'I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching,'' Nabokov replied. 'That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl' — that is to say, Dolores, whose name means sorrow.
In the same interview, however, Nabokov vigorously disavowed any moral or didactic reading of his novels. It's hard to know for sure what he made of Humbert's fans as they multiplied across the decades.
It wasn't until the mid-2010s that a Dolores-centric reading of Lolita finally began to gain more traction.
Related The Great Awokening is transforming America
In the New Republic in 2015, Ira Wells tracked the public's eagerness to read Lolita as the story of a sexually appealing young girl against the language that suggested Dolores's tragedy. 'The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America,' wrote Wells: 'It is the story of how a girl became a noun.'
Probably the most high-profile of these essays came from the feminist critic Rebecca Solnit, in her 2015 LitHub essay 'Men Explain Lolita to Me.'
'A nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn't thought of that yet,' Solnit wrote. 'It is, and it's also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps.'
How Lolita survived Me Too
The new Lolita takes were becoming mainstream just around the time of the so-called Great Awokening, those days in the late Obama era when it felt urgent and necessary to explore how misogynistic ideologies were encoded into works of art and popular culture. Gamergate and the Fappening ricocheted around the internet.
Then in 2017, Me Too exploded into popular consciousness, and Lolita became, abruptly, very urgent indeed. In novels and memoirs of that time, changing the way you read Lolita became a metaphor for changing the way you think about consent.
Related Reading Lolita in the wake of the My Dark Vanessa controversy
When Me Too went mainstream, America began to reconsider old love stories and jokes, wondering if they were really so funny and romantic after all. (Listen, me too.) Almost immediately, commenters on the right began to declare that the left had, just like those killjoy Victorians, gone too far, become too moralistic: that they were destroying art and eroticism alike out of a desire to keep the world sanitized and safe and — using a word that had become a pejorative rather suddenly — woke.
Lolita became a chief exhibit in that argument. Me Too, these commenters declared, was going to come for Lolita, and the book would never have seen the light of day in contemporary publishing. 'What's different today is #MeToo and social media — you can organize outrage at the drop of a hat,' 'If Lolita was offered to me today, I'd never be able to get it past the acquisition team,' publisher Dan Franklin was quoted saying in The Spectator, 'a committee of 30-year-olds, who'd say, 'If you publish this book we will all resign.''
You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her.
When I look back on meditations on Lolita around this time, however, what I find are a few declarations that Lolita is a misogynistic novel; but a great deal more pieces by readers who went back to Lolita expecting to find it appalling, and instead found it holds up remarkably well.
Many of the works of art that were allegedly 'canceled' by the excesses of the woke mob in the wake of Me Too are works whose essence changes entirely when you look at them as stories of sexual assault. If you go digging for the voices of the sexual assault victim in, say, Sixteen Candles, you find nothing. Lolita, however, rewards such a read. You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her.
'Perhaps—and at Vegas odds—only Lolita can survive the new cultural revolution,' Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. 'No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book's publication 60-plus years ago.'
What becomes much more difficult, in such a reading, is enjoying the music of Nabokov's prose without shame.
Who's reading Lolita right?
Since 2018, as the Me Too backlash has mounted, the culture war over Lolita has shifted once again. The question is not, now, over whether someone is trying to cancel Lolita. Instead, it's the same as the old one: How do you handle the pleasure of the novel, and how do you handle the horror? What is the correct way to like Lolita?
In her 2021 essay collection The Devil's Treasure, Mary Gaitskill wrote defensively that she thought Lolita was about love, and that she was sure saying so would lead censorious readers to hurl her book across the room. 'I don't think it's ideal love, it's twisted love, but that doesn't mean it isn't love. Probably the majority of Americans who know of that book would say: 'Yes, in real life Humbert should go to jail, but he's obviously a fictional character and I'm interested to read about him,'' Gaitskill said to The Guardian. 'That seems simple, but for more intellectual people, or people who are loud on Twitter, I think it's become contentious.'
In 2020, writer and comedian Jamie Loftus released her Lolita Podcast, an extensive deep dive into the cultural legacy of Lolita. A central part of Loftus's argument was that our culture had gotten Lolita fundamentally wrong by reading it as the story of the temptress Lolita instead of the victim Dolores. 'I'm now far more aggravated with how [Lolita] was presented to me than by the work itself,' Loftus said. 'For me, a close read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying the predator. I believe it's our culture that has.'
Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive.
Versions of this argument over how to read Lolita continue to play out on social media, where Redditors vigorously debate whether people who read the book as a love story are illiterate edgelords stuck in the past, or if people who read the book as a horror story are virtue-signaling social justice obsessives.
The culture wars have a way of making everything they touch look the same. Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive, who is shrill and moralizing and who is unafraid of petty boundaries.
The person who might be most helpful to us here is, of all people, Lionel Trilling.
'For me one of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone … and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on,' Trilling wrote, in the same 1958 essay in which he declared that Lolita is about love. 'Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.'
Lolita was written by a Russian, but it is about America, the whole vast beautiful seedy map of it, which Humbert and Dolores criss-cross again and again over their horrible year together. It is Lolita's ability to change shape before our eyes, to shift, to mutate, to show us who we are in every era, that makes it such a purely American novel. The more we read Lolita, the more it has to show us about who we are.