Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
4.93/5
This review is part of a re-reads series; My friends and I are reading classics we had read in our youth and reviewing them. Readers should also be aware that this review makes important plot points explicit.
It will be seem from them that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same. First he would tempt meand then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and how to do it, without impinging on a child’s chastity; after all, I had had some experience in my life of pederosis; had visually possessed dappled nymphets in parks; had wedged my wary and bestial way into the hottest, most crowded corner of a city bus full of straphanging school children. But for almost three weeks I had been interrupted in all my pathetic machinations. The agent of these interruptions was usually the Haze woman (who, as the reader will mark, was more afraid of Lo’s deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lo). The passion I had developed for that nymphetfor the first nymphet in my life that could be reached at last by my awkward, aching, timid clawswould have certainly landed me again in a sanatorium, had not the devil realized that I was to be granted some relief if he wanted to have me as a plaything for some time longer.
With every reading of Lolita, like other great works of literature, there are certainly new themes and motifs and metaphors that beg the reader for approval. As Nabokov himself has said, the best reader is the chronic re-reader. A great work of literature is a mirror the writer holds up to the reader, asking him to confront their deepest fears, sentiments, and beliefs.
With that said, and having read a lot of professional reviews about this work, I can hardly believe no one has pointed the sheer antagonistic force of Mrs. Haze; not as Humbert's antagonist because she accidentally thwarts his plan — the novel is from his perspective after all — but rather, as the antagonist to sweet Delores, her daughter. Delores is stuck between two psychopaths who justify their actions and manipulative her to their own ends. Her mother resents and hates her youth and Humbert is a hemophiliac.
Let us attempt to understand the nuances of this line of thought; Mrs. Haze thwarts HH because either she understands that he is an oddball and shouldn’t be alone with her daughter, or the more likely alternative, that she thinks her daughter is an obstacle in her own seduction of HH. And her seduction can only be complete if she sees her daughter as competition. This is what allows Humbert to succeed. She is complicit in his grooming of her daughter because she wants to marry a European and show up her friends. Why else would she invite him to buy perfume for a friend she doesn’t like very much?
Haze, with a dreary laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole camp idea “and now,” added Haze, “the child throws a fit; pretext: you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her we would exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too cute night things that she bullied me into buying for her. You see, she sees herself as a starlet; I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely kid. She is, I guess, is at the root of our troubles.
Of course it is worthwhile to note that HH is viciously unreliable and we should not believe a single word out of his mouth or any of his recollections. In fact, he says she is a woman of principle, but her principle is only prevalent when she helps HH achieve his own twisted motives. Other than that, Haze remains the only character that he seems not to have a reason to lie about. Why? Quilty is competition. Lo is the object of his desire. Charlotte Haze is simply a “busybody” more interested in what HH does for a living — justified since he is living there with them and she has a young daughter — and more importantly, remains the only character that HH must in fact befriend in order to achieve his goal. Befriend, in that he can’t ignore or belittle or flat out back out of confrontation (in the case of Valeria or Maxilovich). Thus either Haze is an idiot who falls for HH’s manipulations — unlikely — or doesn’t care that much about her daughter.
Why the latter? Simple. Because Delores doesn’t seem to have anyone anywhere who has her best interests at heart. Other than her friend’s mothers of course. Even her neighbour, the wonderful dentist Quilty is himself a hemophiliac. For such a caring and classy mother, Mrs. Haze sure does surround herself with people whose motives are to destroy and alienate her from her daughter… unless of course, she herself resents her daughter and thinks of her as a burden and not as a being she brought forth into the world. And I need not mention that absurd love letter (Page 71 of my Everyman’s Library Edition) to HH that begs him to leave but stay at the same time. The triad she sets up between crime, love, and friendship is fiendish and villainous. “You have grown fond of Lo’s noisy ways…” she says, “… If you make a pass at me you would be a criminal — worse than a kidnapper who rapes a child.” Which mother could even conceive of such vicious circumstances in between two or three sentences? To mention how “noisy” and burdensome your child is and berate the object of your affection — which ought to be your child — but then talk about child-rape. Granted, this is very clever foreshadowing by Nabokov, but considering the whole narrative, especially the diary entries, is one confession, to install that foreshadow into the mouth of Delores’s mother makes the reader wonder why, and perhaps even, rightfully, question her motives.
Of course once we are rid of her in Part Two of the work, the tide begins to shift, yet Charlotte’s ghost lingers in every scene. Where Delores is, her mother rests, where Humbert sneaks and connives and contemplates, there is his wife appearing to him like a phantom. And in her residual motives we even find hints that she knew how peculiar and weird our unreliable HH had always been. In fact, not only did she discover HH’s crime, culminating in her own by abandoning her daughter with someone she then knew was a monster — a selfish act to be sure, but also evidence of her hatred, but we also learn that she knew even of Quilty’s crimes well before HH had even entered their lives. Delores was simply a child trapped between a resentful mother surrounded by monsters. Convenient and brilliant, considering that is exactly the kind of neglected and hated child who would be a target for kidnapping and rape.
If Charlotte Haze had been even a decent or normal mother, the whole of HH's manipulations, desires and goals would've easily been moot.
