How can one of the best books in the English language have a protagonist that is considered by many to be a rapist? Time, Modern Library and World Library all claim Lolita to be one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century. It’s even inspired two operas, two ballets and a musical.
I’ll acquiesce that the prose Vladimir Nabokov employs is deft. However, the topic and plot line are bizarre to say the least. Now, I’m the last person to support the subject of banning books, but this one cuts it pretty close. I read Lolita as a senior in high school and was repulsed by it. I’m not a prude nor am I some fundamentalist that doesn’t believe in women’s liberation, however, I can’t support the fictional relationship between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze.
By the 1920s, age of consent laws all over New England, where the novel takes place, were set at sixteen years old. Since the novel was first published in 1955, and the story relates American culture so adeptly, Nabokov obviously knew about the consent laws when writing his “masterpiece.” He even has his protagonist, the strangely named Humbert Humbert, feel completely wretched about his actions with his Lolita. Humbert knows what he is doing is wrong, but can’t help his impulses, blaming it on his stunted ideals of love and sexuality. This is explained in the book by having his first sweetheart, Annabelle Leigh (allusion alert!) die when she was a tween. If this is supposed to be enough to excuse his abominable behavior, I’m glad Nabokov became a writer and not a lawyer.
While this book was immediately a best-seller, the place of its first publication, France, was the earliest incidence of Lolita’s ban just a year later. It is worth noting that its first ban was in Paris, thought to be one of the most sexually liberated places in the world. It was banned in other countries, too, but later on. Fortunately, Lolita is no longer banned anywhere.
What bothers me most about this book, and the part that many people overlook, is that the first initiation of sex comes from Dolores, not the pervy man who’s way too old for her. Not only that, she isn’t a virgin and she’s barely a teen. I don’t judge others’ lifestyles, however, this fictional account would send shivers up my spine if I were a mother. It’s not so much a tale of a troubled aging writer and his stunted amorous growth, but of a manipulative, albeit probably misdirected, young girl.
As a “banned books blogger,” I stand for freedom of speech in almost any situation. I find this subject interesting because of the sheer power of the written word. Next semester, I’m enrolled in a class called “Language and Power,” which sounds so fascinating and neatly dovetails with my blogging efforts. Although I find Lolita to be a pretty ludicrous concept, I won’t debate its spot in the literary cannon. I believe it to be beautifully written and, frankly, we need books that make us squirm. Lolita and other risque or dangerous books help us create opinions about relatively untouched topics and keeps freedom of speech healthy and robust.
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