Lolita is a book that lends itself to a myriad of different interpretations, with each reader finding a different meaning within the story. Many readers are first drawn to Lolita expecting the tale of the escapades of a pedophile and his victim, a “lewd book. They expected the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped too, and felt bored and let down.” (Nabokov 313) It is overly simplistic to define Lolita as a novel about pedophilia –certainly one of the many elements of the story, but by no means the main theme. What makes Lolita a classic is Nabokov’s ability to weave so many elements into his writing, that each re-reading reveals a slightly different, and more profound layer to the book. The reader who opens the book expecting a simple story of pedophilia and sexual exploitation finds himself quickly immersed in the ever shifting quicksand of Humbert Humbert,’s narration. Although Humbert’s sexual attraction to barely pubescent girls, or nymphets makes him easily classifiable as a pedophile, his love for Lolita metamorphoses in the course of the novel like one of Nabokov’s beloved butterflies, starting out as immature adolescent obsession, and culminating in the mature, selfless love that parents feel for their children.
In order to meet the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for diagnosis of pedophilia, a person must exhibit certain characteristics:
“A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger); B. The person has acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty; C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.” (Wikipedia)
According to this definition, Humbert’s obsession with young girls “Between the age limits of nine and fourteen…” can be categorized as pedophilia. However, Humbert is not attracted to all girls in that age group, but only to a select few, “who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human…and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets”. (Nabakov 16) According to Humbert, these girls exhibit “mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm …” that set them apart from other girls their age. (Nabakov 17)
Humbert excuses his fantasies by blaming his obsession on his unfulfilled early adolescent love affair with his age-mate Annabelle Lee. “We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives….I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve”. (Nabakov 18)

Humbert’s passion for young girls would not have been found strange in many cultures, both ancient, and modern. In ancient Rome, “at age twelve a girl was considered nubile. Some were even married off at this tender age, and the marriages were consummated”. (Aries 20)
In Shakespeare’s time, young girls were often married in early adolescence, and in Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet lets her daughter know in no uncertain terms that at fourteen, it is high time she were married, for “younger than you, here in Verona, ladies of esteem, are made already mothers: by my count, I was your mother much upon these years that you are now a maid.” (Shakespeare 887, Act I, Sc. III, Lines 69-73)
In cultures where girls are married early to men old enough to be their fathers, the men are considered to be sexually normal. In no way are their relationships to their pubescent wives considered manifestations of pedophilia. Humbert is aware of this, excusing his fantasies by putting them in a historical-cultural context, and reminding the reader that “marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine…And when Petrarch fell in love with his Laureen, she was a fair –haired nymphet of twelve”.(Nabakov 19)
When Humbert first sets eyes on Lolita in the backyard of her mother’s house, it is as if his adult self had never existed. She is not Lolita, a person with her own history, personality, and desires, but the ghost of his adolescent love, Annabelle Lee, returned from the dead to rejoin him. “I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition…while I passed by her in my adult disguise…the vacuum of my soul managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my dead bride.” (Nabakov 39)
Typically adolescent, Humbert’s first spark of obsessive love for Lolita is like that of a teenager finally seeing their movie star idol in flesh and blood. Although Humbert’s first attraction to Lolita is due to her uncanny resemblance to the dead Annabel, Humbert is quick to point out that “A little later, of course…this Lolita, my Lolita, was to eclipse completely her prototype.” (Nabakov 40)
At the beginning of his relationship with Lolita, Humbert sees her as the embodyment of his sexual fantasies -the perfect nymphet. At first, Lolita seems to be Humbert’s willing partner, even initiating their first sexual encounter. (Nabakov 133-134) However, despite his fantasy that Lolita is a somewhat willing accomplice to their semi-incestuous relationship, Humbert is forced to confront the reality of Lolita’s absolute desperation, when he must hear “her sobs in the night-every night, every night-the moment I feigned sleep.” (Nabakov, 176)
In allowing Lolita to “seduce” him, Humbert begins a perverse relationship with a child who is in point of fact his legal stepdaughter, due to his brief marriage to her mother, Charlotte. He is at once Lolita’s lover, her rapist, and her father. In fact, confounding the situation even more, Humbert enjoys keeping up the pretense that he is a good father, telling his daughter that “I want to protect you, dear, from all the horrors that happen to little girls in coal sheds and alley ways…I will stay your guardian, and if you are good, I hope a court may legalize that guardianship before long.” (Nabakov 149)
However, Humbert does not harbor any truly “fatherly” feelings for Lolita. He merely wants to have the power of guardianship over her to continue his sexual abuse. Perhaps it is in the abuse of his power as Lolita’s only guardian and “father” that Humbert’s true perversion comes to light. More than in his attraction to pubescent girls, or his sexual relationship with a twelve year old, the reader feels the horror of the situation when Humbert justifies his abuse of Lolita through obscure references to purported Sicilian father-daughter incest. (Nabakov 150) Not only does Humbert acknowledge his relationship with Lolita to be incestuous, he even goes so far as to fanaticize about perpetuating the incest though multiple generations of Lolitas, once his pubescent darling is no longer an attractive nymphet.
“With patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960…indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time…bizarre tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.” (Nabakov 174)

Humbert idealizes Lolita as a nymphet, but has no attraction to her as a person. Once her “nymphetage” is over, she will be useful merely as a vessel for the production of more nymphets so that he can continue the cycle of abuse. Both in his relationship to Lolita, and his fantasies involving future generations of his and Lolita’s offspring, Humbert is clearly manifesting his pedophilic tendencies, and fits perfectly with the hypothesis that “a man is likely to sexually assault his sexually immature daughter (plus other children) if he has pedophilia, if he spent little time with her during her early childhood, if she is available, and if he is psychopathic.” (Harris, Rice, 3) Humbert certainly has most of the qualities of the psychopath. He is “callous, selfish, manipulative, irresponsible, impulsive, sexually promiscuous, and generally antisocial” (Harris, Rice 3) in his relationship with Lolita.
Incapable of truly loving Lolita, Humbert is merely obsessed with her, as the embodiment of a physical ideal. He idolizes Lolita’s external shell, but has no idea of the true Lolita that lies within that protective chrysalis. Much later, a more mature Humbert realizes that “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden, and a twilight, and a palace gate-dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me…” (Nabakov 284) Humbert regrets the lack of any possibility of a normal father-daughter relationship between them, and realizes that he has missed out on ever knowing the real Lolita, because his continual abuse of his power over her has made her retreat from him completely.
Before falling in love with the real Lolita beneath the nymphet, Humbert must come to terms with the fact that Lolita, now fourteen, is no longer the idolized child-bride that he has adored for two years. In a fit of anger at one of Lolita’s many deceptions, Humbert is able to see Lolita as the teenage girl she has become. “Oh, she had changed! Her complexion was now that of any untidy highschool girl …A course flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence…how polished and muscular her legs had grown!” (Nabokov 204) Despite her less than ideal appearance, Humbert’s panic when he thinks that she has run away after their quarrel, and his deep feelings of love and relief when he finds her again are indicative of his deepening feelings for the true Lolita, and not the nymphet. (Nabokov 207) However, Humbert’s metamorphosis from pedophile with psychopathic tendencies to selfless lover is not yet complete. He still objectifies Lolita, who while changed, continues to exhibit some of her nymphetish qualities.
When Lolita runs away, Humbert is forced to live without her for three bleak years, in which he searches obsessively for her and her “kidnapper”. His penance enables him to finally clearly see despise the damage he has inflicted on Lolita. Humbert has finally developed compassion, a quality he certainly never had in his years with Lolita, Perhaps these years of soul-searching are what finally give Humbert a more mature emotional perspective, and the ability to see Lolita as a person, lovable in her own right, and not as the embodiment of the nymphet.
In the three years since Humbert has seen her, Lolita has morphed into a pregnant, adult woman with a striking resemblance to her dead mother, Charlotte-the wife that Humbert despised, and married only to have access to Lolita. No longer a nymphet, “there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined, narrow hands and her goose-flesh white arms…hopelessly worn at seventeen with that baby…” (Nabakov 277) Lolita now has the looks of the older women and girls that Humbert has deprecated throughout the novel. It would seem impossible for Humbert, a pedophile in love with an ideal that can only by definition exist between the ages of nine and fourteen, to have any feelings towards a young woman so far beyond the outer limits of nymphdom, and yet, Humbert has matured a great deal in the three years without Lolita. In that time, his love has become the mature accepting love that we associate with adults. No longer bound by an ideal, “I looked…at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else…I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita”. (Nabakov 278) Unfortunately for Humbert, Lolita is incapable of reciprocating his love, because of the unspeakable damage he did to her as a vulnerable young girl.
Near the end of the book, a mature Humbert realizes that his greatest crime was stealing Lolita’s childhood. Listening to a group of children playing, Humbert writes that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” (Nabakov 308) Humbert’s moral development has matured to the point that he is able to feel true empathy towards Lolita. He is able to see outside his own pain at her loss, and exhibit some of the selfless love that parents typically feel towards their children.
Humbert’s last words are of fatherly advice to Lolita: “Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. “(Nabakov 309) Humbert Humbert has undergone a final transformation. Like one of Nabokov’s butterflies, his feelings for Lolita have metamorphosed from immature adolescent attraction, to a fathers’ selfless feelings for his daughter. No longer a pedophile attempting to sate his lust for young girls, Humbert is now capable of caring deeply for Lolita and desiring only her happiness.

Works Cited

Aries, Philippe and Georges Duby eds. A History of Private Life From Pagan Rome to Byzantium.Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Harris, Grant T. and Rice, Marie E. “Men Who Molest Their Sexually Immature Daughters: Is a Special Explaination Required?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology May2002, Vol.111, No 2, 329-339. Psychnet . Laney College Lib, Oakland, Ca. 6 December, 2007

Nabokov, Vladimir The Annotated Lolita Ed. Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

“Pedophilia.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 14 Dec 2007, 13:55 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 15 Dec 2007 .

Shakespeare, William The Unabridged William Shakespeare. Eds. William George Clark and William Aldis Wright. Philadelphia, Penn: Running Press, 1989.

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