Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov’s most popular work. Most of its length is the confession of Humbert on death row. It tells the story of a middle-aged man and an underage girl’s strange love. The novel is always shrouded in Lolita’s indifferent attitude towards the world, and we can follow Humbert’s lustful journey across the American continent into the confused life of a teenage girl.
Humbert described his first encounter with Lolita: “It was the same child — the same delicate, honey-yellow shoulders, the same soft, smooth, exposed back, the same chestnut hair. She had a black polka dot scarf tied to her chest, so that my old, lewd eyes could not see the two young breasts, but the ones I stroked on one immortal day could not escape the memory of my youth… That last mad, immortal day behind the Rock Rose. The twenty-five years of my life since then have tapered off into a quivering tip that finally disappears. Annabelle and Lolita are now one. The gulf between the two girls is now closed.”
Valeria and Charlotte Haze are both wives of Humbert’s famous matchmakers, and Humbert marries both of them for a purpose. Supposedly, Humbert was a “girliophile” with a secret primal lust for girls between nine and fourteen, and was unlikely to be attracted to a woman of his own age. But in his condition, he married Valeria to avoid her pursuit of a sexy girl, to ease the pain of his insatiable desire; And to marry Hazel is to achieve his pursuit of Lolita, is ulterior motives, another plot. One is to avoid, the other is to facilitate, the two are opposite.
Humbert had played with more than eighty prostitutes, and Monique was one of the more satisfactory to him, but later his association with Monique was interrupted by the replacement of her childishness with womanhood; It’s the hooker thing again. Humbert was swindled out of money. The desire to satisfy the sultry desire of a prostitute had added a melancholy and dark layer to Humbert’s psyche, so that finding a woman to marry might be a good remedy for his pain.
“I decided to get married for my own safety. I thought that regular bedtimes, three home-cooked meals, marital customs, routine birth control between beds, and, who knows, the eventual maturation of some moral standard, some spiritual substitute, might, if not eliminate my shameful and dangerous desires, at least help me to bring them under peaceful control.” Humbert decided to marry, and after careful consideration, his choice fell on a Polish doctor’s daughter, Valeria – a woman in her late twenties.
Although Humbert considers himself tall, handsome, sedate, and attractive, and could easily find a more glamorous, gaudy woman than Valeria, his choice is a compromise, a compromise of his own sexual deformity, because Valeria is good at mimicking the look of a little girl, not an affectation, but her style. Unable to woo what he called a “sexy maiden,” Humbert married a grown woman with a girlish look, which was not a bad choice for him. In the later life and relationship, Valeria is not as Humbert imagined, her frivolous, lively, skipping are false, soon the reality exposed everything. “Faded curly hair showing black roots, shaved shank hair turned into thorns…” “Humbert took care not of a pale, wandering little girl, but of a fat, portly woman with short legs and huge breasts who was practically mindless.”
In fact, Valeria was not a little girl, not his fairy, but a woman, who was good at mimicking a little girl, but who was not a little girl, even though Humbert would not admit it. “Not being naturally loud” is Humbert’s only positive attribute to Valeria, but while their marriage is still going on, she is still “useful” to Humbert. “The owner of the grocery store across the street has a little girl who drives me crazy, but with the help of Valeria, I found some legal solutions to my whimsical predicament. Then there are problems in their marriage, Valeria has a crush on someone else, she feels unhappy and wants to divorce Humbert. Humbert, who thought he was the master of their marital world, was devastated by Valeria’s affair, not because he liked her much, but because his avoidance of girly love was thwarted.
In fact, Humbert’s attempt to overcome or relieve his “girly mania” by combining with Valeria in this way is not feasible, and his disease cannot be avoided and cured, even after he meets the real “sexy girl” Lolita. This also shows that Humbert wants to rely on others to save himself, cannot achieve, he can only save himself. Compared with marrying Valeria to relieve the pain of unsatisfied desire, Humbert married Haze with ulterior motives and other designs, that is, to approach and intend to possess his Lolita, not to avoid, but to strive for, is to possess. Humbert came to America, angry at an accident and at Mrs. Haze’s house, but he didn’t want to live there at all and wanted to leave. In Humbert’s view of Mrs. Haze and the family, Mrs. Haze is “rather plain looking and humorless”, the house is “filled with dirty old magazines on the chairs, the house has a repulsive ‘hybrid atmosphere'”, the rent is absurdly and ominously low… However, “the old polite manners forced me to continue this ordeal,” so Humbert saw his Lolita, and then he took up residence as Mrs. Head’s lodger.
Lolita had a difficult relationship with her mother Hazz. Hazz thought Lolita naughty, surly, disobedient, and short-tempered, so he would not take her with him when he went out on business. Because of Haze, Humbert had no chance to be alone with Lolita, and though Haze did not know of Humbert’s sinister intentions at the time, “for almost three weeks all my poor schemes were thwarted. It was usually the Hazes lady who was more afraid of my enjoyment of Lowe than of my enjoyment of her.” Humbert was so lusted over by Lolita that he could not show it, could not be alone with her to satisfy his wild and deformed lust, “her every movement in the dapped sunshine seemed to strike at the most secret and sensitive string in my poor body”. Later, Mrs. Haze sent her daughter to Camp Quy, wanting to be alone with Humbert, lest her daughter disturb her. Humbert was planning to go to the beach for a while, because he could not bear to live without Lolita.
Then Mrs. Haze’s “love letter” arrived. “I loved you from the moment I saw you. I am a lonely woman with passionate feelings, and you are the love of my life.” Humbert’s first impulse as he looks at the letter is disgust and retreat, and his second is to stop himself from being hasty and thoughtful. Humbert intends to agree to marry Haze, “to marry a mature widow, Haze, who has more than one relation in the wide, dark world, just to do as she likes with her child, Lolita.” Moreover, after the marriage, Humbert planned various ways to murder Haze, and gave him sleeping pills, Haze is his pawn to realize his nymphal dream.
This point clearly points to Humbert’s intention to marry Hazel, in order to get or possess his sexy maiden Lolita. The contrast between Valeria and Haze, from Humbert’s point of view: the former is to suppress or relieve his abnormal pursuit of sexy girls, mainly to stop the “need” for prostitutes, but also to help others to save themselves; In the latter case, he saw Lolita, the sexy girl in his mind, at Mrs. Haze’s house, and his desire was rekindled. He married Hazi only to have his way with Lolita. Two wives, one to avoid, one to facilitate.
