1: Dolores, Not Lolita

Who is Dolores Haze? Since Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was published in 1955, readers have formed strong opinions on the story’s narrator and his framing of the titular character. But Lolita and Dolores Haze are far from the same person. Jamie Loftus gets into her history with the book, and dives into the events of the book.

Join our Discord for more discussion! https://discord.gg/Xkp2Yav7

Featuring the voices of Aziz Vora as Humbert Humbert, Robert Evans as Vladimir Nabokov, additional voice work from Anna Hossnieh, Shereen Lani-Younes, Grace Thomas, Isaac Taylor, and Miles Gray. Produced by Sophie Lichterman, Miles Gray, Beth-Anne Macaluso and Jack O'Brien. Editing by Isaac Taylor, additional editing by Ben Loftus. Written and hosted by Jamie Loftus.

In this episode we talked about:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket

Lewis Carroll: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lewis-carrolls-shifting-reputation-9432378/

The Mann Act: https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johnson-pardon

The Enchanted Hunters and the Hunted Enchanters: https://thenabokovian.org/node/50399

This interview with Nabokov from the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov

Men Explain Lolita to Me: https://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/ 

Reading Lolita in Tehran: https://azarnafisi.com/book/reading-lolita-in-tehran/ 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast discusses sexual assault and child abuse,
as well as strong language. Listener discretion is advised. M

(00:28):
I first learned about Lolita when I was twelve, and
that's the same age as Dolores Hayes or Lolita, whichever
of them you're familiar with. At the beginning of that book,
it was two thousand five. I was in the seventh
grade in Massachusetts. I wore a back brace to school,
which put off any hope of getting my first kiss
until two thousand and eight. But in two thousand five,

(00:48):
I had an obsession with lemony snicke ats a series
of unfortunate events, I had a school picture wearing a
T shirt that said too young for Ashton, and I
read Vladimir in a Bulkos Lolita for the first time.
But it was not a random selection off the shelf.
It had been recommended to me by children's author Lomani Snaket. Yeah,
let's take a quick journey if you're not familiar. Lolita

(01:11):
is a ninety novel by Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. That
is Nabokov, But if you correct anyone for saying it Nabakoff,
you're a jerk, But it's a book about a middle
aged European pedophile named Humbert Humbert who falls in love
with heavy quotes there then abducts and sexually and psychologically

(01:33):
abuses twelve year old American girl Dolores Hayes or Lolita,
then abducts and rapes her across the US in the
late nineteen forties. And there's no shying away from the
reality here, in spite of how it's been romanticized over
the years. Lolita tells the story of a pedophile who
abuses a twelve year old that he's supposed to be

(01:55):
the caretaker of. It is horrifying and one of the
most controversial text of the last century. And it's what
this podcast is about, sort of. And if you are
also not familiar, Lemony Snicket, the pseudonym for author Daniel Handler,
wrote the series of Unfortunate Events books in the early
two thousands. There is an adapted movie starring Jim Carey

(02:17):
from two thousand four, and there's also a more recent
Netflix adaptation with Neil Patrick Harris. To this day, these
books are my favorites in the world, not just because
I love the stories, but because Lemony Snicket references a
number of famous books and movies and shows to his
young readers that they probably wouldn't know about, leaving twelve
year old with nothing but time and Google to dcode

(02:38):
his writing and find this whole new media list spanning
Moby Dick to Monty Python just by reading the books.
Handler has written a number of books targeted at adults
as well, with pretty sexual plots, but the majority of
his audience, especially in the mid two thousands, were from
Lemony Snicket and were children, And because he was my
favorite author, I would frequently boot it up the family

(03:00):
Gateway computer to look up interviews with him. The interview
I remember reading very clearly is no longer online, but
I have something close. This is from an interview he
did with I g. N in two thousand four, in
which he recommends the following to his fan base, The
wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Mr Show, the

(03:21):
movie Saboteur, a song called Chlorine Bacon Skin by Prince,
and Lolita by Vladimir and a book. Mr Handler was
not available to be interviewed for this podcast, but he's
been talking about Lolita in interviews for nearly twenty years. Now,
and I want to be clear, I am not trying
to cancel Daniel Handler or a Lemony Snicket over saying
his favorite book is Lolita to a majority young audience.

(03:43):
If you want to scrutinize his politics for different reasons,
feel free to google his name and then the word
controversy and arrive at your own conclusion. There's valid discussions
to be had, but that's not what I'm here to
discuss on this podcast. The thing is that recommending a
book like Lolita was very in the wheelhouse of Lemony
Ticket at this time, and the fact that he answered
what his favorite book was without a filter was a

(04:04):
huge part of what I really liked about his work
As a kid, Unlike a lot of y A authors
of this era, reading a Lemony snicketbook made me feel
like I was an adult, and that by referencing all
these fancy vocabulary words and great works of literature, I
was given the tools to be seen as an equal
to him, be in on it. So Lemony Snickett saying

(04:25):
he liked Lolita stuck out to my twelve year old
brain for a lot of reasons once I found out
what it was about. Because Handler slash Snickett had already
made a number of references to Lolita in his own
book series. One of the references is a character in
the series that is a reference to Lolita's protagonist, Humbert Humbert.
Another references a plot point from the first book where

(04:46):
villain and acting guardian Count Olof tries to steal a
fourteen year old orphan named Violet Boudelaire's fortune by abusing
his parental powers to marry and abduct her. And in
my opinion, the biggest reference to Lolita is in the
framework and narration style of A series of Unfortunate Events.
Lemony Snakett is Daniel Handler's pseudonym, and Snakett, like Humbert,

(05:07):
is a middle aged man following and tracking down the
history of children who may or may not be alive
anymore without any of their input. The big important difference
here is that Snakett is not the villain of the story.
He is merely the documentarian, and that was how I
got to Lolita in two thousand five, I should introduce myself.
My name is Jamie Loftus. I am a writer, comedian

(05:27):
and podcaster. Those jobs are not listed in order of
how embarrassing they are. And this is Lolita Podcast, a
series exploring the confused cultural legacy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
We're gonna be talking about a thesis is worth of
stuff here. How did this story come to be in
the first place? How has it morphed into the pentapod
monster of a cultural artifact it stands as today? And

(05:49):
when Lolita comes up in conversation as a reference, how
far exactly from the source material is the reference? Because
the meaning of Lolita has evolved over time, whether we're
talking about the movies from Vladimir Nabakov's masterpieces a story,

(06:10):
or the music, which ranges from weird metal songs to
the police's teacher student relationship. In Don't Stand so Close
to Me. You know the lines, It's no use he
sees her, he starts to shake and cough. Jed Light
the oh Man in that book by a book off
you can tell. We can't we can't license to the song,

(06:31):
so I just have to sing it. There's a song
by Australian duo The Veronica's called Lolita that features a
love story between an older man and an apparently consenting teenager.
There's Katie Perry singing I studied Lolita religiously in her
single One of the Boys. And then there's, of course,
all of Lana del Rey's early catalog. She's got a

(06:53):
song called Lolita, She's got another called Off to the Races,
whose chorus calls light of my life, fire of my Alloince,
be a good baby, do what I Want, and other
songs we don't have the licensing rights to. There is
hours of Lolita themed music, or this line from a
failed nineteen seventies Broadway musical that ruined my entire summer.

(07:15):
Who is that piper who likes them post Sniper? I'm sorry,
let's hear that again. Who is that piper who likes them? Post?
Someone had to sing that? Let's and and there's more,
And for me, it's the third Pew Pessant where I
draw the line. Now, I have a lot of opinions

(07:37):
on the legacy of Lolita, but in listening to the series,
I want you to form your own. I'm going to
be speaking with fans, detractors, literary scholars, experts on and
survivors of abuse, directors, authors, and a lot of the
women who have played the titular character in these adaptations,
and I also recognize that discussing this book at all

(07:57):
is a mine field. I'm going to be too close
minded for some, too permissive for others. But I'm going
to try and show you every perspective on this story
that I can. But god damn, there is really a lot,
because this is an inherently politicized text, and I can't
even guarantee that how I feel about this book now

(08:18):
is how I will always feel about it. If the
many people I've spoken to for this show or any indication,
I probably won't. Lolita is a terrible and complicated story
with a complicated legacy, but I think it is one
that's still worth examining today. As a survivor of abuse
myself that has been haunted by this book since it
was recommended to me by my favorite children's author, I

(08:39):
want to understand that. And as a feminist, I struggled
to say that Lolita is a feminist text, or even
that Nabulkov is a feminist writer. So why am I
so stuck on it? I've been finding that there are
two huge conversations to be had when it comes to
the adaptations and the cultural influence of Lolita. There's one
conversation that's more connected to the sexualization of young girls

(09:02):
in media, which is more connected to the movies and
the aesthetic, and then there's a conversation more connected to
the book, which we're going to talk about today, and
that conversation is the ethics of pedophile as protagonist and narrator.
So for me, there's really no gut reaction to the
cultural topic of Lolita that you can discredit. It makes
sense that people have very strong reactions to this text

(09:26):
because the topic of pedophilia and assault of miners is
a hugely upsetting, large issue that has been with humanity
for at least all of recorded history, and it remains
a huge issue now. The year this podcast is released,
the Jeffrey Epstein story is still being reported on detail
by excruciating detail. The Q and on conspiracy Theory details

(09:47):
false allegations about current public figures being pedophiles, specifically targeting
that same fear that many people have of children being
preyed upon. Here's some recent statistics from rain the Rape
abew Sin Incest National Network on this topic. One in
nine girls under eighteen experienced sexual abuse at the hands
of an adult, and of these victims, two out of

(10:09):
three are between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Percent
of victims know their assaulter at the time of their assault,
and these are just statistics for cases that are reported.
And on top of that, according to the National Center
on Violence against Women in the Black Community, one in
four Black girls are sexually abused by age eighteen. Sexual

(10:30):
violence and abuse is disproportionately high against Indigenous women and girls,
with one in two experiencing sexual violence at some point
in their lives, according to a UN report from two
thousand fourteen. Another little discussed issue is how pedophilia affects
young boys, something according to Brian Boyd's biography of him,
Nabokov experienced as a child at the hands of an

(10:51):
uncle at a really young age. While still living in Russia.
One in five boys are sexually abused by the age
of eighteen, according to the Advocacy Center. So Lolita the
book has always warranted a huge response because it's one
of the few major literary works, especially up until it
was published in nineteen fifty five, that attempts to grapple
with this theme and reality exclusively at all, and like literature,

(11:15):
students don't come for me. I know it was not
the first book to deal with this. All this to
say that the sexual assault of girls is a gigantic
issue and an issue that sexualization of girls and media
is in direct conversation with, and the difference between how
publicly these issues are discussed between nineteen fifty five and
now is gigantic. So yeah, reactions to Lolita are big,

(11:39):
and it makes total sense that they are. But if
you're not familiar with the book itself and are mostly
acquainted with the sexualized cultural figure that is Lolita, you
may be surprised to hear that Nabokov's book is, at least,
for my money, as anti pedophile as a book can
possibly be while still being narrated by Humbert Humberts. So

(12:00):
I want this dialect to not just be with people
who are experts on the topic. I wanted to be
with you two, because I feel that so much of
how this book affects you has to do with what
your experience with the story is coming in and at
what point in your life you first encountered it. With
that in mind, I bravely set up a phone line.
It's six to six eight, seven, two, four, four or

(12:22):
five eight, if you want to weigh in, And I
asked people what their experience with Lolita was. Had they
read the book, had they seen movies, had they just
heard Here's what some of you said. And these voicemails
have been edited for clarity. My history with Lolita You're
fraud is complicated and also the best. UM. I first

(12:43):
encountered down the Cobs writing, UM, we read an Estate
is in my ap lit class in junior year of
high school. UM. And then I read Lolita, and I
think it's probably the most beautifully written book I've ever read. UM,
setting aside the you know, molestation of it all. Somebody
picked Lolita for our book club book. I've never seen
the movie, never read the book, had a vague idea

(13:05):
of what it was about. I tried to read that
damn book and I read five pages of it and
I gave up. I I think I threw the book away.
I didn't want anything to do with it. It was
the nastiest growthest thing I've ever even tried to read
is way better. I have always found the book Lolita

(13:27):
incredibly offensive. I was raped as a child, and it's
pretty hard for someone, especially an English professor, to look
at you and tell you that it's any about anything
other than the kidnapped and right but a child. Um,
I'm pretty closed up to anybody else's opinions. Um, it's

(13:49):
I think it's pretty funked up. It's a really important
book because it's rare. I feel like you only see
kind of leering man at girls and it's either just
like their monsters and they're not realized people, or it's
like okay, and they're good guys. And the reason why
this book is important is because you see this man
completely misunderstand like a girl navigating her like burgeoning sexuality,

(14:15):
and he prays on like I don't know, we've all
been there when PRET young. When I was the teens fourteen,
I was extremely on Tumbler, and although I had never
and I still have never read Lowly, though I knew
that it was sort of glorified in this way that

(14:38):
I really lusted. Still, my first experience, uh with it
actually was hearing about it in nerdy like anime forums.
Thank you so much to everyone who called in. I
really really appreciate it. There were many more voice mails,
but I tried to pick ones that represented a few

(14:59):
perspectives that I saw cropping up again and again. There's
the I love the book, but I think it's very
misunderstood in culture. There's the book being framed to its
reader in an extremely bad feet way. There's I read
the book, but I was too young to understand what
it was really about at the time. There's readers whose
personal trauma is an understandably large factor. There's I haven't

(15:22):
read the book, but I was very influenced by the
stories cultural aesthetics. There's I haven't read the book and
have no desire to based on the themes. There's anime
guy and my favorite I am a member of the
Lolita fashion community, and we would like to be excluded
from this narrative. Thank you so much. I have been
involved with Japanese Lolita fashion for about ten years. I

(15:44):
have read the book and watched the film, and I
just really really want to reiterate that Lolita fashion has
nothing to do with either the book or the film,
and these are all completely valid ways to approach both
the text and the cultural Lolita. Personally. I definitely read
Lolita before I understood what the book was really about.

(16:06):
At twelve years old, I thought that being desired by
older men was really cool, and a lot of that
had to do with the kind of cultural messaging that
existed at this time. We were all there. The mid
two thousand's was a nightmare, but it also had to
do with what I saw going on around me. And
two thousand five, my older cousin was about to marry
a teacher she started dating. In high school, my female

(16:26):
gym teacher would confiscate my book of Lolita from me
and then be forced to give it back later the
next year, my junior high track coach would be fired
for not what he did to the girls on my
track team, but what he did to the high school
swim team that he coached as well. A few years
after that, when I was in high school, a teacher
in his late twenties sent my best friend a picture
of his penis on the day she graduated when we

(16:48):
were both seventeen, and we didn't say anything, and he
kept inviting high school girls to his house to get drunk,
and then he I think he got promoted based on
the messages all of you left. This is not an
unusual list of things to be happening around a girl
growing up, and in retrospect, I feel weirdly, depressingly lucky
to have spent most of this time in a full

(17:08):
body cast. My reading of Lolita has changed a lot
over time, and it's kind of been a fixation of
mine over the years, and to getting to the core
of what I found so appealing about it in the
first place. I'm going to use the rest of this
first episode to talk about exactly what happens in Vladimir
nabokov novel Lolita. We are going to spend the rest

(17:31):
of this series tracing and speaking to its history and
its influence. But I have been consistently surprised in conversations
at how much of the general opinion on this book
has very little to do with the book itself. So
this explainer is going to be a bit long, but
I can assure you that the details really matter here.
Something that's really helped me and getting to the heart

(17:52):
of the events in this book and to see around
all the flowery, beautiful language, is to think of it
as a true crime book and view Lolita as what
it's presented to us, as a document of a criminal.
And so that's the tack I'm going to take here,
And you know, I would also recommend reading the book,
but books are famously very long. I'm also going to
be differentiating between Dolores, the girl who is abducted and

(18:15):
raped by Humbert Humbert in the novel, and Lolita, the
sexualized construct Humbert has created to justify these crimes. I
don't really think that these are the same person, because
Dolores is a kid. So listen carefully because a lot
of what you're about to hear in this summary you
will never hear about in subsequent adaptations. Again, the first

(18:37):
ten or so of Lolita isn't remembered at all by
anyone who hasn't read the book, and to me, it
is a big reason why Humbert Humbert comes off as
a misunderstood romantic hero instead of a clear cut predatory
liar in most of the adaptations. So before that iconic
opening paragraph Lolita, Light of my Life, fire of my loins,

(19:00):
my sin, No I know, I get it. But before that,
there is a fictional forward from the fictional John Ray Junior, PhD,
an editor of psychology books, who is writing an introduction
to Humbert Humbert's manuscript. He tells you that what you're
about to read is the memoir of Humbert Humbert name changed,
who died in legal captivity and nine two of heart disease.

(19:22):
We also learned that someone named Mrs Richard F. Schiller
has died in childbirth with a stillborn girl on Christmas Day,
several weeks after that, John Ray Jr. Says this about Humbert,
no doubt he is horrible. He is abject. He is
a shiny example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity
and jocularity that betrays supreme misery. Many of his casual

(19:44):
opinions on the people in scenery of this country are ludicrous.
He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman. But how
magically he's singing violin can conjure up a tenderus compassion
for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while
a pouring its author. I mean, if you're looking for
a framing of an unreliable narrator before you even meet him,
there you go. We are told explicitly that this was

(20:06):
written half in a sanatorium, half in a jail cell
under observation, and the text is basically unedited. John Ray
continues in this poignant personal study their larks, a general
lesson the way we'd child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac.
These are not only vivid characters and a unique story.
They warn us of dangerous trends. They point out potent evils.

(20:29):
Lolita should make all of us parents, social workers, educators,
apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the
task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
And after that fictional forward Humbert. Humbert's text of Lolita begins, Lolita,
light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin,

(20:51):
my soul, Lowlyta the tip of the tongue, taking a
trip of three steps down the palette to tap at
three on the teeth, law Lee. She was low, plain,
low in the morning, standing four ft ten in one sock,

(21:11):
she was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school,
she was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my
arms she was always Lolita. His audience for this work
is his jurors, and he asks leading questions while taking
us through a sweeping look at his early life. He
was born in nineteen to a well off European family,

(21:33):
and his mother died in a freak accident when he
was three years old. I love the description a book
of gifts for what happens, it's just in parentheses picnic
Comma Lightning. When he's twelve years old, he spends the
summer on the French Riviera and meets a girl named
Annabelle Lee who's the same age, and they fall madly
in love. This summer he has a number of formative

(21:55):
sexual experiences with Annabelle, but they are too heavily supervised
to ever consummate the relation and ship, and she dies
of typhus four months later before they can ever see
each other again. According to Humbert, the quote certain magic
unquote of Lolita began with this tragedy with Annabelle. And
if your brain like mind has been absolutely torpedoed by
the Internet, and you're thinking annabel Lee, that sounds familiar,

(22:16):
but you can't quite place it. You are vaguely remembering
and Edgar Allan Poe poem by that same name, maybe
I'll recognize it. I was a child and she was
a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we
loved with a love that was more than love. I
and my Annabelle Lee. I don't think I ever even
studied it in school. It was just like hot topic canon.
And this reference to Annabelle Lee is a deliberate choice
on the part of the author whether the author we

(22:38):
were talking about is Humbert or in a bulk off himself.
Because Edgar Allan Poe married his cousin when she was
thirteen years old and he was twenty six years old,
there are a total of twenty references to Poe by
Humbert in the book. There's also a few references to
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, made intentionally for a very
similar reason. Carol real name Charles Dodgson, was a child

(22:59):
pornographer who took a number of erotic photos of a
ten year old named Alice Liddell. Now this is not
very often discussed, as his story is still a billion
dollar Disney property, but Dodgson had hundreds of nude and
semi nude photos like this of children, and while sensibilities
were different in the eighteen fifties, Ladell's parents had cut
off Dodgson from seeing Alice before the book named after

(23:21):
her was ever published, and it said that Carol, well
into his thirties, had asked her parents to marry her,
and a book off was well aware of Carol slash

(23:44):
Dodgson's history, incidentally having translated Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into
Russian in his mid twenties to pay the bills. And
here is what he had to say of this behavior.
He has a pathetic affinity with ageh But some odd
scruple prevented me from alluding and Lolita to his wretched
perversion into those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms.

(24:04):
He got away with it, as so many other Victorians
got away with pederasty and numphilepsy. His were sad, scrawny
little nymphets, bedraggled and half undressed, or rather semi undraped,
as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade. But
sure Tim Burton movies. Back to the summary, Humbred explains
that losing Annabelle so young triggers a lifelong obsession with

(24:28):
nymphets a term of his own creation, I'll let him
describe it. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen,
there occur maidens who, to certain be which travelers twice
or many times older than they reveal their true nature,
which is not human but nymphic, that is demonic. And
why haven't we heard of these nymphets before? Humberd You

(24:50):
have to be an artist and a madman, a creature
of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in
your loins and a super voluptuous flame permanently glow in
your subtle spine. Oh, how you have to cringe and
hide in order to discern at once the deadly little
demon among the wholesome children. She stands unrecognized by them,

(25:12):
an unconscious herself of her fantastic power. You know a
lot of words, and none of them are pedophile. But
that's Humbert's intentional approach here. He's taking the artist angle
to objectifying children that we don't see infrequently in American
culture before Lolita's publication, and a lot since here's a
clip from Woody Allen's Manhattan What do you Do? Tracy?

(25:35):
I got a really really to somewhere to back on
this slow from Whatdy Allen to Roman Polanski to Rudy
Giuliani and Borat too amazing. Yes, we got a Bora
to reference into episode one of Lolita podcasts. Thank you
so much, I'll be accepting my peabody now. But in

(25:56):
framing his life, Humbert even manages to distance him self
from his future crimes in his origin story by suggesting
that pedophilia might be genetic and his family explaining that
his father was once off quote touring Italy with Madame
and her daughter unquote. So to justify this attitude, Humbert

(26:16):
invokes the name of other perceived to be great man, James,
the first Dante Petrarch, and he's already referenced Poe. Can't
you see he's a very handsome artist, not a pedophile.
And if you're me at twelve, with the general opinion
that adults have no reason to lie to me, and
in a world where Vickie Christina Barcelona hasn't even been released,
you might take these words at face value. After he

(26:38):
goes to university and becomes an academic himself, Humbert occupies
his obsession by meeting with sex workers that look young,
and eventually marries a woman named Valeria to keep up appearances.
Humbert hates Valeria. He admires her ability to imitate young
girls when they first start dating, but he describes her
as grotesque. He calls her an animated mercin, a large, puffy,

(27:00):
short legged, big breasted, and practically brainless baba, and he's
still angry when she leaves him for another man four
years into their marriage in nine, he considers killing her
and her lover, but says that they leave before he
can fight them. According to him, Valeria dies in childbirth
in America in after being subjected to eugenic Nazi adjacent

(27:22):
medical experiments, and seems to find the idea of this
pretty funny. So after his divorce with Valeria, Humbert moves
to New York right before World War Two, starts starts
working on a textbook, and is sent to a sanatorium
for over a year after what he describes as a
dreadful breakdown. He does not get specific about what this
breakdown was related to or what his time they're entailed.

(27:43):
He then joins a scientific mission in the Arctic as
a recorder of psychic relations, and after twenty months there
and what sounds like a completely bullshit report on his part,
he returns to America, only to be hospitalized in the
sanitarium again, and even with the second visit, we can
only sort of guess at the details here He describes
it as another bout with insanity and marks the psychiatrist

(28:05):
that he works with, and once he's at the second time,
he decides to work on his textbook again and heads
for small town, New England, where he will meet a
girl named Dolores. So that's a lot of very relevant information.
And this portion of Humbert's life is not especially cinematic,
and on the surface might seem to have little to
do with the subject of the story, but there's a
lot of very relevant stuff here. We learn how Humbert

(28:27):
views women, both as children and as adults. We learn
about a very glossed over repeated struggle with mental health
that he deliberately never brings up again, and in fact,
he has a completely dismissive view of his sanatorium stays,
describing the following, I discovered there was an endless source
of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists, cunningly leading them on,

(28:49):
never letting them see that you know all the tricks
of the trade, inventing for them elaborate dreams, and never
allowing them the slightest glimpse of one's real sexual comment. Now,
I am a huge fan and very reliant on mental
health support, but Humbert does not seem interested in working
on himself, as he tells it. To say the least.

(29:10):
He presents as massively confident from his first words, claiming
that he's seen his own psychiatric records and has everyone fooled,
and the reason his stays at sanatoriums get extended are
just for fun, and we don't have access to any
other information here, and he has the upper hand all
the while because we have no way of cross checking this.
One of my favorite broad claims he makes is when
he calls himself an exceptionally handsome male, slow moving, tall,

(29:34):
with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the
more seductive cost of demeva. Now, as a reader, you
can take his word for this or not, although if
you have seen the movies, they seem to take your
word for it. And it's here that the story you
might remember begins. It's after the house he plans to
move into burns down in the town of Ramsdale and
the state of somewhere in New England. Humbert ends up

(29:57):
boarding with Charlotte Hayes, a thirtiesomething year old widow seeking
a tenant and keeping with his opinions of adult women.
He calls her a quote simple but not unattractive and
quote a weak solution of Marlena Dietrich unquote. He's ready
to turn down the small lodging situation when he notices
her daughter in the garden. Twelve year old Dolores Hayes
is sunbathing outside, and then his obsession with nymphets is

(30:19):
stirred up all over again, and for the first time
in twenty five years, he claims he feels the same
things he felt for Annabelle Lee. He describes it like this.
A little later. Of course, she this nouvelle, this Lolita,
My Lolita was to eclipse completely high prototype. All I
want to stress is that my discovery of her was

(30:41):
a fatal consequence of that princeton by the sea in
my tortured past. So yeah, he stays at the house.
Howard begins keeping a journal that he claims this manuscript
of photographic recollection of Again, we really only have his
word to go on here, but he spends days writing
down every small interaction he has with Dolores, documenting everything,

(31:01):
speculating whether she has her period or not, keeping track
of her measurements, her coloring everything, and he finds any
opportunity to make physical contact with her. It is seen,
I will never forget reading. For the first time, Dolores
gets something caught in her eye and he licks it
off her eyeball, and once it's out of her eye,
he tells her he's just going to lick the other

(31:21):
eyeball anyways, he describes her again, what drives me insane
is the twofold nature of this nymphete, of every nymphete,
perhaps this mixture in my Lolita of tender, dreamy childishness
and a kind of eerie vulgarity stemming from the snubnosed
cuteness of ads and magazine pictures. Charlotte Hayes, as Humbert

(31:44):
tells it, struggles to connect with her daughter and doesn't
really seem to like her, calling her rude and defiant,
sullen and evasive. Then out of nowhere, Humbert mentions that
if he ever seriously considers committing a murder, it would
only be during a quote spell of insanta unquote, and
then he just returns to the diary more close calls,
he almost kisses Dolores. He fantasizes about a natural disaster,

(32:08):
killing Charlotte and leaving him and Dolores alone. He worries
that he'll be sent back to a sanatorium. He rubs
Dolores's legs so hard at one point that she has
a bruise on her thigh the next day, and then
I will place an extra trigger warning here. In one
of the most excruciating scenes in the book, Humbert pleasures
himself while bouncing Dolores on his lap, convinced that she's

(32:31):
none the wiser, but there are some narrative indications, her
legs twitching, the hairs on her legs, bristling comments she
makes later in the book that indicate that this may
not be true. She's singing her favorite song as this happens,
but Humbert can't really remember what it is, only how
he felt blessed be the Lord. She had noticed nothing,
he says at the end of this passage, noting to

(32:53):
the reader how kind and smart he was about it,
how careful, how chaste. The whole wine sweet event is
if viewed with what my lawyer has called in a
private talk, we have had impartial sympathy. He says this
to us before the anecdote and afterward. Quote the child
knew nothing. I had done nothing to her unquote. What

(33:14):
is certain is that Charlotte is none the wiser to this.
Dolores goes to summer camp, and before she leaves, she
runs up the stairs to Humbert's room and kisses him
for the first time. She then leaves for Charlotte to
drive her upstate, and Charlotte has left behind a letter
for Humbert. It says that Charlotte is deeply in love
with Humbert, and if he doesn't want to marry her,
he should leave the house immediately. This letter is so

(33:37):
over the top and again pulled only from humbert memory,
but some parts of it still make me laugh. Quote
I am a passionate and lonely woman, and you are
the love of my life. Unquote. It's all very you know,
one life to live. Back to the horrifying part, Humbert
realizes that his only way to stay near Dolores permanently
without giving away his plan to continue to assault her

(33:59):
is to agree to mary Charlotte. And then he says
again apropos of nothing. He's definitely not thinking about murdering Charlotte,
You guys, He's not I did not plan to marry
poor Charlotte in order to eliminate her in some vulga
gruesome and dangerous manner, such as killing her by placing
five by chloride of mercury tablets and upper prandial sherry,
or anything like that. But he does admit to planning

(34:21):
to experiment on slipping her and Dolores sleeping pills so
that he can rape Dolores without her or her mother knowing.
He fantasizes about black marylyn Charlotte into accepting it if
she ever finds out. But of course Charlotte doesn't know
any of this, and so when she gets home and
he accepts her proposal, she is thrilled and they're married
very soon after. So again Humbert. Humbert is married to

(34:44):
a woman he hates, and he spends the summer experimenting
with sleeping pills and imagining her daughter during sex with her.
Charlotte continues to speak ill of Dolores, calling her everything
from distrustful, too aggressive to negativistic. On a worksheet about
her daughter's personality, says that she plans to send her
to boarding school after camp to free up the home
for her and Humbert. This, of course, is the opposite

(35:06):
of what Humbert wants, and he's furious, but he doesn't
show it because he's afraid that arguing with Charlotte will
hurt his position and access to Dolores. And again he
discusses considering killing Charlotte at length, this time calculating whether
he could drown her in the local lake without anyone
witnessing it. He ultimately decided against doing it and convinces
her to let Dolores come home. So he's definitely not

(35:28):
going to kill our guys. But shortly after that, Charlotte
figures out Humbert's game while snooping around his space and
reading one of his journals, journals that describe his fantasies
about Dolores and calling her things like quote the big bitch,
the obnoxious mama unquote, and his intention to prey on
Dolores indefinitely. And I think that Melanie Griffith, playing Charlotte

(35:48):
Hayes plays this really well in the movie You're a monster.
You're a despicable criminal monster. If you near me, I'll
scream out the window. Get away from me. Humbert goes
into full gaslight mode. She's hallucinating. Let's have a drink,
and he leaves the room to go prepare some drinks.

(36:10):
But a few minutes later, once the drinks are prepared,
he gets a phone call. Charlotte has been hit by
a car trying to get to a mailbox to mail
someone a letter revealing Humbert's treachery. And that's it. She's dead.
As Humbert tells it in the story, he got lucky,
he definitely didn't kill her, you guys. After a swift
funeral and convincing the neighbors that he had secretly been

(36:32):
Dolores's biological father all along and was reuniting with Charlotte
as opposed to meeting her less than ten weeks ago,
Humbert leaves Ramsdale to pick up Dolores from camp. He
manages to get her from the camp without Dolores learning
that her mother has been killed, and immediately brings her
to a lodge that he and Charlotte had discussed going
to for their honeymoon, the Enchanted Hunter's Hotel. Dolores teases

(36:54):
Humbert once she's in his car, saying that she's been
quote revoltingly unfaithful to him on quote and mentioning that
he hasn't kissed her yet, and they kiss again, him
noting her lack of experience. She asks him if they're lovers,
because her mother, she says with a sense of satisfaction,
would be so angry if they were. He says no,
and when they get to the hotel where they're sharing

(37:15):
a room, the following exchange takes place. You're crazy, why
my darn because my darling and my darling mother finds
out to divorce you and destroying me. Now we're not rich,
and so when we travel, we're we're we're we're we're
sure to be. I mean, we'll be thrown together. Sometimes

(37:40):
two people sharing the same hotel room abound to enter
into all How can I put it into it? Into
a kind of incest. Unbeknownst to Dolorus, Humbert drugs her
that night, assuring the reader that he only ever intended
to rape Dolores while she was drugged. While he's waiting
for the drugs to take he goes of the lobby

(38:00):
and runs into a very drunk man who seems to
be onto his scheme, and this reads as innocuous, but
this guy is important later Humbert returns upstairs, but Dolores
isn't sleeping that heavily, so instead he decides to just
sleep beside her, and again pretty heavy trigger warning here.
The next morning, Humbert tells us they have sex with

(38:21):
Dolores fully conscious, and to be clear, this is absolutely rape,
but Humbert of course begins deflecting to his jury immediately.
He says, quote, I'm going to tell you something very strange.
It was she who seduced me, he says. He describes
the crime in typical flowery Humbert detail and calls Dolores

(38:43):
quote the wincing child unquote. Before moving on, he assures
us again that he loves her and reminds us that
marrying twelve year olds was still legal in some states
and sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even
her first lover. Afterward, Dolorus tells Humbert that she had
had sex with a boy at camp over the summer,

(39:05):
and for Humbert not taking her virginity when raping her
makes the crime easier to cope with. After they leave
the hotel, Dolores is in physical pain all day, and
Humbert tells the reader that in the space of just
a morning, he had had strenuous sex with her three times.
Later in the day, Dolores says, you chump, you revolting creature.

(39:26):
I was a daisy fresh girl, and look what you've
done to me. I ought to call the police and
tell them you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old
man unquote. Her pain continues as they continue to drive,
and it is only then that Humbert tells Dolores that
her mother is dead. The first section of the book
ends with just a devastating passage. At the hotel, we

(39:47):
had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night
she came sobbing into mine and we made it up
very gently. You see. She had absolutely nowhere else to go.
And this ends the first section of the book. Dolores,

(40:16):
for the little dialogue we get from, calls Humbert a
rapist twice in this book, and there are many moments where,
in a larger context it's basically impossible to say that
she does not have a semblance of what's going on.
She's telling us that she does, even through all these
walls of prose that Humberts putting up in front of her.

(40:38):
In part two of the novel, Humbert takes to Lauris
around the United States and continues to rape her on
a nightly basis and motels. Floras finds a semblance of
routine and things she likes, jazz square dancing Sundays, going
to movies, and reading magazines. When she got restless or
misbehaved on the road, Humbert with threaten to prolong her
quote exile for months and years unquote, employing every tactic

(41:01):
he has at his disposal, from the ancient precedent of
adults marrying children to long winded speeches like this, I
would not advise you to consider yourself my cross country slave,
and I deplore the Man Act as lending itself to
a dreadful pun. What humbreds referring to here is the
Man Act which made transporting girls and women across state

(41:21):
lines for the purpose of debauchery against the law, which
is good. It was also webinized against black men in
interracial relationships and against Jewish people, which we will talk
about in later episodes. Later on, he plays Devil's advocates, saying,
let us see what happens if you, a minor, are
accused of having impaired the morals of an adult as

(41:41):
a respectable in what happens if you complain to the
police of my having kidnapped and raped you. Let us
suppose they believe you, you become a ward of the
Department of Public Welfare. This is the situation, This is
the choice. Don't you think under the circumstance, Dolores Hayes
had better stick to year old man. She is trapped

(42:01):
for a full year August ninety seven to August. At
one point, she asks him how long they'll be traveling
like this quote, doing filthy things together and never behaving
like ordinary people. Unquote. He describes their months primarily as
a vacation, harping longer on roadside attraction descriptions than on
their arguments, and we catch a few of Dolores stray

(42:24):
words quote, I'd be a sap if I took your opinion. Seriously,
you can't boss me. I despise you, and so on.
Humbert is lightly paranoid, but mainly elated. He goes so
far as to fantasize about getting Dolores pregnant with a
baby girl and doing the same thing to her years later. Finally,
Humbert chooses a place for them to settle down a

(42:44):
different New England town a safe distance from Ramsdale called Beardsley,
where Dolores is enrolled in a private school and he
gets a job at a local university, and for the
first time since her mother's death, Dolores is allowed to
make friends and go to school to an extent because
a round this time, Humbert tightens his control on her
considerably by creating a monetary system for having sex with him.

(43:06):
He describes it like this, This was more than a
generous arrangement, considering she constantly received all kinds of small presents,
and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under
the moon, although of course I might fondly demand an
additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses
when I knew she coveted very badly. She was, however,

(43:28):
not easy to deal with. Only very listlessly did she
earn her three pennies or three nickels per day, and
she proved to be a cruel negotiator whenever it was
in her power, which I could not live with more
than a few days in a row, and which because
of the very nature of love's languor, I could not
obtain by force when she's not paying attention. Humbert steals

(43:51):
her money back and blames it on the neighbor. He
monitors her communication forbids her from being with boys without
his supervision, but insists on her girlfriends around so he
can ugle them, and he only allows her to join
the school drama club when the headmistress of Dolores's school,
who interprets his bad attitude as being a strict European parent,
asks him to. In that same meeting, the headmistress mentions

(44:13):
that Dolores is doing worse in school and his quote
morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses
her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self
denity unquote. And while the head mistress fails to ever
ask Dolores why this is, it scares Humbert nonetheless, and
he allows Dolores to play a part in the Hunted Enchanters.
Promptly after this meeting with her head mistress, he finds

(44:35):
Doloris in a classroom and gives her sixty five cents
to give him a hand job. Dolores is excited to
be in the drama club and the Hunted Enchanters is
a recent play about a nym fete of sorts played
by her who falls in love with the poet. She
forbids Humbert from spying on her rehearsals, but starts bringing
up that the hotel quote where you first raped me

(44:56):
unquote was called the Enchanted Hunters, where Humbert had met
at strange drunk man. I told you to remember the
night before the first performance. Humbert realizes Dolores has been
keeping the money for her piano lessons instead of going
to them, and he confronts her about it. Per Humbert,
she said I had attempted to violate her several times
when I was her mother's rumor. She said, I was

(45:16):
sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would
sleep with the very first fellow who asked her, and
I could do nothing about it. On this night, he
yells at her, grabs her arms so hard she's injured,
and she flees from the house. Humbert's afraid that she's
gone for good, but not quite yet. He finds Dolorous
later in a better mood and tells him that she
wants to leave the school and the town at once,

(45:37):
and returned to the road. Humbert is thrilled back on
the road. It doesn't take long for humbert suspicion to escalate.
He's convinced Dolores is communicating with another man. Whenever possible,
He sees her talk to a man in the car,
but Dolores insists it was a stranger. This happens a
couple different times, until somewhere in Colorado, Dolores gets sick
and needs to go to the hospital. She recovers, but

(45:58):
this brief separation from Humburg gives her the opportunity to
make her escape. When Humbert returns to bring her back
from the hospital, he's told that she has been taken
already by her quote uncle. Finally, at age fourteen, Dolores
has escaped. Humbert searches for her. For years. He traces
their steps back across the country, trying to figure out

(46:19):
who Dolores was communicating and left with, and fails to
do so. He dreams of her, but she takes the
form of his dead wives, Valeria, Charlotte, or both. He
mentions in the space of a sentence that he spends
another winter in spring in a Quebec sanatorium not focusing
on his mental health but writing long poems about Lolita.
He meets and starts a doomed relationship with a young

(46:40):
alcoholic named Rita for two years nineteen fifty nineteen fifty two,
who he promptly abandons. The moment he hears from Lolita
for the first time in three years, and her letter
breaks my heart every single time. Dear Dad, how's everything.
I'm married, I'm going to have a baby. I guess
he's to be a big one. I guess we'll come

(47:01):
right for Christmas. This is a hard letter to write.
I'm going nuts because we don't have enough to pay
our dats and get out of here. Dick has promised
a big job in Alaska. Pardon me for withholding our
home address, but you may still be mad at me,
and Dick must not know. Please do send us a check, Dad.
We can manage with three or four hundred or even less.
Anything is welcome. You might sell my old things, because
once we get there the dolls start rolling in. Right. Please,

(47:24):
I've gone through so much sadness and hardship yours expecting Dolly.
Mrs Richard F. Schiller Humbert finds out where she is
by tracking her down against her explicit wishes, thinking that
the man she's married to was the same one she
took off with back in nine and arrives with a
pistol at a rundown house on Hunter Road Enchanted Hunters,

(47:45):
Hunted Enchanters, Nice Touch and a book off to find
a seventeen year old Dolores, pregnant, poor with a husband
close to her own age, the sweet mechanic Dick Schiller.
Humbert realizes that Dick is not the guy he's looking
for and pushes Doloris on the identity of the man
from It's Clear Quilty, the drunk man from the Enchanted

(48:05):
Hunter's Hotel, the playwright of the Hunted Enchanters who directed
Dolores and Beardsley, and the nephew of the dentist from Ramsdale.
It's here where Dolores says that she'd known clear Quilty
and had been pursued by him before she ever met Humbert,
since she was ten years old, and that she'd heard
that he'd almost been thrown in jail for molesting young
girls when she first met him, and it was this

(48:27):
clear quilty that had followed them from Beardsley to Colorado
and planned her escape. Where was he now? Dolores didn't
know she, at fourteen, was in love with him and
thought that he wanted to be with her, but quickly
realized he was much more interested in putting her in
hardcore pornography. When she refused, he kicked her out of
the house, and a dejected Dolores began making her own

(48:48):
living as a waitress before meeting Dick and getting married.
After extracting the information he wants from her, Humbert realizes
as he tells it that he's still in love with her.
There she was, with how ruined looks, and her adult
rope veined narrow hands, and her goose flesh white arms,
and her shallow is and her unkempt armpits. There she

(49:10):
was my Lolita, hopelessly worn at seventeen. And I looked
and looked at her and knew, as clearly as I
am to die, that I loved her more than anything
I had ever seen or imagined on earth. He begs
to her is to leave with him. She asks him
if he'll give her the money if she doesn't go.
He says no, he'll give her the money either way,

(49:32):
and hands her four thousand dollars of his own money
and what's left from selling the old house in Ramstock,
the one thing Charlotte was really able to give her daughter.
In the end, Dolores is so excited and Humbert asks
her to come with him one last time. She says no, no, honey, no.
And she does not say this, but Humbert projects this

(49:52):
final thought on her, referring to clear Quilty. He broke
my heart, you merely broke my life. Laura's is excited
to have the money, and she sees him off. Humbert
leaves tracks down Clerk Quilty, murders him, and is arrested
for nothing he ever did to do Laura's hayes, but
for murdering Quilty. Just one last humberd quote as he

(50:14):
overhears a group of girls playing towards the end quote,
I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty
slope to those flashes of separate cries, with a kind
of demurror murmur for background, And then I knew that
the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side,
but the absence of her voice from that concorde. Unquote.

(50:34):
The book ends here. But remember we were told in
the foreword that Mrs Richard Schiller dies in childbirth in nWo.
That's Dolores dying at only seventeen years old. And that's Lolita,
the account from an admitted predator of his rape and
kidnapping of a twelve year old girl, with a smattering
of murders depending on how much you believe him. I
know this was a very long description, but I really

(50:56):
feel that knowing what happens in the book exactly makes
it a lot easier for you to see how far
away many adaptations get away from the very difficult source
material the book of who we really haven't gotten to
talk about yet, was pretty clear on his feelings about
Humbert Humbert from the moment of publication, saying the following quote,
Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages

(51:18):
to appear quote touching unquote. Now, why he chose to
write this story is something we're going to talk about.
Who he's pulling inspiration from for these doomed characters is
something else altogether. But as far as the book goes,
Lolita is designed to lead its readers astray. You were
told before the narrative even starts that you were reading
the heavily biased, often ridiculously inaccurate account of a child

(51:40):
molester and murderer who is appealing directly to his jurors.
From the first words, Humbert says, you learned that Lolita
is not even a name anyone else in her life
uses except for him. But then, well, god damn, he's
a pretty good writer. Imagine me. I shall not exist
if you do not imagine me. Humbert says. He is
extremely manipulative. And by the time we learn who Mrs

(52:02):
Richard Schiller is, and there's Dolores still being named based
on the dominant man on her life to the very
end that there is no one else alive to give
their account of these events. Charlotte Hayes is dead, Dolores
Hayes is dead. Humbert is the only person to tell
us his version of the events, and even so, with
this deeply biased account of what he claims to be loved,
even though Dolores assures him just months before her death

(52:25):
that it was not. There are glimmers of Dolores inside
of this story. She has raped hundreds of times by Humbert,
She's abducted by him, she's lied to, hit, spied to,
stolen from, and those facts are referenced inside of all
this fancy murderer prose, and still with no adult on
earth that she can trust, she gets away, and still

(52:46):
she only changes hands to her next abuser. A problem
a lot of readers bump up against in reading Lolita
is that, in spite of how much is talked about
Lolita from Humbert, her exact measurements horrified in details of assault,
we don't get to know Dolores all that well, aside
from what Humbred shares of mostly their arguments. But even

(53:08):
through the severe limitations that come with a heavily unreliable
narrator trying to talk you out of thinking what you
think about him, this is not the story of a
precocious girl seducing an older man, as he describes it,
and the reality is right there in the pages. It's
the story of a girl having her life taken from
her by a horrific, if well spoken pedophile and all

(53:31):
of the other adults in her life who failed to
help her along the way. At the time of publication,
this was a topic that was completely forbidden to discuss
in the United States and in most of the Western
world in spite of its reality becoming increasingly common. And
we'll be discussing the real life case that inspired Lolita
in a future episode. But then, as now, I think

(53:53):
that your interpretation of this book is a bit of
a mirror. My first read of it was very impacted
by my age, my experience is up until that time,
and the aesthetics surrounding not just the movie adaptations, but
around sexualizing young girls in general. And after reading this
book back four times to prepare for this show, I'm
now far more aggravated with how it was presented to

(54:15):
me than by the work itself. For me, a close
read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying
the predator. I believe it's our culture that has There's
a quote from Vera Nabokov, Vladimir's wife who will be
talking about in future episodes, on her feelings about Doloris,
the character. They all missed the fact that the horrid
little brat Lolita is essentially very good. Indeed, or she

(54:38):
would not have straightened out after being crushed so terribly
and found a decent life with poor Dick more to
her liking than the other kind. Another take on to
Luras I found really impactful in my research was reading
Lolita in Tehran, a memoir by Iranian author and professor
Azar Nafisi. It's the account of an undercovered book club

(54:58):
that she made for her the students after leaving as
a teacher at an Iranian university. From n Nafisi and
her group analyze Western literature through the lens of students
who haven't known anything but the oppressive gender roles of
revolutionary Iran. Per the title, they read, Lolita and Dolores's
plight really affected the whole group and got them discussing

(55:20):
their own girlhoods. Forty years after the book's publication, one
member of the group, Mascheid, said this, it is hard
for me to read the parts about Lolita's feelings. All
she wants to be as a normal girl. Now goes
on to say, Lolita belongs to a category of victims
who have no defense and are never given a chance

(55:40):
to articulate their own story. As such, she becomes a
double victim. Not only her life but also her life
story is taken from her. We told ourselves that we
were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim
to this second crime. And as will continue to discuss,
there's a lot of very valid criticism are around Lolita
the book, like in Rebecca salm It's wonderful essay men

(56:04):
explain Lolita to Me, which she wrote after getting some
extremely condescending feedback while making the argument that the literary
canon that in a book golf is very much a
part of is perhaps dominated by straight white guys with
a tendency to harp on the suffering of their female characters. Huh.
Here's what Salnick says. So much of feminism has been

(56:26):
women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much
of anti feminism has been men telling them these things
don't happen. You were not just raped, your rapists may say,
and then if you persist, there may be death threats,
because killing people is the easy way to be the
only voice in the room. Non white people get much

(56:48):
the same rubbish about how there isn't racism and they
don't get treated differently, and race doesn't affect any of us,
and this is all very much in the wheelhouse of
how Humbert Humbert represents Doloras, and the tendency to take
this information at face value from Humbert is a huge
contributor to why Lolita has come to popularly mean the
sexualization of young girls instead of the story of a

(57:11):
young girl's life being destroyed when she is sexualized and abused.
And I'm not saying that every appreciator of the book
feels this way. I'm not saying that at all, but
I do think you'll recognize this condescending, missing the fucking
point tone that Solnett is describing here. 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.

(57:34):
It is, and it's also a novel about a big
old guy violating a spindley child over and over and over.
Then she weeps. And then another nice little man came
along and said, you don't seem to understand the basic
truth of art. I wouldn't care if a novel was
about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If

(57:54):
it was great writing, I'd want to read it, probably
more than once. Of course, there is no such body
of literature. And if the nice little man who made
that statement had been assigned book after book full of
castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have
made an impact on him. One of the main problems
people have with Lolita as a cultural figure is how

(58:18):
she's shown in advertising. The heart shaped glasses, gazing at
the viewer, the school girl close about to pop off
that we've seen a million times, But that's not the
Lolita that Nabokov writes about. The subject of all of
the abuse of this story is Dolores, a twelve year old.
So before we continue into the rest of the series,
I want to remind you the age Dolores is when

(58:41):
Humbert first violates her. Here's Amanda Buydes at twelve. I'm twelve,
al yes, I can. Here's Marseille Martin at thirteen. It
was amazing, Like, if you know, Beyonce is like my

(59:04):
favorite person. Like we are talking about a twelve year
old girl. And throughout the show, I'm going to continue
to call the character as we know her, Dolores, and
the book and the idea surrounding it as Lolita, because
they are two different people. Dolores is present in slips
of Humbrid's pen, but he doesn't let us get too

(59:25):
close to her by design, the Lolita we meet at
subsequent points and pop culture require taking Humbred's word at
face value. When in the book, before you hear a
word that he says, you know that that's the first
thing you absolutely should not do. The cultural legacy of
Lolita has just as much to do with Dolores's absence

(59:46):
as it does with the presence of Humbrid's distorted fantasy.
So if you've gotten this far into the episode and
had some hesitation at that reading or rereading Lolita the
book beforehand, and your will to give it another shot,
I'd be interested to talk to you on the show.
So if you like, I'm going to be cobbling together
a book club of listeners to discuss the book on

(01:00:09):
discord over the next eight weeks or so as this
series continues to come out. And for the link on that,
I will leave it in the show notes, as well
as a pint to my Twitter account over at Jamie
Loftus Help. So that's episode one, and it does require
some addressing that this book was written by someone whose
life experiences are way more aligned with Humbert's than Dolores's.

(01:00:34):
So nibulkof Why the funk Did You write This? Next
week on Lolita Podcast. This has been a production of
I Heart Radio. My name's Jamie Loftus. I right and
host the show. My producers are the wonderful Sophie Lichterman,
Miles Gray, Beth and Macaluso and Jack O'Brien. My editor

(01:00:57):
is the amazing Isaac Taylor. Additional research and transcription work
from Ben Loftus. Music is by Zoey Blade, and our
theme is from Brad Dickert. Thank you so much to
my guest voices on this episode as well, Aziz Vora
as Humbert Humbert, Robert Evans as Vladimir nabuk Off, Julia Claire, Anna,
Josnie Sharene, Lanni Units, Grace Thomas, and Miles Gray. We'll

(01:01:21):
see you next week.