Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published in 1955, explores Humbert Humbert’s fascination with, and subsequent acts that arise from said fascination, with prepubescent Dolly Haze. Before Nabokov wrote this story, it underwent ten years of permutations, first being set in the Old World France before being moved to its permanent residence of the Northeastern United States. Nabokov was a monolithic writer and moved to the US in 1940, so it’s no wonder that he would chose to write a story set in America. But, a question still remains: why this story in America? When commenting upon this, Nabokov mentioned that he had accomplished the recreation of Russia and Europe, and now he turned to America (Jelly-Schapiro). Nabokov explores and defines what America is through the novel, Lolita.
In choosing to rewrite America, Nabokov uses the vehicle of a disturbed pervert, Humbert Humbert, to communicate this vision of what America is. Humbert reflects the Old World’s colonialization of the new, represented by Humbert’s fetish Dolly Haze. Through this colonialization, Dolly loses who she is, becoming Lolita when renamed by the professor.
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This “system of monetary bribes” that allows Humbert to fully take advantage of Lolita eventually forces him to reckon with his complicity in mass culture (Nabokov 167). Through this system, Lolita is able to also gain her independence from Humbert by reasserting her power. Even in Humbert’s fantasies, Lolita is a mixture of that purity of childhood that he so desperately desires and an “eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snob-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures…” (Nabokov 48). The image that makes up Lolita is comprised of many different forces and inspirations, but importantly, the vulgarity is comes from the pictures of advertisements that permeate the way that Lolita moves through the