Invasive Reality In Lolita

send Lolita away to camp is not poster parenting, but Lolita has a stable life and is provided for by her mother. After Charlotte's death when Lolita finally settles in Beardsley after a year of unsettling travels, she shows clear underdevelopment through the indirect characterization by her teachers and peers. For example, a school advisor told Humbert that Lolita was, “mildly speaking, impudent” (Nabokov 195). The traumatizing effects of Humbert’s invasive reality on Lolita are undeniable. At Beardsley, Lo acts as a pseudo-normal student, but her life outside the walls is in ruin. She hides much from her step father and neglects the ability to form lasting friendships. It is noted that Lolita dropped her friends after short bouts of inseparable

One aspect of Lolita that transcends both school and home life is her ability to play duplicitous roles. Lolita is an actress at school, despite Humbert’s wishes. Similarly, at home Lolita acts as an innocent child who teases Humbert to get what she wants, or she can scheme with intention to escape. The dichotomy of Humbert’s reality appears further in his forcation of children to be idols of perfection. Here it is clear that Lolita is truly about the pursual of art and unattainable beauty, here in the form of a child (Mergerle 342). Lolita is forced behave as a paragon, and the psychological effects are stunting, just as Annabel was on Humbert’s youth. In contrast to Humbert, Lolita seems trapped in a false sense of womanhood from a young age. Lolita eventually escapes Humbert for another sex-crazed man: Quilty. Her inability to escape a life of sexual obsession symbolizes the obsession that artists have of reaching the common goal of perfection. In art, there should be no such thing as one, uniform perfection, which Nabokov is satirizing. Lolita’s later romance with Dick Schiller further characterizes Lolita as a creative stimulus. Dick calls Dolores, Dolly, similar to how Humbert calls her

By the same token, her last name, Haze, embodies how misunderstood Delores is. Readers are only allowed a very subjective view of Lolita, and never fully understand who she is. While she is misrepresented as a human child, Lolita is undeniably performing the role of a nymph in Humbert’s twisted production. In etymology, a nymphet is an insect that fails to undergo metamorphosis so it is trapped in a childlike stage (Ray 2). Likewise, Lolita, who is referred to as a nymphet throughout the