''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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age. She was the "initial girl-child" without whom
"there might have been no Lolita at all" (11). It was
during that summer, he argues, "that the rift in my
life began" (15). He cannot get over the memory of
their unfulfilled, frustrated romance; the memory of
her "honey-coloured skin", "brown bobbed hair", "long
lashes" (14), of her "musky perfume" (17) and the memory
of their crudely interrupted love-making haunts him.
Long after her death his thoughts. still seem to be coloured
by hers. Such an impression has their short unhappy
romance left on him, and such a shock has her
death been that no other romance is possible for him.
it takes him fully twenty-five years, during which he
struggles with his perversion and with actual insanity,
before the spell of Annabel is broken, and this happens
at Humbert's first sight of Lolita. In her he finds
everything he loved in-Annabel, the same "bright beauty"
(41), "the same frail, honeyhued shoulders, the same
silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair"
(40). She is so much "the same child" (40) that, after
the first shock of passionate recognition, Annabel and
Lolita seem to merge into one, or, as Humbert puts it,
"... I broke [Annabel's]
spell by incarnating her in
another" (17). He makes it all sound very much like a
case history of the Freudian kind. He traces not only
his nympholepsy and the long years of struggling
against this predicament back to the frustration in his
youth, but he sees his very discovery of Lolita and his
subsequent involvement with her as a "fatal consequence"
of. that experience in his ". tortured past" (41).
The reader who is acquainted with Nabokov's abhor-