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

-
136 -
question "Are we to sleep in one room? " (118) and
in her brusque rejection of Humbert's "controlled
tenderness before dinner": "Look, let's cut out the
kissing game and get something to eat" (119). Her
fits, her weeping and sobbing, and her tears are
genuine. She never leaves Humbert in any doubt about
what she thinks of him: "I'd be a sap if I took your
opinion seriously... Stinker.
I despise you... " (168).
..
You can't boss me...
oddly enough, there is little acting in the sense
in which the word has been used with regard to Margot,
even when Lolita gets involved with Quilty, when she
knows that he is following them and that sooner or
later she is going to run away with him. She does
tell some lies to Humbert to cover up her communication
with Quilty and her meetings with him, but apart from
that her behaviour reflects her emotions as faithfully
as before. This applies to her reactions to
Humbert, to whom she says "unprintable things" (201),
but it applies also to her reactions to Quilty. More
than once Humbert is puzzled by something about her:
"a kind of celestial vapidity" in her eyes (199);
"those muddy, mooney eyes of hers, that singular
warmth emanating from her" (210); "a private blaze on
my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek" (215).
Again unlike Margot, she does not play doKn the emotions
evoked in her by the man she loves: her happiness
shows, and she is content to let it show.
It appears from all this that Lolita is not quite
the soulless creature and almost non-entity that some