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LOLITA
(VLADIMIR NABOKOV)
,.
“ ‘I have only words to play with’: Taboo and
Tradition in Nabokov’s Lolita”
by Samuel Schuman, University
of North Carolina at Asheville
Since it was first published in America in 1958, 1 Vladimir Nabokov’s
novel Lolita has been praised by some as a masterpiece of American
literature and condemned by others as an immoral, pornographic, and
evil work. Over the years the work has solidified its reputation as a
classic, but it still continues to outrage the censorious. 2 At first blush,
the novel’s plot seems to justify its repute as a racy novel of scandalous
content. Lolita tells the story of the passionate sexual love affair
between a 37 year-old man, Humbert Humbert (the book’s narrator),
and a 12 year-old girl, Dolores Haze, called “Lolita”. Humbert is a
cosmopolitan, polyglot middle-aged European; Dolores is a midtwentieth-century,
small-town American pre-teenager. Humbert
marries Dolores’ mother, Charlotte Haze, solely in order to be close to
her daughter. When the hysterical Charlotte is killed in an automobile
accident just seconds after discovering Humbert’s true affections,
Humbert swoops up Dolores from summer camp, consummates his
sexual lust (but, he affirms, he wasn’t even Dolores’ first lover), and
the step-father and daughter travel throughout America until Dolores
escapes with another middle-aged man, the playboy playwright Clare
Quilty (who Humbert eventually murders). To say that Lolita focuses
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