The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

In my honest opinion she was nothing [sic] of [either of] them! She was a lonely girl
without a family. She didn’t want to mislead Humbert [the older male
protagonist]…. She realized that she gets what she wants if she does what Humbert
wants of her. [But], especially in [sic] the end of the novel it gets clear that she never
wanted a romantic relationship with him… Because of… that I wonder why
people think that Lolita has a negative connotation. *
In other words, although there is this perception that the Lolita “wants to
attract older guys” – an association that stems from a particular reading of
the sexual relationship between Nabokov’s Lolita and her “guardian”,
Humbert Humbert, and subsequently becomes implied in the Lolita
subculture – a thorough understanding of the novel reveals that the
Nabokovian Lolita was a victim of statutory rape and, therefore, neither she
nor her namesake, the Gothloli, should be seen in either a derogatory light
or as inviting this reputation. I agree with “Duplica” when she says that the
†
“problem is just [in] the [mis]interpretation of the book”.
These misunderstandings in regard to Nabokov’s novel, and indeed the
character of Lolita herself, feed misinterpretations of the motivations behind
participation in the Japanese Lolita movement, especially in regard to
intentions. The Gothloli’s desire to be seen as a child and her refusal to
grow up, I maintain, should be read as a reluctance to become sexual. The
choice to engage in the Lolita subculture is, therefore, a means of drawing
* Ibid.
† Ibid.
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