The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

To the Victorians, the Child was a metaphor for purity, innocence and
grace and so the untainted naked vessel of the Child was not readily
connected with sin or sinful motives. There was instead an emphasis in
common trains of thought and representation that “dwelt on the holiness of
the Child” whose image was often seen as “redemptive”. 187
In regard to the mindset of Dodgson, Hannah Feldman has supported
his innocence to a degree, claiming that his “interest in these girls (often the
daughters of friends) was… the outgrowth of… [an] aesthetic that…
[found] in the girlish physique an innocent beauty untainted by
experience”. 188
However even one of Dodgson’s main defenders Hugues Lebailly
believes that “it would of course be preposterous to attempt to dispute the
reality of that fascination [with little girls] and to deny that it ever played a
part” in his behaviour. 189 And, states Feldman, “it could be said” that
Charles Dodgson was indeed “an early sufferer” of the Lolita Complex
which “in Japan sociologists call the male desire for girlish women”. 190
Hannah Feldman likens Dodgson to the fictional Humbert Humbert,
the male protagonist of Nabokov’s Lolita, in seeing his behaviour as an
“outgrowth of a sexual aesthetic that privileged the developing body over
the developed” which, in association with what we know of that character,
suggests her belief that Dodgson’s practice was less than healthy. 191
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