re Eric Goldman article on Normalcy and Deviance in Lolita
It turns out that Eric Goldman is as wordy as I am, so there are not just a few sentences that can capture the entire range of his thoughts. So I'll concentrate on those most relevant to our discussion here, which really does do injustice to a brilliantly reasoned article and interpretation.
In very short, Lolita is a normal child and Humbert is the deviant, and "Lolita poses the question of how a woman's sexual awakening should be viewed." But there is also a further thought about Humbert relevant to our discussion.
Humbert
Goldman sees Humbert as casting Lolita in the role of Eve in a mythic Garden of Eden because that places her in the role of a fallen woman, or temptress, and him as the innocent target of her temptation. Moreover, after he claims
he is seduced by
her, he continues to view himself as innocent because
she is the deviant and perverted one.
Lolita
In the Introducory paragraphs Goldman says
It is important to look also at the ways she transcends the myth Humbert writes for her and, in doing so, becomes less an avatar of an archetypal figure and more of a unique modern woman.
Goldman alleges, and proves, that Nabokov (not Humbert) presents the alterntive Kinseyan view that Lolita is a normally developing girl, at least until Humbert thwarts and deflects her normal sexual growth. Goldman points for proof to the scene (among others) that I originally regarded as one of the more heavily satiric in the whole novel, the meeting between Head Mistress Pratt of the Beardsley School and Humbert. Here we have Goldman speaking:
Mythic and scientific aspects of Lolita's sexuality clash in Pratt's conference with Humbert about Lolita's partcipation in the school play, entitled The Enchanted Hunters. She believes the play might help Lolita mature normally. "What worries me," she tells Humbert, ""is that both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey -- and everybody wonders why you are so firmly opposed to all the natural recreations of a normal child. Humbert bristles at this and replies, wryly, "Do you mean sex play?" Pratt retorts that she is referring to Lolita's participation in an actual play, not sex play. What ensues is an interpretive battle in which Humbert tries to make Lolita's participation in the play perverse while Pratt tries to establish this as part of normal (and sexual) maturation.....Humbert, however, interprets Lolita's sex play and experimentation as signs of a monumental and irreversible fall that justifies his own truly perverse exploitation of her."
Furthermore
"At the novel's close, she is the quintessential American housewife, and Humbert's disappointment is palpable.....Lolita's supposed deviance leads not to a squalid life of pornography, prostitution or exploitation but, ironically enough, to a normal life as housewife in suburban America. Such a twist, a deviation from the expected corruption or downfall of the deviant woman, was more than enough to disturb American audiences [of the 1950's]"
Humbert again
And finally, a different thought that relates to how we view Humbert at the end.
While Lolita outgrows her role as Humbert's fallen woman, his Eve who has seduced a "helpless" Adam, Humbert's view of her does not change. He ... still casts her in the same mythic context he has imposed on her from the start. He reflects, "there was within her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate -- dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me.......[which are] Humbert's conscious recreation of Eden and the symbolic entrapment of Lolita within this myth..."
That latter is disappointing for me especially to hear, for I viewed it otherwise (as an end to his solipsism) but, I guess, in the game of Lolita interpretaion, you win some and you lose some.
But you should read the whole
article,
Peder
And I've often found myself smiling indulgently when I see youngsters flirting with my partner. He takes it in his stride but I have noticed the very wide berth he gives them if they get a little too flirty - and then there's my eagle and knowing eye on them too.
