Lolita Misread

 

In a book I'm currently reading I saw the following passage:

"There is the incontrovertible fact, very hard for some of us to accept, that in certain cases it is not the man who inaugurates the trouble. The novel Lolita ... describes what may well happen. A girl of twelve or so is already endowed with a good deal of sexual desire and also can take pride in her 'conquests.' Perhaps, in all innocence, she is the temptress and not the man." (The Facts of Sex, 1970, quoted in Fear of Child Sexuality by Stephen Angelides, 2019)

Doubtless in some cases this is what happens, but it misrepresents the novel, and I've encountered this misrepresentation quite a number of times. Go no further if you're supersensitive to spoilers, but in a nutshell here's what happens up to that scene in the book: Humbert sees twelve-year-old Lolita and finds her attractive, as he's a hebephile who loves "nymphets." There's no indication that she has any interest in him. He devises to befriend and ultimately marry her mother, pretending to love the latter, simply to get close to Lolita and ultimately achieve intimacy with her. Yet he's beset with the perverse notion that he's morally obligated to preserve her "innocence," so he devises to give her a drug that will put her out, allowing him to take her without her being "corrupted." But when he actually gets to this point, he's anxious to be absolutely certain that she's really unconscious, and so deeply so that she won't wake up during the act. So he keeps almost initiating intercourse without actually doing so. Finally he falls asleep from exhaustion, only to be awakened by Lolita's jumping his bones.

In this context, it appears perfectly clear what Nabokov was portraying: a relationship initiated and driven exclusively by the older man's desire, ultimately consummated by the girl only because his repeated "almosts" when she wasn't actually asleep have started to drive her crazy and to arouse her with the feeling that she's desirable.

For whatever reason, the term "Lolita complex" came to be used for a girl pursuing older men, and presumably this is why many people, perhaps people who haven't actually read the book, have had a misapprehension of the story it tells.