Humbert's Description of Lolita in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita

Humbert's Description of Lolita

In Chapter 31 of Part 1 of Lolita, Humbert and Lolita are in the lobby of the Enchanted Hunters only hours after consummating their sexual relationship. As Humbert arrives in the lobby to check out of the hotel, he observes Lolita as she sits reading a movie magazine in a large armchair, and his description of her progresses from a focus on her loss of innocence to a focus on her inner, demonic nature. As elsewhere in the novel, the reader here sees Humbert attempting to mitigate his own sense of guilt and self-loathing.

His description of Lolita is typical Humbert, with an almost obsessive attention to detail as his eyes glide over her body from her shoes to her eyes and face:

She wore her professional white socks and saddle oxfords, and that bright pink frock with the square throat; a splash of jaded lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs. There she sat, her legs carelessly highcrossed, and her pale eyes skimming along the lines with every now and then a blink. (138)

Humbert's reference to "that bright pink frock with the square throat" suggests his intimate familiarity with Lolita's wardrobe; he has, likely, seen and admired this particular dress before, contributing to our sense of Humbert's obsession with the girl. This obsession, moreover, is tinged with a lyric and romantic sensibility ("a splash of jaded lamplight brought out the golden down on her warm brown limbs") that characterizes Humbert's descriptions of Lolita throughout the novel.

But the most significant aspect of Humbert's description of Lolita in this passage, the controlling idea guiding it, is Lolita's loss of innocence. There is a ...

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...e base lust and lechery of Quilty to become something almost sacred. This, too, is a recurring theme in the novel; Humbert continually casts his love for Lolita as transcendent, divine, exceeding the bounds of mortal experience and approaching the status of timeless art.

Because the novel adheres so strenuously to Humbert's very unreliable first person narration, the reader knows Lolita only through what and how Humbert chooses to tell us about her. And, because Humbert seems to see her in multiple ways, the reader is left at the end of the novel with many Lolitas. Part child, part demon, Lolita remains, for the reader, locked forever in the prison house of Humbert's schizophrenic mind.

Sources Cited:

Amis, Martin. "Lolita Reconsidered." The Atlantic 270, Sept. 1992.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage International, 1989.