Victoria Weston
28th April 2025
Whatever Happened to Dolores Haze?The Romanticisation of Lolita in the Media
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was published in 1955, causing waves of moral indignation that ripple to this day. The book tells the story of the obsessive attraction that Humbert Humbert, 37-year-old literature professor, has towards 12-year-old Dolores Haze, the rebellious young daughter of his landlady – and later wife, Charlotte Haze.
The book was rejected by various publishers before finally being accepted by Olympia Press, a Parisian publishing house that specialised in erotic and countercultural literature. It comes as no surprise that Lolita has been very controversial over the years: this book does not simply tackle a taboo subject, but it does so from Humbert’s point of view, apparently endorsing his account. Lolita is a difficult read because it forces us to take on the perspective of a man who manipulates and sexually abuses a child.
But not everyone agrees. To this day Lolita has been misinterpreted as a love story, albeit a tormented one.
How did we get here? Giving credit to this interpretation of the novel means accepting Humbert’s recount of the events at face value. Humbert Humbert throughout the whole book romanticises the abuse and describes Dolores Haze as an active participant in it. In the last pages, when he visits a 17-year-old desperate Dolores he thinks to himself: “… and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.” He often imagines himself in front of a jury, vehemently arguing his case from the very first page. When he rapes a drugged Dolores for the first time, he addresses the women on the jury as “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury!”, only to state that “I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.” A few pages onward, he claims “Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.” Should we believe him? That is up to each individual reader, but it would be difficult to argue that, within the book, Humbert isn’t slyly trying to persuade us to take on his perspective.
While Nabokov was loathe to give overt interpretations of his work, I would personally argue – as many have before me – that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator, that is, a narrator who cannot fully be trusted because he, whether deliberately or not, deceives the reader and presents his own narrative as objective. We find out from the foreword that Humbert Humbert writes Lolita or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male in prison, awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty. He is likely to face the death penalty. I would argue that he has every reason to want to justify his actions and elicit the reader’s sympathy. On that account, Humbert has all the motive to mislead us, making Lolita first and foremost a confession and a defence.
Humbert is, in a way, trying to seduce us with his poetic “fancy prose style” into taking his side. Despite this, I believe, the reader remains somewhat aware of his rhetoric: while Humbert’s first-person perspective tends to be all-encompassing, silencing Dolores and presenting her as his own sexual fantasy (she is never Dolores to him, but Lolita, Lo or Dolly, the nymphet), her point of view may emerge through the cracks of a broken narration, giving us glimpses of her desperation, like when Humbert, in a dusty roadside motel, finally admits to her that her mother is dead: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Quite terrifyingly, even he seems to be somewhat aware of the pain he is causing her and the situation he is forcing upon her.
Lolita is a book that merits a certain kind of attention and sensibility. It is, bluntly put, a story of abuse and manipulation of a child at the hands of a man three times her age. So, why, as a culture, do we so readily accept Humbert’s account? Contemporary pop culture is saturated with eroticised images of young girls in seductive or knowing poses, used in films, advertising, social media; “Lolitas” completely detached from the original story. These kinds of images can be considered to be part of the “Lolita aesthetic”, a visual culture surrounding Lolita as a symbol of youth, innocence and the sexualisation of it. No wonder according to Merriam-Webster a Lolita is a “precociously seductive girl”. How did Lolita go from victim to vixen?
Elle Fanning was fourteen years old when she featured in 'Lolita Lempicka'
The visual objectification of Lolita isn’t new: if you have a copy of Lolita, chances are that the cover depicts a young girl eyeing the reader languidly, often in her bathing suit or underwear. An image that is supposed to entice the potential reader, seduce, sell. This tendency only worsened with the release of the films that would crystallise the Lolita aesthetic for years to come: Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita was famously advertised with a photograph of Sue Lyon (the actress playing Lolita) wearing heart-shaped sunglasses, sucking on a red lollipop. The film depicts a middle-aged man comically struggling against his sexual desire, a sympathetic victim of a sexually provocative brat. But in the book Humbert is not struggling; he is knowingly and deliberately orchestrating the kidnapping and sexual abuse of Dolores Haze. Despite this, when interviewed, Kubrick famously stated “To me, Lolita seemed a very sad and tender love story”. Coincidently Adrian Lyne, whose adaptation sees Dolores (Dominique Swain) in her opening scene lying on her stomach, her see-through dress drenched by a sprinkler in the garden, had a similar opinion: “I wanted to make a movie of Nabokov’s novel, because it’s, I think, one of the great novels of this century. In the end, it’s a love story – it’s a strange and awful love story.”
Lolita spawned a whole genre, bringing about animations such as “Lolita Anime”, an erotic series, born in the 1980’s, featuring hentai scenes involving young girls. It became a staple of the lolicon genre in Japan, a type of media that concentrates on young or young-looking girls, usually in sexually provocative clothing and poses. In Western culture, nymphette and coquette culture blew up on social media platforms like Tumblr, with pictures taken from the films, Lolita-inspired fashion and Lana Del Rey lyrics all over their dashboard. Lana Del Rey, who famously sings about tormented, violent relationships and unequal power dynamics, makes overt references to Lolita in songs like Off to the Races, Diet Mountain Dew or Lolita and implicit ones in Put Me in a Movie or Cola. Advertising agencies also soon saw the potential for this kind of imagery: a 17-year-old Dakota Fanning famously appeared in a Marc Jacobs ad for a perfume called “Oh, Lola!” in 2011, in a thigh-length dress with the perfume bottle resting between her thighs (subsequently banned for promoting the sexualisation of children). In 2012 her sister, Elle Fanning (14 years old at the time), was featured in an ad for a perfume named “Lolita Lempicka”, giving the spectator a performance halfway between child-like innocence and sexual provocativeness. I believe this cultural trend signals an acceptance, if not overt desire, in society for the sexualisation of young girls.
Lolita is a symbol for something that predates it: the romanticisation of unequal power dynamics between men and women, and the sexualisation (and subsequent demonisation) of women. The objectification of young girls is a consequence of the idealisation of submission, dependency and innocence in women. Many over the years have criticised Lolita for glamorising paedophilia. But maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is not whether Lolita glamorises or endorses child sexual abuse, but why – if it did – we are drawn to romanticising this kind of depiction.
Our culture doesn’t simply romanticise Humbert’s behaviour, in some way it is already primed for it. Humbert is the one telling the story, but it is a story that rests on our unconscious beliefs about relationships between men and women. A society built on patriarchal beliefs tends to normalise sexual abuse, either by downplaying it or by sugarcoating it, as well as predatory behaviour on the part of men, and is compelled to ascribe some quota of responsibility to women (no matter how young they are). We tend to believe Humbert when he tells us Dolores initiated sex for the first time (leaving her “a wincing child”, in his own words), we empathise when he tells us he is in love, we are saddened when Dolores finally manages to run away – not because this is the point of the story, but because it is the point of our culture. The interpretations that Lolita has been subject to over the years are the reflection of a society that already believes it to be a love story and ignores all the red flags – and victims – scattered in their wake.