Lolita (Characters)

Characters

Mona Dahl

Lolita's "elegant, cold, lascivious, experienced" girlfriend. Humbert decides she "had obvi-ously long ceased to be a nymphet, if she ever had been one."

Jean Farlow

Jean and her husband John are Charlotte's friends. In an effort to prevent the pair from paying too much attention to his plans, Humbert suggests that Lolita is the product of an affair he had years ago with Charlotte. Humbert considers Jean "absolutely neurotic" and notes that she "apparently developed a strong liking for me." Jean dies of cancer two years later.

John Farlow

Farlow looks after Charlotte's estate after she dies.

Gaston Godin

Gaston, who teaches French at Beardsley College, finds Humbert and Lolita a house to rent. Humbert trusts him because he is "too self-centered and abstract to notice or suspect anything." While revealing a "colorless mind and dim memory nonetheless, everybody considered him to be supremely lovable." Humbert suggests a sinister motive behind Gaston's enjoyment of the company of the small boys of the neighborhood: "There he was devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language — there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young — oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody."

Charlotte Haze

Lolita's mother appears as both victimizer and victim. Humbert rents a room from her and eventually marries her so that he can be close to Lolita. Charlotte is a type of middle-aged woman "whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul; women who are completely devoid of humor utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished." She "combined a cool forwardness with a shyness and sadness that caused her detached way of selecting her words to seem as unnatural as the intonation of a professor of speech." Charlotte resents Lolita's affection for Humbert and so packs her off to camp. Humbert writes, "she was more afraid of Lolita's deriving some pleasure from me than of my enjoying Lolita." Yet she turns into a "touching, helpless creature" with Humbert, at least until she discovers his true feelings about her and Lolita. "McFate" conveniently removes her from Humbert's life when she is hit by a car.

Doloreshaze

See Lolita

Humbert Humbert

A name invented by the author/narrator of "Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male." Humbert is a witty, cultured European with a destructive obsession for young girls. For several years he lives with Lolita, his young stepdaughter, whom he coerces into granting him sexual favors. In his recreation of his life with Lolita, he calls himself "an artist and a madman." He tries to convince the "ladies and gentlemen of the jury," of the following partly true description:

the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill.

Yet at other points, Humbert admits that his "pathetic" obsession with Lolita "broke" her life. In the Foreword, the narrator suggests that Humbert writes of himself and Lolita with "a desperate honesty," and comments on "how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendress, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author." Humbert dies of heart disease in prison, while awaiting his trial for the murder of Lolita's lover, Clare Quilty.

Valeria Humbert

Valerie is Humbert's first wife. He marries her in an effort to control his desire for young girls. Humbert admits he fell for "the imitation she gave of a little girl," but soon discovers she is at least in her late twenties. Initially his naivete prevents him from seeing that he "had on his hands a large, puffy, short-legged, big-breasted and practically brainless baba. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in [their] small squalid flat." When she falls in love with another man, Humbert leaves for America. Later, he finds out that she died in childbirth.

Lolita

In the first lines of the novel, Humbert characterizes Lolita as "light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." Readers see her from Humbert's point of view, which presents an often idealized but sometimes realistic image of this young girl, with whom he had an incestuous relationship for several years. Initially he defines Lolita as a nymphet, a category of young girls between the age of nine and fourteen who exhibit "fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering insidious charm," and a certain "demonic" nature. He admits, "what drives me insane is the two fold nature of this nymphet — of every nymphet, perhaps; this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity, stemming from the snub-nosed cuteness of ads and magazine pictures, from the blurry pink-ness of adolescent maidservants in the Old Country ; and from very young harlots disguised as children in provincial brothels." Sometimes he sees her as

a combination of naivete and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue sulks and rosy mirth. When she chose, [she] could be a most exasperating brat [with her] fits of disorganized boredom, intense and vehement griping, her sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed style — a kind of diffused clowning which she thought was tough in a boyish hoodlum way. Mentally, I found her to be a disgustingly conventional little girl.

Most often, Humbert projects Lolita as a vision of innocent beauty, as when he watches her play tennis:

[E]verything was right: the white little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones, and the smooth, downward-tapering back.

Yet, almost against his will, Humbert recognizes that "Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac." After she leaves Humbert, Lolita lives for a time with Clare Quilty. He throws her out after she refuses to allow him to put her in a pornographic film. A few years later she dies during childbirth.

Miss Pratt

Miss Pratt is headmistress at Beardsley School for girls. She tells Humbert that Lolita's grades are slipping and that she appears "morbidly uninterested in sexual matters." In an effort to help Lolita, she convinces Humbert to let her be in the school play.

Clare Quilty

Lolita runs off with him during her second cross-country trip with Humbert, who drops clues throughout the text that Quilty is a projection of an extreme version of himself. Nevertheless, he constructs a history for him. Quilty had known Lolita's mother, since his brother had been her dentist. He was the mysterious man who sat in the shadows at the Enchanted Hunter and quizzed Humbert about Lolita. Intrigued by their relationship, he followed the pair to Beardsley, where he wrote and produced a play for Lolita, who considered him "a genius," a "great guy," and "full of fun." This "great guy," however, encourages Lolita to engage in group sex and to participate in pornographic films. When she does not agree, he kicks her out. Humbert finds him "gray-faced" and "baggy-eyed" before he shoots him.

Media Adaptations

• Lolita was twice adapted for the screen. The first version was directed in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick from Nabokov's screenplay and starred James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Sue Lyon as Lolita. This initial film was released by Warner and is available from Warner Home Video.
• The second film version, featuring a screenplay by Stephen Schiff, was directed by Adrian Lyne and stars Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, and Dominique Swain. The film was released in 1997 by Trimark and is available from Vidmark/Trimark Home Video.
• The novel was also recorded in an audio version read by Jeremy Irons and released by Random House Audio in 1997.