SOURCE: “Her Monster, His Nymphet: Nabokov and Mary Shelley,” in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, edited by Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 158-76.

Knowledge of Nabokov's privileged background has tended to confirm, for many readers over the past half-century, their wary impression of his fiction: that it is crafted by a “virtuoso stylist” coolly presiding over his universe and serenely, even cruelly indifferent to the plight of his characters.¹ To this familiar stereotype has been added, in recent years, the stigma of male chauvinism: Nabokov, we often hear it said, was a patriarch par excellence. The novelist's most widely read novel, Lolita, has only intensified the charges against him—inciting more than a few critics to label its author not just a sexist but a sexual pervert. The man who invented Humbert Humbert proved himself capable, after all, of fantasizing the most salacious, brutally oppressive conduct known to the male gender. For nearly three hundred pages the author lays out in rich, provocative detail the protracted sexual and social exploitation of a female—a helpless child, at that—by a pedophile who pretends to be her father. How far can the novelist's own perspective (and proclivities) lie, these critics ask, from his scurrilous narrator's?

Convinced that “most of the sympathies in the story” lie with Humbert Humbert, Naomi Wolf objects to the fact that in Lolita, “great art” makes the child's sexual exploitation seem, “if not good, then at least completely understandable.”² Most troubling of all, it appears, is the way that the novelist extends his guilt-by-association-with-Humbert to Lolita's readers. Invited to imagine (and thus to “understand”) the nature of Humbert's desire, we come dangerously close, Wolf implies, to approving his actions: to regarding them as “good.” The suspicion with which critics treat Nabokov's motives for writing Lolita may well raise questions about their own motivations as readers. Andrew Brink, for example, is wary of an author who could dream up “so perverse a theme” but does not, apparently, feel obliged to justify his detailed fascination with that theme. Finding fault with Nabokov—for granting Lolita's readers “permission to fantasize sexuality with very young girls”—Brink may be saying more about himself than he realizes.³

Recent commentary on Lolita has also made much of Nabokov's allegedly masculine “authorial narcissism.” Voicing her antipathy, “specifically as a woman reader,” to the novelist's penchant for narrative reflexivity, Virginia Blum detects in Nabokov's strategies a desire for “mastery” over his readers—the desire to “assimilate us in his solipsism” and “swallow us whole.”⁴ Several decades ago Alfred Appel, Jr., convincingly demonstrated, in his introduction to The Annotated Lolita, that by creating a sense of “the novel-as-game-board,” Nabokov distances Lolita's readers from Humbert's narcissistic vision and undermines his claims.⁵ More recently, Julia Kristeva has lauded Nabokov's reflexive strategies for exposing “the essential polymorphism of writing,” which she defines—with a phrase familiar to students of Nabokov's style—as a process of “ongoing metamorphosis.”⁶ In an essay comparing Kristeva's linguistic theories to Nabokov's artistic practices, Elizabeth Ermarth similarly argues that Nabokov's emphasis on “parody” and “reflexive play” constitutes “an act of restoration of full power to a language” that realist narrative had reduced to “static forms.”⁷ But many readers are not convinced. For all its “linguistic and literary sophistication,” Trevor McNeely contends, Lolita is a “world” in which “the concepts of purpose and value lose all meaning.” While few critics would go along with McNeely's startling conclusion—that both Nabokov and his admirers are “Hitlerian nihilists”—a substantial number assume that no serious or sympathetic rendering of the child's plight can result from Lolita's verbal highjinks.⁸ In “a text that parodies all literary conventions,” Blum maintains in Hide and Seek, the subject of child abuse becomes just another “literary convention” to be played with, another clever move or maneuver in “the author's delirious game” (214, 224).

Conflating Lolita's author with its narrator, Blum ignores the novelist's strategies for undermining his protagonist's statements.⁹ In a similar vein, Brink detects in Nabokov's “parody” a series of “clever disguises” by which he seeks to “camouflage” the essential identity of “Nabokov-Humbert” and the “hidden disreputable themes” at work in his “creative consciousness.”¹⁰ Others in the psychoanalytic camp likewise regard Lolita's parodic structure as a “protective shield” against a “psychological interpretation” of the novel and its author.¹¹ Pressing the argument to an extreme is Brandon Centerwall, whose conflation of author and narrator leads him to declare in no uncertain terms that Nabokov was “a closet pedophile.”¹²

Nearly fifty years ago, as though anticipating some of the cultural stereotypes he was to inherit, Nabokov made a candid confession in writing of his male bias. In a letter to Edmund Wilson (dated May 5, 1950) he stated, “I dislike Jane [Austen], and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.” Vexed by Nabokov's summary dismissal of Austen—whom he had identified in an earlier letter to Nabokov (dated April 7, 1950) as one of “the two incomparably greatest” English novelists—Wilson fired back on May 9, 1950: “You are mistaken about Jane Austen. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park. … She is, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest English writers” (NWL, 241, 238, 243).

This exchange between two famous men of letters does not in the least suggest that Wilson was the more “liberated” male. To the contrary, while Nabokov admits to having a “prejudice” against women writers, Wilson elevates his personal bias to the level of an objective standard. In that same letter of May 9, 1950, his defense of Austen turns on “the fact,” as he calls it, “that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man, that is, of an artist, and quite unlike that of the typical woman novelist, who exploits her feminine day-dreams. Jane Austen approaches her material in a very objective way. … She wants, not to express her longings, but to make something perfect that will stand” (NWL, 243).

More surprising than Wilson's rather typical pronouncements is the abrupt change of heart evinced by Nabokov only a week after Wilson advised him “to read Mansfield Park.” Having consulted the novel in question, he quickly—and most “uncharacteristically,” as John Updike observes—“capitulated” to Wilson's point of view.¹³ “I have obtained Mansfield Park,” Nabokov wrote to Wilson on May 15, 1950, “and I think I shall use it too in my course” (NWL, 246). That course, scholars know, was Literature 311–312, “Masters of European Fiction,” which Nabokov inaugurated at Cornell University in the autumn of 1950. Under its auspices, he continued to lecture on Austen's novel—alongside works by Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka—for nearly a decade, until Lolita's succès de scandale allowed him to retire from teaching.

Two salient facts of Nabokov's life and career at mid-century undermine any facile assumptions about his presumed chauvinism—even those for which he is directly responsible. First, as his correspondence with Wilson makes clear, Nabokov's own confessed prejudice against women writers was set aside with remarkable alacrity—a mere week—after he opened the cover of Austen's novel. The second, far more telling fact concerns the composition of Lolita, which Nabokov began in earnest during the same period, 1950-51, that he inaugurated his course on European Fiction.¹⁴ It is here, at the heart of Nabokov's most scandalous and suspect novel, that the stigma of sexism is definitively challenged.

Indelibly inscribed in Lolita's ludic structure, I shall demonstrate, is the tribute it pays to two important female figures: one, the fictional child depicted in its pages; the other, a woman writer who composed her own literary “classic” when scarcely more than a child herself.¹⁵ At the tender age of eighteen, Mary Shelley began work on her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.¹⁶ Since then, her tragic “monster,” like Nabokov's much younger “nymphet,” has become a cultural icon and popular, if frequently misconstrued, figure of speech. (Just as Victor Frankenstein's name is often mistakenly attributed to the monster he creates, so the American kid, Dolly Haze, is repeatedly confused with the mythic creature, or seductive “nymphet,” who takes life in Humbert's imagination.)

In recent decades, Shelley's novel has been regarded as a quintessentially “female” text, one that reflects at every level its author's painful experience of childbirth and child-loss. This characterization has held fast despite the fact that Frankenstein is even more exclusively focused on the male point of view than Lolita. (This exclusivity is yet another charge leveled in support of Nabokov's allegedly sexist preoccupations.) Just as Humbert's narrative is introduced by the Foreword ostensibly authored by John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., Dr. Frankenstein's narrative is framed by that of Captain Robert Walton, whose letters to his sister, Margaret Saville, precede his crew's rescue of Frankenstein from the Arctic's icy waters and prepare for Walton's ultimate task as a secondary narrator: to recount the story Victor Frankenstein tells him before he dies on board Walton's ship. Contained within this overarching frame is the creature's own narrated history: the account he gives Frankenstein, in volume 2 of the novel, of his solitary growth, development, and self-education.

Frankenstein, Ellen Moers points out in “Female Gothic,” is “without a heroine, without even an important female victim. Paradoxically, however, no other Gothic work by a woman writer, perhaps no literary work of any kind by a woman, better repays examination in the light of the sex of its author.”¹⁷ Writing two decades after Moers, critics like Elisabeth Bronfen analyze the various ways in which Shelley's “personal experiences of birth” are reflected throughout the novel. In Over Her Dead Body, Bronfen points out that “by the time [Mary Shelley] wrote Frankenstein,” her experiences of birth were “hideously and inextricably intermixed with death”; the text of Shelley's novel mirrors her “fear, guilt, depression and anxiety in relation to maternity.”¹⁸

As numerous commentators have remarked, Frankenstein's central theme reflects not only female but feminist concerns. The novel critiques male pride and ambition in its most lethal form: Dr. Frankenstein's overweening ambition to usurp the female's creative prerogative and engender, on his own, new life. In Anne Mellor's view, Frankenstein is “our culture's most penetrating literary analysis of the psychology of modern ‘scientific’ man … and of the exploitation of nature and of the female implicit in a technological society.” In Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, Mellor summarizes the feminist perspective that informs Frankenstein: “So long as human beings see nature as a loving mother, the source of life itself, they will … protect and nurture all the products of nature—the old, the sick, the handicapped, the freaks—with love and compassion.”¹⁹

If, in the letter he wrote Wilson on May 5, 1950, Nabokov appears to confirm his sexist label by voicing a “prejudice against all women writers,” Mary Shelley likewise appears to condemn herself in her own words, which invite comparison with Wilson's stereotype of the “typical woman novelist.” In her introduction to the revised (1831) edition of Frankenstein, Shelley openly identifies herself as a writer who, to recall Wilson's condescending phrase, “exploits her feminine day-dreams.” The composition of Frankenstein, Shelley points out, was inspired by a “waking dream,” whose “successive images” arose in her mind “with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.”²⁰ That Shelley's novel was born of reverie and inspired by “day-dreams” obviously constitutes grounds for Wilson to dismiss it; the same cannot be said of Nabokov. It was Wilson, not Nabokov, who defined the male writer's (superior) approach to his material as “objective.” The Russian-born novelist had little faith and less interest in putative objectivity, particularly where aesthetic and literary matters are concerned.

A more likely explanation for Nabokov's stated “prejudice” against women writers was his relative indifference to the social and domestic world of manners and mores—the matrix in which most women's lives have for centuries been embedded and about which they have tended to write. When, therefore, Nabokov sends Wilson, in a letter dated November 18, 1950, a “mid-term report” on his course—and on “the two books,” Bleak House and Mansfield Park, that Wilson had recommended to him—he categorically states: “In discussing Bleak House, I completely ignored all sociological and historical implications, and unravelled a number of fascinating thematic lines” (NWL, 253). (Here one wonders whether Nabokov may be playfully tweaking the nose of his American friend, whose weighty engagement with “sociological” issues was obvious to all who knew him and his work.)

The real proof, in any case, lies in the pudding—or, in the words of Nabokov himself, in the specific “fruit” of artistic inspiration, not the synthetic “jam” of general ideas (Strong Opinions [hereafter abbreviated as SO,] 7). It is to Lolita's [hereafter abbreviated as Lo] narrative and thematic structure, and the homage it pays to Frankenstein's, that we must turn. Let us note, to begin with, the striking resemblance between Shelley's famous protagonist and Nabokov's infamous one—a literary kinship that has thus far gone unnoticed. Perhaps the oversight is due to the obvious difference between the two characters. Victor Frankenstein, who endlessly delays marriage to the woman he says he loves, is almost comically indifferent to the force of sexual passion that consumes ardent Humbert. (From the vantage outlined by Brink in Obsession and Culture, however, Frankenstein's sexual indifference to Elizabeth would tend to suggest another basis for comparison with Humbert. In Brink's view, Humbert's nympholepsy betrays both “homoerotic” tendencies and a profound “ambivalence toward women.”²¹ Tellingly, Brink's conclusions correspond rather precisely to those of Humbert's own befuddled psychotherapists, who describe him, absurdly, as “potentially homosexual” and “totally impotent” (Lo, 34 [pt. 1, ch. 9]).

Once readers look beyond the disparity evinced by Humbert's sexual ardor and Frankenstein's sexual indifference, they will discover telling similarities between the two obsessed characters. The Promethean protagonist of Shelley's novel conceives in the bowels of his scientific laboratory the monster he comes to hate; Humbert conjures in the depths of his feverish imagination the nymphet he blames for bewitching him. Both of these solipsists engage in acts of creation that have disastrous consequences. The special poignancy of Lolita, like that of Frankenstein, derives from a vision of the child's sacred innocence, which both Shelley and Nabokov inherited from Rousseau and the Romantics.²² But each of their male protagonists proves radically estranged from this resonant vision. That the offspring featured in each novel either lacks or loses a mother highlights the absence of a nurturing presence in their lives. What U. C. Knoepflmacher observes of Frankenstein is also true of Lolita: each is a “novel of omnipresent fathers and absent mothers.”²³ In both novels, moreover, the protagonist is an accomplished liar, to himself as well as to others; he sustains his morally suspect project by means of elaborate and self-serving rationalizations.

Humbert's claim to have the “utmost respect” for “ordinary children” allows him to level ludicrous charges against the nymphet. To the “purity and vulnerability” of most little girls he contrasts her magical allure (Lo, 19 [pt. 1, ch. 5]). The nymphet, he argues, is not really a child at all: her true nature “is not human but nymphic (that is, demoniac).” Among the “innocent throng” of “wholesome children,” he explains, the eager nympholept spies the “deadly demon”—the cruel enchantress disguised as a mere little girl (Lo, 16–20). Mythologizing the child as a juvenile belle dame sans merci, the pedophile transports himself, on wings of imagination, to that “enchanted island” where the “laws of humanity” conveniently do not obtain (Lo, 306 [pt. 2, ch. 6]). Taking refuge in fancy's “mossy garden” or “pubescent park,” as he puts it, Humbert feels free to dally and disport at will (Lo, 16, 21 [pt. 1, ch. 5]).

The terms in which Humbert tries to justify his conduct expose the dark underside of his professed reverence for the child: “Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row” (Lo, 19-20 [pt. 1, ch. 5]). Here, unable to bear the weight of its own false logic, Humbert's argument instantaneously collapses. In one swift aside, the speaker bares his true motives, admitting that he would “interfere” with a child's “innocence”—that is to say (when the euphemism is decoded), he would tamper with her body—only if he could get away with it!

Giving him away at every turn, Humbert's rationalizations are as intriguing in their unwitting self-exposure as those of Victor Frankenstein. The linguistic parallels are also remarkable: the analogy, for example, between Humbert's self-styled “deadly demon,” the alluring nymphet, and the dreaded “daemon,” in Dr. Frankenstein's words, who haunts his creator (Lo, 17, 20 [pt. 1, ch. 5]); F, 39, 40, 56, 78, and passim). Monster and nymphet: each of these marvels of creation, the offspring of Promethean imagination, provokes torments in its creator. The true disaster, however, is one to which Frankenstein wholly, and Humbert partially, remains blind: the tragic betrayal of the child's original innocence. Just as Frankenstein's creature is trapped in the monstrous shape his maker conceives for him—a shape that alienates him from all humanity—so the child, Dolores Haze, is trapped in the nymphic guise conjured by Humbert's imagination.

“No creature,” Frankenstein avows at the outset, “could have more tender parents than mine. My improvement and health were their constant care” (F, 19). In stark contrast to his own parents, the scientist assumes that, in Patricia McKee's words, he “ow[es] nothing to his offspring.”²⁴ No sooner does Frankenstein bring his creature to life than he rejects him in horrified disgust. The misshapen monster is not the “beautiful” being his progenitor had dreamed of creating (F, 39). Frankenstein refuses to accept responsibility for the “filthy mass” of flesh-and-bone that he alone has brought into the world (F, 121). Blinded by disappointment as he formerly was by ambition, he does not recognize what his author, Mary Shelley, makes clear to her readers: ugly as the creature appears, he begins life as an innocent child in a benign state of nature. With a grotesque “grin” wrinkling his yellow cheeks, the trusting newborn instantly “stretches out” a “hand” to his parent—as Frankenstein, overcome by repulsion, rushes out of the room (F, 40).

As Shelley demonstrates later on in the novel, when the creature recounts his early history, Frankenstein's offspring began life as a “benevolent” being. As he tells the parent who abandoned him, “my soul glowed with love and humanity” (F, 78). Frankenstein's creature, Knoepflmacher observes, is a “genuine Wordsworthian child,” one who delights as much “as any Romantic child” in the wonders of “feminine Nature.” The creature's ugly, “contorted visage,” Knoepflmacher adds, is but a “monstrous mask,” beneath which “lurks a timorous yet determined female face.”²⁵ Gendering as female the metaphorical face concealed beneath the creature's “monstrous mask,” Knoepflmacher draws a parallel between the male monster and his female victims—particularly Frankenstein's innocent bride, Elizabeth Lavenza, whom the creature vengefully murders on her wedding-night. What Shelley invites us to see is that the murderer's original nature, his true “face,” is not monstrous but benign. His humanity and vitality spring from that same idealized life-source, “feminine Nature,” which animates Elizabeth's beautiful features. Ultimately, however, the monster grows ugly and twisted inside: psychologically speaking, he grows into the “monstrous mask” that once concealed an innocent nature. Yet as Shelley's readers well know, this internal distortion does not take place until the creature has suffered the most vicious blows from both strangers and the only parent he knows.

Like Frankenstein, who spurns the offspring he creates, Humbert betrays the covenant between parent and child while exploiting, at the same time, his role as her self-styled guardian. When, therefore, Humbert adopts an absurdly paternalistic note, lamenting the “definite drop” in young Dolly's “morals,” readers are invited to consider the monstrous irony of his pretense. The perverse logic of Humbert's moral stance as pater familias is worthy of his literary precursor. Giving voice to his own brand of solipsistic fervor, Victor Frankenstein conceives of himself as “creator” not only of a single offspring but of a noble “new species” to follow in the wake of his initial experiment. Casting himself in the role of divine patriarch, he gloats over the “gratitude” he anticipates receiving from this new race of mortals (F, 36). His sudden volte-face, once the supposed paragon of this brilliant “new species” actually comes into being, is brutally comic in its reversal.²⁶ Cursing the “demoniacal corpse” that he brought to life, Frankenstein condemns his unfortunate offspring to an existence of isolation, misery, and finally rage against humanity (F, 39). The process by which Frankenstein projects his own “daemonic” energies onto his creature exposes in a sharper light Humbert's hazy references to demonic enchantment. Take, for example, the scene in which Humbert, having consummated his desire for the nymphet, stands at the hotel desk waiting to check out with his “little mistress.” His “every nerve,” Humbert comments, is alive “with the feel of her body—the body,” he adds, “of some immortal daemon disguised as a female child” (Lo, 139 [pt. 1, ch. 32]). Here, as in Frankenstein's case, the narrator's rhetoric is more revealing than he knows. Humbert's evocation of the nymphet's mortal “disguise” draws attention to his own constant need to disguise his actions and bury his guilt.

Standing in the lobby of The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert strains to conceal what just took place in the hotel room upstairs, where he and the “female child” had “strenuous intercourse three times that very morning.” As if that weren’t enough, Humbert has other dreadful secrets to hide. Not until he has safely removed Lolita from the hotel and its onlookers will he dare to tell her the truth: that he has lied to the child about their destination as he has lied to her about her mother. The fact is, Charlotte Haze is not eagerly awaiting her daughter's arrival in some “hypothetical hospital” in a nearby town (Lo, 139-40 [pt. 1, ch. 32]). She is dead. Lolita is a hapless and helpless orphan.

As Humbert and the “lone child” drive away from the hotel, he is suddenly gripped by a feeling of “oppressive hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” Temporarily awaking to the fact that the little “waif” seated next to him is no “immortal daemon,” Humbert reluctantly voices his guilt. In contrast to Frankenstein, whose little brother, William, is eventually murdered by the creature, Humbert has no hideous monster to blame for the violence perpetrated against a helpless child. There is only the “heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult” seated next to her in the car (Lo, 140 [pt. 1, ch. 32]). No wonder Humbert feels haunted by a “small ghost”: only a shade, or shadow, remains of Dolly Haze's brief childhood. The true “daemon” is the “pentapod monster,” as Humbert later describes himself, who has defiled the offspring in his charge (Lo, 284 [pt. 2, ch. 32]).

The psychological process by which Humbert successfully blots out the image of the hapless child is identified, early on in the novel, as solipsistic. Recounting how he achieved, surreptitiously and onanistically, his first sexual ecstasy with the nymphet—as the child, munching an apple, lay sprawled on his lap—Humbert declares, “Lolita had been safely solipsized” (Lo, 58 [pt. 1, ch. 13]).²⁷ Humbert's vision of the “small ghost” takes on this added significance: to him, the child's reality is as fleeting and insubstantial as an apparition. Soon enough, the image of the nymphet reasserts its power over his imagination, blotting out the child's presence. To his dismay, says Humbert, he feels “the writhing of desire again, so monstrous was my appetite for that miserable nymphet” (Lo, 140 [pt. 1, ch. 32], italics added). Here the narrator's language offers a direct parody of Frankenstein's, as the scientist blames the “miserable monster” for what he himself has wrought (F, 39). In those moments, however, when Humbert's “monstrous” appetite temporarily abates, he again suffers “pangs of guilt.” In realizing his “lifelong dream” by having sexual intercourse with a child, he has, he admits, “plunged” them both “into nightmare” (Lo, 140 [pt. 1, ch. 32]).

A similar descent into nightmare is traced by Shelley's narrator. Like Humbert, Frankenstein pursues his lifelong dream with solipsistic fervor—having “desired it,” as he says, “with an ardour that far exceeded moderation.” He too observes “the beauty of the dream” plunge into nightmare: a living hell that “even Dante could not have conceived” (F, 39–40). (In a similar allusion to Dante's Inferno, Humbert describes the strange admixture of guilt and rapture, heaven and hell in nymphet-love as the “first circle of paradise” [Lo, 283 (pt. 2, ch. 32)].) Seized by the Promethean ambition to create life, Frankenstein did not pause to consider the disastrous consequences that might follow. Blindly he assumed that the gigantic creature he was patching together out of bits and pieces—the flesh and “bones” collected in “charnel houses”—would be “beautiful”! Only after he assembles the severed “limbs” and body parts, stitches them together and jolts them into life, can he perceive what a dreadful “thing” he has done (F, 36, 39–40). Even so, Frankenstein does not accept responsibility for the “nightmare” that follows. Only after his infant brother and old father, his best friend and his bride have all died, does he fathom the extent of the destruction he has wrought.

The parallels that emerge between Frankenstein's “miserable monster” and Humbert's “miserable nymphet” help to clarify, as we have seen, the relationship of each protagonist to the child he victimizes (F, 39; Lo, 140 [pt. 1, ch. 32]). In addition, both of the protagonists suffer tremendous feelings of guilt, which they project upon others. Frankenstein curses the creature for the murderous actions he has set in motion; Humbert, on the other hand, reserves his purest hatred for the “fiend” who steals Lolita from him (Lo, 252, 259 [pt. 2, ch. 23, 26]). At a deeper level, however, both characters recognize in their hated adversaries a mirror-image of themselves. Frankenstein's hideous monster mirrors, first as a physical shape and then in his vicious actions, the scientist's monstrous disregard for moral and natural law. By the same token, Quilty, the pervert and pedophile, serves as a nasty, even more brutish reflection of Humbert's “monstrous” lust (Lo, 140 [pt. 1, ch. 32]). The passion enflaming both protagonists—one to usurp Nature and create life, the other to usurp a child's life for his own pleasure—is “monstrous” in the most fundamental sense: a transgression, as Humbert ultimately admits, of “all laws of humanity” (Lo, 306 [pt. 2, ch. 36]).

Like Frankenstein, Humbert eventually comes face-to-face with his hated reflection, or alter ego. Quilty, in collusion with Lolita, sets out to follow Humbert and his ward across the United States—until Dolly finds the chance to give her former “guardian” the slip. Relishing the game he has set in motion, Quilty adopts a series of playful guises and disguises. His object is not to avoid but rather to attract Humbert's attention, to taunt and bedevil him. Gradually it dawns on Humbert that he is enmeshed in a “demoniacal game” with a diabolically clever opponent: a creature who appears to know a great deal about him (Lo, 249 [pt. 2, ch. 22]).

As the hide-and-seek game between Humbert and Quilty intensifies, so do the intertextual echoes. After Lolita manages to disappear with Quilty, Humbert attempts to uncover the identity of his rival. Doubling back on the thousand-mile course that he, Lolita, and their tenacious “shadow” have traced across America, Humbert finds to his dismay that his secret sharer has once again anticipated his moves. Perusing the registers of countless hotels and motels, Humbert discovers a series of inciting clues and punning signatures, all pointing to his pursuer's grinning presence. Terrified and enraged, Humbert begins to regard his shadow as a “fiend”—employing the very epithet that Frankenstein repeatedly uses for the monster. Within the space of six short pages, Humbert calls his rival a “fiend” seven times: the series begins with the “red fiend” signifying Quilty's red convertible and progresses to “fiend's spoor,” suggesting the trail left by an animal. It then proceeds to “shadow of the fiend,” “loitering fiend,” and “fiendish conundrum”—ending with two final references to “the fiend” (Lo, 247-52 [pt. 2, ch. 23]).

Caught up in a “cryptogrammic paper chase” with an adversary he loathes, Humbert has the uncanny sensation, nonetheless, of gazing into a mirror: his tormentor's “personality,” “his type of humor,” the very “tone of his brain,” Humbert confesses, “had affinities with my own” (Lo, 249-50 [pt. 2, ch. 23]). Like Frankenstein, Humbert cannot deny the profound ties that bind him to his monstrous double, the despised creature who is at the same time, in an allusion to Baudelaire, his “brother” (Lo, 247 [pt. 2, ch. 22]). It takes years for Humbert to solve the riddle of Quilty's identity; and when he does, he vows to have his revenge. With the same fury that impels Frankenstein to destroy his creature, Humbert sets out to murder Quilty. For both protagonists, vengeance becomes the driving force of existence, the only reason to live. Each devotes his remaining years to pursuing his former pursuer, the creature who has robbed him of all that he loves. Stripped of friends and family, Frankenstein is reduced to the same state of isolation, despair, and hatred that has long since turned his creature into a murderer. Like the monster he created, Frankenstein now declares that “revenge” alone will keep him “alive”: he will “pursue [the] daemon” until one of them “perish[es] in mortal conflict” (F, 171).

Spurred on by murderous rage, Frankenstein pursues the creature, as the creature has earlier trailed him, over the terrain of Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea, and through the “wilds of Tartary and Russia.” Aware that he is being followed and, like Quilty, enjoying the game, the creature leaves taunting signs and symbols of his grinning presence. Even when Frankenstein pauses to rest in the “stillness of night,” he is bedeviled by the sound of the creature's “loud and fiendish laugh … I felt,” he says, “as if all hell surrounded me with mockery and laughter” (F, 172). Taunting Frankenstein with the very epithets his creator has hurled at him, the monster now whispers “miserable wretch” in his maker's ear before vanishing into the shadowy night.

Staging an early version of the “cryptogrammic chase” that Quilty arranges for Humbert, Frankenstein's creature often leaves “a slight clue” or “some mark to guide” and goad his dazed pursuer. At one point in the game, as the two adversaries travel north into the snow, Frankenstein spies “the print of [the creature's] huge step on the white plain.” At another stage, the scientist finds “a repast” mysteriously “prepared for [him] in the desert” (F, 172-73). “Sometimes,” Frankenstein notes, the fiend “left marks in writing on the barks of the trees, or cut in stone.” One day he finds the following inscription: “Follow me. … You will find near this place, if you follow not too tardily, a dead hare; eat, and be refreshed. Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives” (F, 174).

As though taking their cue from Shelley's novel, Humbert and Quilty literally “wrestle for [their] lives” at the end of Lolita. After tracking Quilty down at long last, drunken Humbert proposes to kill his drug-dazed rival. A farcical chase-scene ends in a clumsy struggle for Humbert's “pistol,” sent “hurtling under a chest of drawers.” As the two men grapple for the gun, they literally “fall to wrestling,” rolling over each other “like two helpless children.” As their separate identities begin to merge in Humbert's gin-befuddled mind, their ludicrous tussle becomes a muddle of personal pronouns: “he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us” (Lo, 299 [pt. 2, ch. 35]). Here the narrator's language parodies the theme of merging identities revealed in Frankenstein's tortured bond with his creature.

So similar are the phrases in which Shelley's creature and his creator ultimately express their woe, that readers are sometimes hard-pressed to differentiate between the two speakers. At one point in the narrative, Frankenstein, having reluctantly agreed to fashion a female companion for the lonely monster, recoils from the “filthy process”—saying how “sickened” he is by “the work of [his] hands” (F, 137). At the end of the novel, his lament is echoed by the creature. Gazing “on [his] hands,” which have “murdered the lovely and the helpless,” Frankenstein's monster is filled with self-loathing: the “abhorrence” of others, he declares, “cannot equal that with which I regard myself” (F, 190). Echoing Shelley's language and theme, Nabokov has Humbert similarly confess near the end of Lolita, “I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands” (Lo, 274 [pt. 2, ch. 29]). When, at the close of Shelley's novel, the “miserable monster” describes himself as “polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse,” he might well be speaking for both Frankenstein and Humbert Humbert (F, 190).

No matter how sharply the “fangs of remorse” tear at each novel's protagonist, neither Humbert nor Frankenstein overcomes his obsessive desire. Awareness of guilt does not quell the Promethean longing for immortality (F, 64). Frankenstein's narration, like Humbert's, is riddled with oscillations in emotional tone and moral register that signal each character's ambivalence. Even on his deathbed, in the midst of warning his friend Walton against the temptations of ambition and the desire for glory, Frankenstein's penitence gives way to pride: “Seek happiness in tranquility,” he begins by telling Walton: “avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.” But then Frankenstein abruptly breaks this train of thought: “Yet why do I say this?” he asks. “I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (F, 186). Humbert's own oscillations in tone—his alternating expressions of pride and repentance, remorse and romantic fervor—shed an equally ambivalent light on his declarations of remorse. To the frustration of many readers, Humbert's statements, like Frankenstein's, are grounded in nothing more stable than the shifting sands of his own contradictory perceptions.

Referring, near the end of Shelley's novel, to the “hideous narration” he is about to complete, Frankenstein appears, at least temporarily, to take full measure of his guilt. Repeating one of the epithets he has used to deplore the creature, Frankenstein now claims this epithet—“hideous”—for the story he has set in motion (F, 42, 56, 166, and passim). With a similar sense of the hideousness he has wrought, Humbert draws his tale to a close in this way: “This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies” (Lo, 308 [pt. 2, ch. 36]). Humbert's narration, like Frankenstein's, issues from the ruins of death and decay; it resembles, metaphorically, the monster Frankenstein created—a kind of living corpse.

The “public birth of the text,” Bronfen observes of Lolita, “is grounded on the death of its author [that is, Humbert] and its privileged object of representation [Lolita].”²⁸ Unwilling to “parade living Lolita” in the pages of his memoir, Humbert vows to defer publication until they are both “no longer alive.” His understandable, though incorrect, assumption is that young Mrs. Richard Schiller will “survive [him] by many years.”²⁹ It is “in the minds of later generations,” therefore, that Humbert ultimately hopes to achieve immortality—by making Lolita “live” there forever (Lo, 309 [pt. 2, ch. 36]). At the novel's end, he acknowledges the “local,” or limited, nature of his creative efforts. No longer does he seek, like Frankenstein, to usurp Nature and transform human flesh and blood—the body of that “North American girl-child named Dolores Haze”—into his Promethean creation, the mythic nymphet (Lo, 283 [pt. 2, ch. 31]). Instead, he will rely on the only medium to which mortals can rightfully lay claim: the “durable pigments” of art. Chastened by knowledge of the misery he has wrought, Humbert as narrator attempts to realize a more qualified dream: to revive with the “local” magic of “articulate art” the nymphic image of a child whose “life,” as he says, he “broke” (Lo, 283 [pt. 2, ch. 3], 308-09, [ch. 36], 279 [ch. 29]).

Although Frankenstein does not achieve even the partial recognition evinced by Humbert, Shelley's “modern Prometheus” is also a creator in this qualified, or “local,” sense. Like Humbert, he wants his story to live on “in the minds of future generations.” To Robert Walton, captain of the crew that rescues Frankenstein from the Arctic Ocean, he expresses his dying wish: that the body of his “narration” be preserved. He adds, “I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity” (F, 179). On the brink of death, Frankenstein ironically evokes the image of that “mutilated” corpse he brought to life. This telling adjective alerts Shelley's readers to the truth Frankenstein would yet ignore. His misshapen creature was only the first of many bodies and lives to be mangled and “mutilated” by his unholy experiment.

In both Frankenstein and Lolita, the monstrous nature of the narrative testifies to the destructive as well as creative power of imagination and the terrible beauty it engenders. Each text invites its readers to enter into the “controlled play with the daemonic” that is one definition, says Peter Brooks, of a work of art.³⁰ In both novels we discover the profound extent to which imagination and will can wreak havoc with nature and human nature. Entering into a relationship with the daemonic that is wildly out of control, each narrator produces his “hideous” story: hideous not because his desires are grotesquely thwarted, but because human hope and innocence—embodied for both Nabokov and Shelley in the image of childhood—are monstrously abused.

Both novels suggest, moreover, that the text itself is an offspring—a body that each writer, like a modern-day Frankenstein, constructs and brings to life for the first time. Like the creature that Frankenstein “piece[s] together out of disparate parts,” Shelley's text, Nancy Fredricks observes, is similarly composed of “discontinuous” and “disjointed” elements—including “letters, first-person narratives, and frames within frames.”³¹ To an even greater extent, Lolita comprises a “patchwork of fragmentary” forms. As Linda Kauffman points out, not only letters but “poems, jingles, advertisements, plays and filmscripts, literary criticism, newspaper articles, psychiatric and legal reports are mixed with vestiges of the diary, confessional, journal, and memoir.”³²

Unlike their solipsistic narrators, both novelists are acutely aware of the profound responsibilities incurred by their acts of (literary) creation. “And now, once again,” Shelley says in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, “I bid my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper. I have affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days.”³³ Here Shelley embraces the relationship that her creature, Victor Frankenstein, spurns. She avows her parental “affection” for the “hideous” offspring she has delivered into the world. Like a maternal expression of unconditional love, Shelley's stated affection for her “hideous progeny” implicitly comments on her protagonist's outright rejection of his: Frankenstein's failure to recognize, in Brooks's phrase, “the destructive potential of the creative drive.”³⁴ Nabokov closely echoes Shelley's sentiments when he reflects, years after his novel's initial publication, on his own literary labors. Lolita, the author states, was “a painful birth, a difficult baby, but a kind daughter.”³⁵ Delivering his “difficult” offspring into the world proved, Nabokov suggests, an excruciating literary task; but for him as for Shelley, it was clearly a labor of love.

Separated from Mary Shelley by gender, 150 years of history and culture, and vast differences in personal experience and artistic accomplishment, Nabokov both parodies and pays tribute to his female precursor. The changes that Lolita rings on Shelley's novel do not undermine so much as underscore Frankenstein's celebrated themes. Today it has become a commonplace, in academic circles at least, to credit the collective forces of gender, race, class, and culture with near-absolute authority over individual thought and art. These are the ruling powers, we often hear it said, that dictate the nature of discourse and the shape of every text. Flying in the face of such deterministic assumptions, Lolita—Nabokov's “difficult baby”—honors Shelley's “hideous progeny” in profound and unexpected ways. For creating and then abandoning his offspring, Frankenstein stands eternally condemned; for having “broken” a child's life, Humbert suffers a similar sentence (Lo, 279 [pt. 2, ch. 29]). In each case, betrayal of the child's innocence signifies the greatest evil known to man or woman. For Nabokov as for Shelley, it constitutes nothing less than a crime against the cosmos.

Notes

1. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Art for Art's Sake and Literary Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 7; see also 194, 258-59. For a brief overview of a half-century's critical commentary, see Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 11-13 and attending notes.

2. Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New York: Random House, 1997), 193.

3. Andrew Brink, Obsession and Culture: A Study of Sexual Obsession in Modern Fiction (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 98.

4. Virginia L. Blum, Hide and Seek: The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 205, 230, 232.

5. Alfred Appel, Jr., “Introduction,” The Annotated Lolita (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), lxix and passim.

6. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudriez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 33, 37. In her later work, Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 220–21, Kristeva critiques the notion of a “female language” distinct from its allegedly “male chauvinist” counterpart.

7. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, “Conspicuous Construction; or, Kristeva, Nabokov, and The Anti-Realist Critique,” Novel 21 (1988), 335, 331.

8. Trevor McNeely, “‘Lo’ and Behold: Solving the Lolita Riddle,” Studies in the Novel 21 (1989), 182-99; rpt. Harold Bloom (ed.), Lolita (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 184, 187, 193.

9. Blum, Hide and Seek, 176.

10. Brink, Obsession and Culture, 137, 103, 124, 115.

11. Jeffrey Berman, “Nabokov and the Viennese Witch Doctor,” The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis (New York University Press, 1985); rpt. Bloom (ed.), Lolita, 110.

12. Brandon S. Centerwall, “Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32 (1990): 468 and passim.

13. John Updike, “Introduction,” LL, xxi.

14. See ch. 9 of Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton University Press, 1991), 166–98.

15. In volume 2 of the two-volume revised edition of his translation-with-commentary of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (Princeton University Press, 1981), Nabokov makes explicit reference to the writings of Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley's “widow,” when glossing a line (ch. 3, st. 9, l. 8) of Pushkin's poem: “according to his widow,” Nabokov comments, “Shelley one summer evening heard the skylark and saw the ‘glow-worm golden in a dell of dew’ mentioned in his famous ode” (“Commentary to Eugene Onegin,” vol. II, pt. 1, 344).

16. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. Marilyn Butler (1818; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). (Hereafter F.)

17. Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” Literary Women (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976); rpt. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 79.

18. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992), 130-31.

19. Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1988), 38, 137.

20. Mary Shelley, “Introduction,” Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, rev. edn. (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831); rpt. Butler (ed.), Frankenstein, app. A, 197.

21. Brink, Obsession and Culture, 123, 114.

22. See Ellen Pifer, “Innocence and Experience Replayed: From Speak, Memory to Ada,” Cycnos 10.1 (1993): 19-25; and Pifer, “Lolita” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), 312-13, 316-18.

23. U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters” in Levine and Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein, 90.

24. Patricia McKee, Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764-1878) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68.

25. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” 100-01, 112.

26. On the novel's “problematic comedy,” see Philip Stevick, “Frankenstein and Comedy” in Levine and Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein, 222.

27. As Vladimir E. Alexandrov points out in Nabokov's Otherworld (Princeton University Press, 1991), Nabokov's Russian translation of Lolita (New York: Phaedra, 1967) “makes the point even more bluntly”: the Russian version of the cited sentence reads, “Lolita's reality was successfully canceled [‘otmenena’]” (Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld, 170-71; LoR, 49).

28. Bronfen, Over her Dead Body, 371.

29. In the Foreword to Lolita, ostensibly authored by John Ray, Jr., readers learn that both Humbert and Lolita die shortly after Humbert's “memoir” has been completed. On November 16, 1952, Humbert suffers a “coronary thrombosis” while awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty; only weeks later, “on Christmas Day 1952,” Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (Lolita's married name) dies in childbirth (5-6 [“Foreword”]).

30. Peter Brooks, “‘Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts’: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity,” in Levine and Knoepflmacher (eds.), The Endurance of Frankenstein, 220.

31. Nancy Fredricks, “On the Sublime and the Beautiful in Shelley's Frankenstein” (unpublished paper, 21 pp.), 19.

32. Linda Kauffman, “Framing Lolita: Is There a Woman in the Text?”, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1992); rpt. Bloom (ed.), Lolita 149.

33. Frankenstein, ed. Butler, app. A, 197; see also 192.

34. Brooks, “Godlike Science,” 217.

35. Alfred Appel, Jr., “Nabokov: A Portrait,” Atlantic Monthly 228 (September 1971): 88. See also SM, 65; and SO, 15, 94.