100%. All I can think is that it's because she's not a "perfect victim" in that she has a childhood crush on HH at the start and makes some risque jokes that are a clear case of a child testing boundaries. Lo behaves like a real twelve year old, who acts out and gets inappropriate crushes and wants to appear more worldly than she is, and not an idealised image of childhood innocence. She might be one of the most psychologically real portraits of a child/tween I've ever read.
And that makes the book's message more important. A lot of tweens do have crushes on teachers or other adults in their lives and it's a normal part of their development. Humbert's interest in her is perverse regardless of her behaviour because it's the adult's responsibility to keep things appropriate, not the child's. There is nothing at all that Lo could have done that would justify HH grooming and molesting her.
(I'm honestly having to take breaks and read through my fingers because it's just so deeply, deeply sad. Beautifully written and characterised but hard going.)
Its also implied later in the book that Dolores never really had any kind of crush on Humbert at all but was cloyingly affectionate towards him solely as a means to get under her mother's skin.
I think the relationship between Dolores and Charlotte is something a lot of people overlook in analyzing the book, since Charlotte is a secondary character, and unlike Dolores - the child who's burgeoning sense of self is violently and systematically destroyed by Humbert the depraved pedo - Charlotte is an adult woman with full agency, someone who has more than likely accumulated a few genuine mistakes and regrets she is largely responsible for, and therefore doesn't elicit the same protective instinct in the reader as Dolores.
But that relationship is also key to understanding just how full of shit and monstrous Humbert is underneath all his direct appeals to the reader. One of the things that makes the novel psychologically complex and not just a cautionary tale or an unpleasant read about a child molester is that Nabokov employs an imperfect mother as a key foil to his monstrous pedophile. Its important that Charlotte is flawed.
For example: One of the reasons Charlotte and Dolores do not get along is because Charlotte has lost a young son before the events of the book. Its also revealed that Dolores was an unplanned pregnancy with her now-deceased husband and that she maybe felt coerced into marriage as a young woman. Charlotte is clearly idealizing her dead son - a precious toddler who never grew up to sass his mother or assert his independence in hurtful ways or make her deal with the complexities of an emerging young adult - over the stark reality of her living child, whose demands and caprices are all too real as a kind of bratty kid. And also one the Charlotte might feel not just a little bit of misplaced resentment for but perhaps a sort of emerging Freudian jealousy of as well? (Dolores has her whole future in front of her, after all - Charlotte? No. She's a middle aged widow with one dead child in her past. And daughters don't always dote on their mothers the same way sons do, or vice versa.)
The Hazes are also strapped for money! They have to rent out a spare room to Humbert for necessary income, and being a single mother is never an easy task - and definitely wasn't an easy task as a widow in the 1940's and 50's when employment for women was even more limited and underpaying than it is now. Dolores has also lost her beloved father and any father figure she had 2 years before the book takes place, and Charlotte has lost her husband, who likely provided for the family and can't anymore. This is a family unit under a profound amount of grief, stress, loneliness and alienation between the two women who comprise it. And this therefore makes it easier for Humbert to exploit.
I am seeing lots of comments to the effect of "Charlotte is a horrible mother" and the fact is I don't think of Charlotte as Divine in Female Trouble or Tonya Harding's mom in I, Tonya or Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest - I don't see Charlotte as abusive. I see her as a lonely and emotionally frail middle aged woman who is struggling with motherhood, which is to say - I see her as profoundly flawed and human and in a not-uncommon way.
Humbert insists in the book that Dolores was harboring a crush on him? Not impossible, but in my opinion, improbable, and Dolores all but admits this a few times. She is grieving a father, and may or may not see Humbert as a possible candidate to fill that role in the beginning (although she also might not - lots of children absolutely resent the spouses their mothers pick after a divorce or a parental death at least in the beginning, even if they come around later on). But she most definitely identifies from the beginning that he is an easy source of affection missing in her life, and that this affection has the added bonus of driving her resentful mother insane, and she is keen on doing that because she knows her mother resents her for things she can't really help and had nothing to do with, like the dead younger brother and the dead father.
I also think its evident that while the two women don't get along, they do in fact love each other and have normal familial bonds and interdependencies. Dolores grieves her mother's death really hard, especially as an orphan. Charlotte is shocked and disgusted to find out Humbert lusts after her daughter, and like I said, she's not abusive or neglectful - just kind of resentful of her and mad at the world in general.
7
u/HeroIsAGirlsName 13d ago
100%. All I can think is that it's because she's not a "perfect victim" in that she has a childhood crush on HH at the start and makes some risque jokes that are a clear case of a child testing boundaries. Lo behaves like a real twelve year old, who acts out and gets inappropriate crushes and wants to appear more worldly than she is, and not an idealised image of childhood innocence. She might be one of the most psychologically real portraits of a child/tween I've ever read.
And that makes the book's message more important. A lot of tweens do have crushes on teachers or other adults in their lives and it's a normal part of their development. Humbert's interest in her is perverse regardless of her behaviour because it's the adult's responsibility to keep things appropriate, not the child's. There is nothing at all that Lo could have done that would justify HH grooming and molesting her.
(I'm honestly having to take breaks and read through my fingers because it's just so deeply, deeply sad. Beautifully written and characterised but hard going.)