Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader

This essay reads Lolita within the broader context of midcentury advice literature intended to manage marriage, parenting, and sexuality. Moving away from critiques that read the novel as a parody of the prescriptive genre, Wilhite argues that Humbert’s narrative and what Nabokov calls the “aesthetic bliss” of his novel are consistent with a cultural incitement to classify sexual practices and identities for an uneasy readership. Devotees of parenting guides and marriage manuals turn to such works in search of answers, and Humbert knows that readers of his confessional narrative are also on a quest for information—to learn the salacious details of his affair with Lolita. In similar ways, Lolita and prescriptive literature depend on the presence of a curious and conscripted reader, and from John Ray Jr.’s Foreword to Nabokov’s “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” the novel sustains a hyper-vigilant awareness of, and apprehension about, its audience. This balancing act between curiosity and control suggests a new framework for understanding how Lolita exercises power over, and exhibits aggressive tendencies toward, its sexually inquisitive and anxious readers.