“My Poor Little Girl”: Lolita and Nabokov’s Faulkner

“Down with Faulkner”? Nabokov’s Postmodern Response to Faulkner

Vladimir Nabokov had exacting literary tastes. He considered the “masterpieces of twentieth century prose” to be “Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time” (1973, 57). Two of the few modern American writers he admired were J. D. Salinger and John Updike – he was more amenable to nineteenth-century U. S. authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe (1973, 57; 64). Nabokov’s disdain for William Faulkner, however, was notorious. Nabokov admitted he was “amused by fabricated notions about so-called ‘great books,’” specifically that “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered ‘masterpieces’” (1973, 57). He made clear, in fact, that Faulkner’s work “mean[t] absolutely nothing to” him (1973, 102). Literary critic Edmund Wilson was surprised by Nabokov’s stringent dislike of Faulkner, opining that “Your failure to see his genius is a mystery to me” and that “I think you would be rather congenial to him.” Unlike Nabokov, Wilson considered Faulkner “the most remarkable contemporary American novelist.” Nabokov bluntly rejected Wilson’s pleas, however, quipping “Down with Faulkner!” (Karlinsky, 211; 230–31).

Given Nabokov’s severe dismissal of Faulkner, scholarly comparisons between their work are virtually non-existent. Edward A. Malone explains that this paucity in comparative studies on Faulkner and Nabokov is compounded because “It is difficult to determine precisely how many books by Faulkner Nabokov had read”:

He was definitely familiar with Light in August. He may have known Sanctuary. His quip about Faulkner’s ‘corncobby chronicles’ suggests the scene in which Popeye rapes Temple Drake with a corncob. [ . . . ] There is no indication, however, that Nabokov was familiar with any other novel or short story by Faulkner.²

(65)

This essay builds upon Wilson’s contention that Nabokov should have been “congenial” to Faulkner by proposing that Lolita, one of the central works of transgressive postmodernist literature, was written in response to three of Faulkner’s own modernist “corncobby chronicles”: The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and Absalom, Absalom!³ I argue that key aspects of Humbert Humbert’s character, personality, and actions are comparable to, and indeed a distillation of, Quentin Compson, Popeye Vitelli, and Wash Jones. Dolores “Lolita” Haze, meanwhile, is an amalgamation of Caddy Compson, Temple Drake, and Milly Jones. In his pursuit and sexual victimization of Dolores during their two-year journey across the United States, Humbert is driven by base, socially transgressive instincts which mirror Quentin’s sexually perverse desire for his sister Caddy; the routinized violence and abuse which Popeye subjects Temple to while she is held captive at the Old Frenchman place; and Wash’s exploitation and murderous rage towards Milly. Despite Nabokov’s overt aesthetic disdain for Faulkner, I urge a reevaluation of his position on Faulkner’s modernism through Lolita’s explicitly postmodern lens, especially because Nabokov’s concerns with the abuse, silencing, and subjugation of women often parallels and intersect with Faulkner’s.⁴

By positioning Nabokov as a distinctly postmodern author responding to the quintessentially modernist Faulkner, I echo Brian McHale’s formulation of postmodern aesthetics, which “produces new insights, new or richer connections” to modernism (4):

Postmodernism is not post modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement. Thus the term “postmodernism,” if we take it literally enough, à la lettre, signifies a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth-century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future.

(5, italics McHale’s)

Following McHale’s lead, I argue that, within Lolita, Nabokov interrogates and critiques traditional, heteronormative notions of sexuality and desire through his depiction of Humbert’s perverse relations with Dolores. In doing so, he follows on from precisely the kinds of questions and concerns which Faulkner raises about male desire and female subjugation through Quentin’s destructive penchant for incest, Popeye’s relentless victimization of Temple, and Wash’s objectification of Milly. Nabokov follows Faulkner’s cue by illustrating, in Minrose C. Gwin’s terms, “the process of women’s silencing, the appropriative gesture of white male dominance— the naturalization of systems of oppression” (1989, 61, italics Gwin’s). Lolita depicts “the destruction of the female mind and body, the acting out of anger against the feminine” which Diane Roberts argues is prevalent across Faulkner’s oeuvre, and especially within Sanctuary (129). This essay works against the narrative contexts and techniques within these novels which decentralize these young women from their own stories and minimizes the extent of their pain and suffering.⁵ My work here amplifies the voices of Dolores, Caddy, Temple, and Milly, rather than keeping them in the margins.

Nabokov’s direct, overtly postmodern response to Faulkner’s modernism matches Ihab Hassan’s contention that “postmodernism, and modernism even more, are beginning to slip and slide in time.” This slippage eventually produces an “interdetermanence” between modernism and postmodernism, wherein “Each contains its own contradictions, and alludes to elements of the other” (263–69). Hassan’s statement helps illustrate that Nabokov’s insistence upon rejecting Faulkner does not necessarily mean that he was not influenced by or responding to Faulkner. Instead, given the parallels between their works which this essay will outline, Nabokov’s disavowal of Faulkner can be read as a displaced expression of precisely the ways in which Faulkner’s fiction may have informed his own, an influence that he denied until his death but which resonates clearly within Lolita. Lolita’s relation to Faulkner epitomizes Steven Connor’s view that postmodernism “is an intensification of ” modernism, “rather than a clean break with it” (66). Ultimately, this essay argues that Nabokov was provoked by and responding to Faulkner’s “corncobby chronicles” in Lolita, and finally acknowledges the undeniable similarities between these two American masters. While the explicitly patriarchal lens through which Faulkner’s novels are presented often deliberately overlooks the victimization of Caddy, Temple, and Milly, Nabokov’s postmodern narrative technique works to reveal the devastation that Humbert’s aesthetic obsession with “Lolita” causes within the tragically short life of Dolores Haze.

Sex, Subjectivity, and the Patriarchal Gaze in Lolita and The Sound and the Fury

To Faulkner, Candace Compson in The Sound and the Fury was “the beautiful one, she was my heart’s darling.” He considered her three brothers to be “the proper tools” necessary “to try and tell her story,” because he felt that Caddy was “too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to what was going on,” and “that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes” (Gwynn and Blotner, 1; 6). Meanwhile, Nabokov described Dolores Haze as “my poor little girl” and the victim of Humbert, a “vain cruel wretch” (1973, 94). He considered Dolores to be “like the composition of a beautiful puzzle[.] [ . . . ] There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet” (1973, 20–21). He claimed to have written Lolita because Dolores’s story afforded him “aesthetic bliss,” but insisted that the novel “has no moral in tow” (‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’, 314).⁶ These statements make clear that the lived experiences of Caddy and Dolores are eclipsed by the images which the Compson brothers and Humbert create around them. Caddy’s representation depends upon her brothers’ varying needs. To Benjy, she is the idealized surrogate mother who “smelled like trees” (5). To Jason, she is the “bitch” who deprived him of his coveted position at Jefferson’s bank (119). To Quentin, the Compson brother who most clearly matches Humbert’s fixation upon Dolores, Caddy is central to his insecurities regarding his sexual inexperience and the root of his overwhelming question, “Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin[?]” (52). In turn, Caddy is the ironic, futile means through which Quentin aims to resolve this libidinal dilemma: “If we could have just done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames” (53). For Hum-bert, Dolores is the “light of my life, fire of my loins” and, like Caddy, her identity is malleable and subject to his desires: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four foot ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita” (9). Caddy and Dolores are purposefully silenced by these narrators from the outset, and their subjugation is at the heart of these narratives, informing Faulkner and Nabokov’s authorial intentions. The conception that one has of these young women is warped by the rigidifying desires of Quentin and Humbert, whose domineering, patriarchal gaze erases their female agency.⁷ Caroline Garnier argues that, in Sanctuary, Faulkner “establishes sex as a matter of power rather than pleasure”: “sex is a powerful tool” which enables female “objectification, control, and silencing” (164–65). Garnier’s statements match Faulkner’s representation of Caddy and Nabokov’s aesthetic revision of Caddy through Dolores – in both The Sound and the Fury and Lolita, male sexuality is figured as a destructive yet powerful means to ensure female subjugation.⁸

Quentin and Humbert both believe they embody traditional notions of masculinity. Quentin portrays himself as a quintessentially Southern gentleman upholding the verities of white womanhood, “the sacred thing in human life” (Sanctuary, 199). Likewise, Humbert presents himself to the “ladies and gentlemen of the jury” (9) as “an exceptionally handsome” literary scholar of European heritage (25) who, after marrying Dolores’s mother, Charlotte, becomes a suburbanite American (79). Both men exploit the central positions they occupy within the lives of Caddy and Dolores to satisfy the lusts they have for them. Quentin, as the eldest son, is “expected to become the head of the family” and “continue the Compson line” (Brown, 544). As such, his centrality within the family fuels his wish to coerce Caddy into committing incest. Similarly, while critics have debated whether Humbert is guilty of incest given that he is not Dolores’s biological father, he admits to using the patriarchal authority which becoming her stepfather allows him in order to “play” with and sexually coerce her (71), a tactic mirroring Quentin’s manipulative behavior with Caddy.⁹ On the one hand, Quentin and Humbert are both obsessed with the sexual licentiousness and perversity which Caddy and Dolores apparently embody. On the other hand, they are each fixated upon upholding traditional notions of female purity, virtue, and sexual morality. This contradiction points towards what Kristin Fujie considers “One of the key features of Faulkner’s modern woman” (and, given this essay’s focus, Nabokov’s by extension): “her sexual energy stirs up the men around her, who then seek to contain it by physical, sometimes violent, means” (114). Quentin repeatedly castigates Caddy for her relationship with Dalton Ames, calling her a “whore” and tauntingly asking “Why wont you bring him to the house, Caddy? Why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods hot hidden furious[?]” (61). Quentin repeatedly attempts to humiliate and dehumanize Caddy, shaming her into believing that her sexual attraction to Dalton is antithetical to her status as a young, Southern woman. Indeed, Quentin makes clear that Caddy’s sexuality degrades her, placing her in precisely the same subordinated position as the African American women he crudely compares her to.

Humbert, meanwhile, envisages Dolores as the “absolute optical replica” of his deceased childhood love, Annabel Lee (11): “from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses. [ . . . ] A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day” (39). These frameworks of sexual desire and impropriety imposed upon Caddy and Dolores compound their objectification. Caddy is significant to Quentin only because she allows him to uphold his rigid, socially constructed valuations regarding female sexuality and identity, familial honor, and the South’s legacies and traditions. Dolores’s existence, meanwhile, initially matters to Humbert simply because she allows him to finally satisfy his stifled carnal appetite for the dead Annabel.¹⁰ At the Compson estate and within the Haze residence, Caddy and Dolores are constantly monitored by Quentin and Humbert. They are caught in the crosshairs as these men occupy “a vantage point” where they closely observe their “every movement” that, Humbert says, “plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body” (41). This intersection between constant surveil-lance and unrelenting sexual objectification allows Quentin and Humbert to become immovable fixtures in Caddy and Dolores’s lives. Their goal, to a large extent, is to “suck in every detail of (the) bright beauty” of these young women, consuming them entirely and leaving “no will, no conscience—indeed, no life of (their) own” (Nabokov, 62).

Quentin and Humbert also frame their respective incestuous and pedophilic desires as devastating afflictions which condemn them to metaphorical hell-scapes. By committing suicide, Quentin seeks to reach a realm “beyond the clean flame” where he can rest with Caddy, “the two of us more than dead. Then you will have me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror” (77). Similarly, Humbert claims to feel “consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet” he encounters before meeting Dolores (18). Outwardly, Quentin and Humbert are aware that wider society will regard their “love” for these young women with “horror,” and they make no attempt to conveniently justify these transgressive lusts. At the same time, however, Faulkner and Nabokov purposefully reveal aspects of Quentin and Humbert’s life which calls the veracity of these admissions, and the sincerity of their repentance for abusing Caddy and Dolores, into question. Upon arriving in the United States, Humbert suffered a “dreadful breakdown” and was committed “to a sanatorium for more than a year”; during his confinement, he developed “a robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style [ . . . ]; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament” (32–34). Seen in the context of these admissions, Nabokov implies that, when Humbert calls upon his readers to accept his story and pity him (9), he is in fact framing his discourse in precisely the same manner as he manipulated his psychiatrists by positioning his behavior in a socially and morally justifiable manner. Humbert purposefully decries the “hideous” nature of his “fatal lust” (48) to appeal to the sensibilities of mainstream society and manipulate the reader’s empathy and understanding. Faulkner also complicates whether, considering his suicidal mind-set, Quentin would recognize his culpability for Caddy’s subjugation and the perversity of his own desires in a context divorced from his impending death. Margaret D. Bauer argues that Quentin’s drive towards suicide results from his “guilt” after recognizing his abuse of Caddy (70). However, given the fact that Quentin’s apparent acknowledgment of this guilt occurs on the day of his death, Bauer’s argument is rendered dubious. Instead, the case can be made that Quentin’s desire for Caddy is only one of several possible reasons for his death, including mental illness and the devastating pressures of traditional Southern masculinity. Quentin is also in no way as conscious of his reader or concerned with atoning for his incestuous desires for Caddy in the manner that Humbert so clearly and self-reflexively attempts to garner sympathy from his readers.

These details illustrate why Quentin and Humbert frame their fate as predicated, at least in part, upon Caddy and Dolores’s refusal to acquiesce to or reciprocate their desires. Quentin, attempting to explain his incestuous proclivities to his father, says that “it was to isolate [Caddy] out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity [ . . . ] but if I could tell you we did it it would have been so” (117). Humbert, meanwhile, repeatedly juxtaposes Dolores’s inevitable, emphatic rejection of his “love” to Annabel’s enduring faithfulness. Whereas Annabel allowed Humbert to “feed on her open mouth” and held “in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion” during a youthful tryst, Dolores never shares Annabel’s desires for him, which causes Humbert to lament “Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!” (14–15, italics Nabokov’s). Quentin and Humbert suggest, then, that their lives are at the mercy of Caddy and Dolores, much like the reader’s conception of these young women depends upon the whims and aesthetic felicities of these controlling, manipulative male narrators. Quentin’s life, as previously acknowledged, ends in suicide. Humbert, meanwhile, dies awaiting trial for the murder of Clare Quilty, an act of “love” which was committed, in part, to revenge Dolores’s rejection and escape from him (3). Caddy and Dolores’s ardent refusal to reciprocate the “love” which Quentin and Humbert offer them is implicitly connected with these mens’ ill-fated ends. As Qui-Phiet Tran argues, “Death for [Quentin] is a way of taking revenge, of telling Caddy he cannot be readily forgotten and that she will be sorry for having neglected him” (56).¹¹ Similarly, Elizabeth Bronfen writes that Humbert “purposefully casts himself in the role of the victim of feminine daemonic lust, the jealous lover of a deceitful and duplicitous girl and her monstrous ravisher” (377). Caddy and Dolores are, therefore, considered worthy of contempt and scorn through the patriarchal lens they are framed within. Susanna Hempstead states “The transgressive woman,” as embodied by Caddy and, for the purposes of my comparison, Dolores, is figured within patriarchal society as “the vehicle that carries a man, in this instance, Quentin” (and, by extension, Humbert) “to destruction” (31). These men falsely characterize themselves as the victims of Caddy and Dolores – rather than, more accurately, their abusive tormentors. Faulkner and Nabokov make clear, then, that this mischaracterization compounds the subjugation and oppression these young women suffer.

Ultimately, given their uncontrollable, devastating lusts, Quentin and Humbert each transgress the traditional values of the societies they are part of and that they, hypocritically and ironically, pretend to uphold. By virtue of their perverse appetites, Quentin and Humbert embody transgressive behaviors, because their proclivities are grossly incompatible with normative sexual standards within the United States. Their desires for Caddy and Dolores transgress, in Michel Foucault’s terms, “that narrow zone” of socially acceptable, normative sexuality. According to Foucault, transgressive sex – in this case incest and pedophilia – “has its entire space in the line it crosses” (33–34). These transgressions, however, do not remain concealed from the eyes of society. Instead, Quentin and Humbert’s obsessions with Caddy and Dolores are revealed in the most scandalous and destructive ways imaginable. While Quentin repeatedly attempts to claim Caddy as his own, not only are his efforts fruitless, they also exacerbate Caddy’s own various misfortunes, including her illegitimate pregnancy, her estrangement from the Compsons, and her long frustrated efforts at motherhood. Likewise, although Humbert attempts to conceal his pursuit of Dolores that he records within his diary (48), Charlotte inevitably discovers the “‘detestable, abominable, criminal’” truth (96). However, Charlotte’s sudden death after being “knocked down and dragged several feet” by a neighbor’s car (98) ironically affords Humbert an invaluable opportunity to satiate his desires for Dolores. In doing so, he inflicts unrepentant sexual violence and abuse upon her. While Quentin is one of several “misfortunes” Caddy encounters during her life (69), Humbert epitomizes the “‘monster’” Charlotte described him as being before her death (96), embodying all of Dolores’s misfortunes.

A key question that any reader of The Sound and the Fury and Lolita must confront is whether Caddy and Dolores are ever “safely solipsized” into Quentin and Humbert’s fantasies (Nabokov, 60), or whether they are aware, from the outset, of the impact that their existence has upon these men. For Caddy to be “solipsized” by Quentin would entail her willing acquiescence to his sexual demands – she would die for him and await him in the realm beyond the clean flame. For Dolores to be “solipsized” by Humbert would mean that she would not recognize or even be aware of the abuse she is subjected to. Instead, she would fully embrace and perform the role of “Lolita” that, for Humbert, is “more real” than Dolores herself (62). Yet, as Gwin persuasively argues, Caddy actively “seeks a way out of male discourse”: “Resonating from within the dark folds of Quentin’s despair, her voice and presence speak the feminine desire that inscribes her woman’s body across his male text” (1990, 47).¹² Likewise, Tony Moore makes clear that, although Humbert utilizes “perverted narration to realize his perverted world[,] Dolores cannot be ‘solipsized.’ No language he can devise is fixed enough to subordinate her entirely” (97). Caddy becomes unapologetically defiant in her attraction to Dalton, answering Quentin’s demanding, interrogative question “What did you let him for kiss kiss” thus: “I didn’t let him I made him watching me get mad What do you think of that?” (88). As her words make clear, Caddy genuinely desires and loves Dalton, becoming pregnant with his child and desperately attempting to be with him despite Quentin’s intrusive efforts. Caddy firmly resists Quentin’s overtures, making clear that she will not affirm his longings by repeatedly rejecting and refusing to be “solipsized” by him.¹³ As Dawn Trouard observes, “Caddy may be stuck, tearful, trapped, and desperate, but she does not appear to feel doomed. As a young woman, she has repeatedly violated the taboos of the patriarchy” (42–43). Likewise, Humbert insists that Dolores does not comprehend his perverse fixation upon her, and he asserts that she is oblivious to the masturbatory “euphoria of release” he achieves as she sits next to him on the davenport one afternoon (61). However, Dolores’s affective responses to this moment, her “cheeks aflame” and “hair awry,” radically undercut Humbert’s claims that “she had noticed nothing!” (61). Implicitly, even before they venture across the United States, Dolores develops a consciousness of Humbert’s position as her abuser. Thus, she will never be “solipsized” by his discourse. Instead, she becomes increasingly aware of the illicit, violating nature of his actions.

Quentin and Humbert, then, purposefully overlook the lived experiences of Caddy and Dolores, thus epitomizing solipsistic, single-minded carnal longing. Faulkner and Nabokov create a palpable disjunction between the fantastical aesthetic images Quentin and Humbert have created around these young women and the inconvenient reality – figured chiefly through Caddy and Dolores’s accumulative, emphatic resistance – which finally intrudes upon their fantasies. This evident disjunction signals that Quentin and Humbert are destined to inevitably lose Caddy and Dolores, and they are as powerless to prevent the dissolution of their fantasies as they are in overcoming the perverse desires they develop. This powerlessness is figured in both The Sound and the Fury and Lolita as the ultimate critique, judgement, and damnation which Faulkner and Nabokov cast upon Quentin and Humbert, whose desires are as futile as they are destructive.

Rape and Resistance in Lolita and Sanctuary

After Charlotte’s death, Humbert insists that, as Dolores’s stepfather, he will “devote all my life” to her “welfare” (100). His utterance is a self-consciously performative gesture of traditional patriarchal safety and security before the eyes of his suburban neighbors. In reality, Humbert embodies a false sanctuary during their two-year sojourn across the United States because of the repeated rape and abuse he subjects her to. With that in mind, this section compares Dolores’s experiences with Humbert to Temple Drake’s with Popeye Vitelli in Sanctuary. John T. Matthews has explicitly compared Lolita to Sanctuary: acknowledging Nabokov’s aversion to “Faulkner’s stylistic vulgarity,” Matthews observes that, nonetheless, Lolita “perversely ends up mimicking Sanctuary, Faulkner’s evil Popeye a mute anticipation of the florid Humbert Humbert, Lolita a prepubescent avatar of Temple Drake” (2015, 4).¹⁴ With Matthews’s observations in mind, this section outlines how the Old Frenchman place, Miss Reba’s brothel, and the various hotels, motels, and lodgings that Dolores and Humbert frequent are treacherous and abusive sanctuaries which both young women long to escape from.¹⁵ Within these “prison cell[s] of paradise” (Nabokov, 145), Popeye and Humbert both ironically adopt the role of “father” (Nabokov, 342) and “daddy” (Faulkner, 166), abusing the responsibility the patriarchy traditionally places upon men to preserve the welfare and sanctity of children and femininity.

The innumerable sexual assaults that Temple and Dolores experience are not framed or presented in those exact, direct terms. Throughout Sanctuary, Faulkner deliberately avoids describing Temple’s sexual assault in any detail. Matthews hypothesizes that Temple’s rapes epitomize the “elliptical nature” of Sanctuary – her abuse is a central, recurring narrative motif throughout the novel, but one that Faulkner renders inherently unrepresentable. (I will return to the significance of Matthews’s point in due course as I turn to its potentially unsavory implications given my reading of such “unrepresentable” content.) Moreover, as Garnier identifies, Temple is frequently misinterpreted by Faulkner scholars and his wider readership as a “willing victim” of Popeye’s abuse, a judgement which emphasizes that “patriarchal domination continues to plague gender relations” and “silences numerous victims of abuse” (178).¹⁶ Similarly, Humbert purposefully frames the first time he raped Dolores at the Enchanted Hunters hotel as an act of seduction which he was unable to resist (132). Elizabeth Patnoe, however, insists that “Humbert, while wanting us to believe he is dis-empowered [by Dolores], is empowered, and he manipulates the voice and the dialogue of this passage in his effort to convince us that he is seduced, while there is covert evidence that this is not the case, that Lolita does not have intercourse in mind” (122). During their odyssey across the United States, Humbert makes no explicit acknowledgment of his abusive treatment of Dolores. When he does describe any sexual activity between them, he deliberately emphasizes Dolores’s apparent consent. For instance, when they happen upon one of Dolores’s former schoolmates, Humbert reports her pleas thus: “‘Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them, please’— let’s talk to them, reader!—‘I’ll do anything you want, oh please . . . ’” (157, italics added). Humbert purposefully frames his abuse of Dolores here as a fact of her life which she uses to her own manipulative advantage. By doing so, he refuses to acknowledge that, in fact, Dolores is desperately working to negotiate and survive this dreadful situation. Thus, as Linda Kauffman highlights, “In view of his unreliability, it is doubtful that his claim that Lolita seduced him is true; more important, it is unverifiable” (60). Neither Popeye nor Humbert accept the position of rapist; instead, they hold Temple and Dolores accountable for the abuse they suffer. Indeed, the “sanctuaries” which these young women are offered are actually sexually violent spaces, an idea echoing André Bleikasten’s larger point about Sanctuary that “transgression manifests itself as intrusion” (234, italics Bleikasten’s). In other words, Temple and Dolores are each transgressed against through sexual violence, the central destructive act in both novels.

The abuse that Temple and Dolores suffer, such as Temple’s tacit acknowledgement of her torn genitalia, “sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I’m still bleeding” (273–74), or Dolores’s loud “sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep” (176), is relegated to the background, the reader’s gaze drawn away from the traumatic site. Indeed, in stark contrast to this narrative method, I will attempt to train a sharp, critical eye here upon these errant details of sexual abuse which have often been overlooked throughout the history of Faulkner and Nabokov scholarship, so as to bring these details forcefully into our interpretive view. The suffering Temple and Dolores experience is enveloped within the interstices of these narratives, wherein Faulkner’s authorial strategy and Humbert’s reminiscences purposefully refuse direct contemplation of their torment.¹⁷ Instead, Temple and Dolores’s sobbing and screaming initially undermines the resistance they eventually show to their abusers, reducing them to illegible verbal expressions. This breakdown in verbal expression mirrors Elaine Scarry’s argument regarding the corporeal body in physical pain. Pain, says Scarry, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). Eventually, however, the physical damage inflicted upon these women bursts from the interstices of both novels and takes center stage, as figured through the bloodied corncob Popeye uses to penetrate Temple (376), or Dolores “complaining of pain” after she is raped at the Enchanted Hunters, “sa[ying] she could not sit, sa[ying] I had torn something inside her” (141). Temple and Dolores thus undergo a violently enforced maturation, becoming fully aware of the danger they are in, and being under no illusion that these perverse uses of their bodies are normative or consensual.

Critics have argued that Faulkner’s elliptical technique is his own authorial attempt to sympathize with and valorize Temple’s plight, isolating readers from graphic accounts of her pain. Victoria M. Bryan, for instance, notes that “as Faulkner introduces acts of violence” in Sanctuary, “he turns the novel’s narrative eye away from them at the moment they take place, refocusing the reader on the aftermath of the violence by showing them how characters react to it” (28). Instead, I would argue that, by refusing to represent Temple’s rapes explicitly and directly, Sanctuary in fact colludes with Popeye by silencing her pain. The implications of the novel’s refusal to directly contemplate the trauma and abuse Temple experiences is what, in my view, most clearly demarcates Faulkner from Nabokov in their respective positions as modernist and postmodernist authors. Sanctuary’s refusal to represent the violence Temple experiences minimizes her profound distress and terror. Lolita, in contrast, makes clear that Humbert’s refusal to acknowledge the suffering he routinely subjects Dolores to actually amplifies the violence she experiences, and makes his own culpability as her abuser overwhelmingly apparent.

In that respect, Faulkner and Nabokov match the distinction between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics defined by Jean-François Lyotard. By deliberately looking away from sexual violence in Sanctuary, Faulkner “allows the unrepresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure” (81). Lyotard’s claim here recalls Faulkner’s publicly stated explanation that he wrote Sanctuary to tell “the most horrific tale I could imagine” (Meriwether, 177). By using Temple’s rape as a means to shock and titillate the wider reading public, Sanctuary offers its readers a transgressive variation of the “intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain” that Lyotard asserts is central to modern aesthetics. Faulkner then obscures Temple’s pain, in a deliberate yet ironic and contradictory fashion, by positioning her abuse at the margins of the novel. Nabokov, on the other hand, “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself,” in Lyotard’s terms (81). Rather than colluding with Humbert aesthetically masking Dolores’s pain, Nabokov, instead, makes clear that Humbert seeks precisely “the solace of good forms” and expresses a “nostalgia for the unattainable” which postmodernism “denies itself ” (Lyotard 81) by invoking “the refuge of art” to explain the purpose of his confessions (309). Thus, Nabokov undermines and rejects Hum-bert’s aesthetics, and instead draws attention to the ethics of reading Lolita solely through Humbert’s perspective and in tacit support of his crimes. Nabokov’s postmodern method suggests that, if readers overlook Dolores’s plight and fulfill Humbert’s command to “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me” (129) at the expense of acknowledging her victimization, they themselves are complicit in making her suffering even more acute. This essay, in opposition to Faulkner and Humbert’s tactics, has been working to draw explicit and direct attention to the sexual violence at the heart of Sanctuary and Lolita to finally present the unrepresentable and say the unsayable.

Temple and Dolores, then, have “absolutely nowhere else to go” (Nabokov, 142); they cannot circumvent the horror and tyranny that Popeye and Humbert pose. Instead, as Bleikasten writes (specifically referencing Sanctuary), “There is no place here that does not eventually become a trap or a prison, a torture chamber or a stage for foul deeds; no sanctuary can be found that has not been or will not be desecrated” (227). Temple and Dolores’s only means of freedom is literal escape. Indeed, they frequently attempt to combat and resist Popeye and Humbert, making explicitly clear that they do not enjoy or willingly participate in their abuse. Temple tries to repeatedly run away from Popeye while at the Old Frenchman place (274); later, after arriving at Miss Reba’s brothel, she tries to stop him from assaulting her:

He gripped the top of the gown. She caught his wrists and began to toss from side to side, opening her mouth to scream. His hand clapped over her mouth, and gripping his wrist, the saliva drooling between his fingers, her body thrashing furiously from thigh to thigh, she saw him crouching beside the bed[.]

(289)

Meanwhile, Humbert records that Dolores would frequently scratch him as he raped her (164). During one such altercation, “She said she loathed me. [ . . . ] She said I had attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She said she was sure I had murdered her mother” (205). The misogynistic, trite accusations of sexual and moral impropriety that critics have often levelled at Temple and Dolores manifestly does not match the unquestionable resistance which they repeatedly display. Leslie Fiedler, for instance, grossly mischaracterizes Dolores as a “demonic rapist of the soul” while comparing her to Eula Varner in The Hamlet to make a wider point about “Faulkner’s anti-sentimental conviction that woman is born into destructive sexuality and has no innocence from which to fall from” (326–27).¹⁸ Instead, Temple and Dolores both work to escape these endless scenes of abuse and trauma. They are desperate to find real sanctuary in “an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence” (Nabokov, 170) which eases their suffering, even as Popeye and Humbert habitually disrupt their resistance.

When Temple and Dolores’s voices are explicitly heard, they attempt to emasculate Popeye and Humbert, combatting the sexual victimization they suffer through their utterances. Temple, aware of Popeye’s impotence, repeatedly taunts and urges him to “‘Touch me! You’re a coward if you dont’”: “‘You, a man, a bold bad man when you cant even—When you had to bring a real man in to—And you hanging over the bed, moaning and slobbering like a—’” (330–39). Temple’s desperation is such that, in order to ensure her own survival, she purposefully ridicules the one facet of Popeye’s sexuality (his impotence, much like Humbert’s pedophilia) which threatens to disturb the entire façade of the stereotypical, hyper-aggressive masculinity he regularly enforces upon her. Similarly, Humbert admits that, during his perverse acts of “love,” Dolores would implore him to “‘leave me alone, will you, for Christ’s sake leave me alone,’” words which make him feel like “a brute” (192–93). Despite his ardent efforts to regulate Dolores’s behavior and speech, Humbert cannot ignore the fact that she steadfastly resists his efforts – from the outset, she is aware that his behavior collapses the moral, legal, and tenuous familial bonds between them. In no sense, then, do either Temple or Dolores consider the abuse they suffer as “loving.” Instead, they work to reclaim the power which Popeye and Humbert have abused and long wielded over them. To castigate Temple and Dolores as apparent agents of sexual impropriety (as critics like Fiedler or even Humbert himself are guilty of) ignores the fact that their actions reflect their need to survive the danger they are placed in.

Temple’s most overt attempt to override the impact of the abuse she suffers is figured through the “perjury” she enacts during Lee Goodwin’s trial after finally escaping Popeye. Joseph R. Urgo asserts that, because Goodwin never intervened while Temple was held captive at the Old Frenchman place, she can legitimately describe him as the man responsible for her rape and abuse. Urgo writes that to accuse Temple of perjury “is only true in the very strict sense, the same kind of literal reading which tends to see Temple as the guilty party” (439). Following Urgo’s lead, I argue that Temple’s perjury is the final phase in her seemingly rigidifying quest for justice, and the only means of resistance left to her. Temple’s trial is marked by Popeye’s notable absence, through which Faulkner makes clear that he will not face punishment for criminally abusing her.¹⁹ My argument here offers an alternative view to John N. Duvall’s reading of the trial. According to Duvall, “In the all-male word of the courtroom where fathers and husbands (who are themselves either fathers or potential fathers), is it any wonder that the daughter cannot speak? If the daughter were to speak, we might hear a different violation named, but in the texts of William Faulkner the law reproduces and legitimizes only the father’s desire” (80). Temple’s resistant quest for justice is not forced upon her by her father or her three brothers, nor does her perjury result from a patriarchal assertion over her weakened and defenseless position to uphold ‘“that most sacred thing in life: womanhood”’ (Sanctuary, 199). Instead, as Julianna Leachman argues, “Temple’s perjury demonstrates her agency, not simply her trauma” (18). To achieve even a semblance of personal justice, she transgresses legal and ethical grounds, much like Popeye transgressed all moral standards while abusing her. Matthews argues that “the face that actually occupies the position” Temple is “looking towards” at the back of the courtroom “is ours, the readers’ just over the narrator’s shoulder” (2009, 52, italics Matthews’s). I echo Matthews here: having witnessed Temple’s torment, we are aware of the profound extent of her abuse. Temple’s gaze is thus a plea for our sympathy, urging us to understand, if not entirely condone, why she must condemn Goodwin. Her “perjury,” therefore, is a transgressive act of empowerment through which she achieves retribution for the crimes enacted against her.

Dolores encapsulates her resistance to Humbert through repeatedly uttering the word “No” during the multiple instances Humbert asserts sexual dominance and control over her. Instead of quietly suffering through his abuse, Dolores actively signals her resistance to Humbert with increasing potency, and thus disturbs the carnal bliss his abusive actions afford him:

I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again—and ‘oh, no,’ Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure—all would be shattered.

(285, italics Nabokov’s)

With this word, Dolores rejects Humbert’s pretentions towards “love” and nullifies the hundreds of pages he has written to explain his “misery” (283). Indeed, Dolores’s subsequent escape with Clare Quilty is her ultimate rejection of all that her “relationship” with Humbert ever signified, refusing to remain imprisoned by him. Humbert frames Dolores’s rejection as a deceitful act of betrayal (229), but he does not acknowledge that she treats him with precisely the cruelty he treated her with by finally using his duplicitous, manipulative tactics against him. In his unrepentant abuse, Humbert engineers the circumstances which bring his captivity of Dolores to an end by causing her to seek any form of escape she can, such that even Quilty’s lasciviousness appears hopeful and appealing. Nonetheless, Nabokov also deliberately ironizes Dolores’s escape with Quilty; by becoming his lover, she places herself in precisely the same circumstances with him as with Humbert. Quilty lures her with his “cocker spaniel pup,” his “black Caddy Lack,” and his money (246), much like Humbert enticed her with luxury goods and bribes (183). Quilty successfully grooms Dolores because his expression of “love,” much like Humbert’s, is all that she has ever known. Dolores’s choice of Quilty as a lover and as the means of escaping Humbert thus extends and offers a postmodern rendering of Temple’s earlier, modernist resistance to Popeye and her transgressive use of the law as a means of justice.

Humiliation and the Hypocrisy of Vengeance in Lolita and Absalom, Absalom!

Outwardly, Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Wash Jones in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! are antithetical in terms of socio-economic background and class. Humbert is a highly educated aesthete of distinctly European stock who projects an image of style and sophistication while traveling across the United States with his stepdaughter, Dolores. Wash, meanwhile, is a lowly, poor-white, “malaria-ridden” caretaker living in “an abandoned and rotting fishing camp” on the grounds of his employer’s hundred-square-mile plantation with his granddaughter, Milly (103). However, the lives of Humbert and Wash conclude in explosions of violence which end the lives of Clare Quilty and Thomas Sutpen, the ostensible rivals for their “love” and patriarchal domination over young Dolores and Milly. Indeed, the way Sutpen and Quilty are represented in both novels is filtered through the profoundly humiliated gazes of Wash and Humbert. The language which repeatedly describes Sutpen and Quilty is virtually identical: portrayed as “fiend,” “beast,” “monster,” and “demon,” they are each framed as satanic figures whose uncompromising pursuit of Milly and Dolores embodies destruction and evil. Wash uses Milly as a bargaining tool in his desire for a better life, a desire which Sutpen exploits by seducing, impregnating, and finally disavowing Milly and her “unnamed infant” daughter. Wash demands vengeance because of the humiliating debasement that Sutpen’s disavowal causes.²⁰ Quilty, meanwhile, usurps Humbert’s long held, enforced exclusivity in Dolores’s life, writing Humbert out of the history of Dolores’s sexuality through his sudden, “nightmarish” appearance (251). Wash and Humbert, then, are forced to expel the monstrous impact that Sutpen and Quilty have upon them to regain control over their lives and, more importantly, reassert their authority over Milly and Dolores. This section highlights that, in their pursuit of vengeance to “honor” Milly and Dolores, Wash and Humbert overlook the inherent hypocrisy of that vengeance, refusing to acknowledge that they themselves are as responsible as Sutpen and Quilty are for the victimization of these young women.

Milly and Dolores are overtly attracted to and fascinated by Sutpen and Quilty, whom they consider antithetical to the weak, perverse masculinity that Wash and Humbert embody. The basis for this attraction has been the subject of critical debate. Dirk Kuyk, Jr. asserts that Milly is “seduced by Sutpen’s wealth, even though it’s much diminished; by social prominence; and by his military fame. [ . . . ] But Wash’s admiration [for Sutpen] must sway her too” (66–67). Ellen Pifer, meanwhile, observes that “Quilty’s celebrity status thrills [Dolores’s] heart” (2003, 95). According to Jen Shelton, Dolores has a “childish infatuation with the movie-star looks of Quilty,” through whom “she eventually manages a story that parodies Humbert’s tale of their first cross-country trek”: “Dolly writes another story that Humbert does not yet see: that of her escape” (288–89). Although Sutpen and Quilty seemingly offer Milly and Dolores a life free from the burden that Wash and Humbert pose, they are also overtly exploitative and predatory. Through Wash’s “admiration” for Sutpen, he tacitly enables Milly’s sexual exploitation; Milly’s willingness to uphold her grandfather’s honor, while remaining steadfast in her attraction and acquiescence to Sutpen, contributes to her untimely death. Quilty, meanwhile, lures Dolores with the prospect of an apparently genuine, loving alternative to the rape and abuse Humbert subjects her to. Quilty engineers Dolores’s escape from Humbert, writing a play entitled The Enchanted Hunters for her and casting her in the lead role. Although Dolores acknowledges that the Enchanted Hunters was the hotel where Humbert first raped her (202), in her ardent efforts to escape him, she either misunderstands or willfully ignores the perversity in Quilty naming the play after this site of formative trauma. While she rightly acknowledges Humbert’s gross mistreatment of her as rape, she mistakenly equates Quilty’s predatory behavior with affection and love. Milly and Dolores, then, are closely worked upon and continually objectified by all the men they are surrounded by and remain vulnerable to predatory, destructive behaviors.

Unlike Humbert, Wash does not harbor illicit sexual desire for Milly, but he does clearly have insidious designs upon her sexual use-value to Sutpen. On the one hand, Wash is acutely aware that Milly “‘aint nothing but a fifteen-year-old gal’” who is being preyed upon by Sutpen, “‘a man past sixty’” (234). On the other hand, although he is “a little grave” when he sees Milly wearing a dress, ribbons, and beads furnished upon her by Sutpen, he finally reassures her that “‘Ef Kernel and Miss Judith wanted to give it to you, I hope you minded to thank them’” (234). Through this utterance, Wash tacitly encourages Milly’s acquiescence to Sutpen, effectively authorizing her exploitation and betraying the moral disquiet he initially felt. Her mother having died in a brothel, Wash is the only family Milly has. Like Dolores, she has “absolutely nowhere else to go” following her mother’s death (Nabokov, 142). Wash, like Humbert, exploits his patriarchal authority over Milly to fulfill his own wish for social advancement. In that sense, Wash and Sutpen are not morally divergent. Despite their class differences, they are more alike in their perverse exploitation of Milly than is initially apparent. As John Rodden argues, “Sutpen and Jones share the same morality, not in the sense of religious beliefs or even ethical outlook but in their tendency to idealize human beings, embodying abstractions in human crucibles” (19). With Rodden’s claims in mind, Milly’s symbolic value as a means towards social advancement for Wash and the completion of Sutpen’s design far outweighs the moral bankruptcy of her exploitation.

Likewise, Nabokov undermines Humbert’s moral indignation over Quilty’s actions during his final meeting with Dolores. Humbert repeatedly asks her what “filthy, fancy things” she engaged in while with Quilty. Dolores refuses to divulge any details, saying only that “‘he had two girls and two boys, and three or four men, and the idea was for all of us to tangle in the nude while an old woman took movie pictures’” (276). Quilty, therefore, has engaged in precisely the perverse sexual acts with Dolores that Humbert was robbed of. Although Humbert outwardly uses Quilty’s sexual exploitation of Dolores as justification to “destroy” him (247), they are both aroused by perverse, aesthetic images of her. Humbert, like Quilty taking explicit “‘movie pictures’” of Dolores, wishes to produce a pornographic cinematographic representation of her, through which he arrests her in the “projection room of [his] pain and despair” (231), immortalizing her as his own. The instrumental use of pornography which Hum-bert and Quilty share emphasizes that, fundamentally, their conception of Dolores is identical: they transform her into a simulated, eroticized vessel for their sexual gratification. Dolores becomes, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, a sexualized “simulacrum,” whose representation in these films “has no relation to any reality whatsoever” (6). Instead, this explicitly sexualized image erases the reality of the abuse she suffers, hiding her pain from the camera’s view. As Maurice Couturier writes, in their quest to create these pornographic images of Dolores, Humbert and Quilty ensure “the absence of the real behind the proliferation of images and simulacra”; in other words, ‘Lolita’ becomes an empty, “sterile” simulation of Dolores Haze, a real person (257).²¹ During their fatal confrontation, Quilty insists that he “‘did not force’” Dolores, Humbert’s “‘little protégée to join me,’” but that “‘It was she made me remove her to a happier home’” (301). Quilty’s utterance replicates Humbert’s assertion that “it was she who seduced me,” and that “I was not even her first lover” after raping Dolores for the first time (133–35). Through the identical nature of their language, Nabokov deliberately signals the undeniable culpability that Humbert and Quilty share for Dolores’s victimization. Although Humbert describes himself as “‘her father’” (296) before shooting Quilty, he still refuses to accept his own responsibility for her victimization. Instead, the onus remains on Dolores as the primary agent of her own degradation, even as Humbert ironically and futilely claims the title of her father to avenge the humiliation Quilty has caused him.

Likewise, by not bearing Sutpen a son, Milly is responsible for her own dehumanization in his eyes, not even meriting “‘a decent stall in the stable”’ once her daughter is born (236). When Milly and Dolores have outlived their usefulness to Sutpen and Quilty, their lives cease to matter. They are subsequently disposed of and relegated to the furthest interstices of their own narratives. Wash slits the throats of Milly and her newborn with his butcher knife, “‘the one thing in his sloven life that he was ever known to take pride in or care of ’” (240), while Humbert fantasizes about shooting Dolores when she refuses to “‘come live with me, and die with me’” (278). Wash’s murder of his grandchildren is an act entirely devoid of honor, a fact which critics have repeatedly failed to acknowledge. Rodden, for instance, mistakenly argues that Wash’s crime “is a measure of love, albeit misguided, for what had been his virgin flower Milly [such] that he slits her throat with the pure, sharp knife” (34). Likewise, Edward Clough erroneously describes Wash’s act as a moment of “pained tenderness” (194). Rodden and Clough, therefore, collude with Wash, willfully overlooking his responsibility for enabling Milly’s corruption and exploitation by Sutpen. His moral outrage over Sutpen’s actions notwithstanding, Wash remains oblivious to the fact that his actions caused his own and Milly’s shared exploitation and humiliation. Dolores’s past with Humbert, meanwhile, leaves behind only a dirty, distasteful memory, “like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood” (272). While Nabokov’s readers may wish to titillate themselves and ask, in Stanley Kubrick’s words, “Will Humbert get Lolita into bed?” (Phillips, 88), these questions ignore the fact that their “romance” was grounded in sexual abuse and psychological manipulation. The fact that Humbert does not murder Dolores may, initially, be read as his long-delayed recognition that he “‘broke [her] life’” (279).²² However, when he observes Dolores’s “ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands” and that she is “hopelessly worn at seventeen with that baby,” (277) the reason why he does not murder her becomes clear: the “nymphet” Lolita is dead, and the adult Dolores Schiller is not worth killing.

Wash and Humbert demand vengeance not because of the exploitation which Milly and Dolores endure, but rather because their own masculine authority has been profoundly disturbed. Wash’s scythe and Humbert’s gun allows them to reclaim the power they have been robbed of. Faulkner frames Wash’s vengeance in triumphalist terms. Raising his scythe in defiance against Sutpen, who as a Confederate colonel is “the acknowledged and chosen best among” men of his generation (240), Wash finally refuses to accept his social subordination. Instead, he rebels against Sutpen’s dominating, exploitative presence. Faulkner himself felt that Wash “represented the man who survived the Civil War”: “The aristocrat in the columned house was ruined but Wash Jones survived it unchanged” (Gwynn and Blotner, 75). Faulkner’s comment signals his implicit support and admiration for Wash, who defeats Sutpen with a single blow of his scythe (238). Crucially, Faulkner’s comments also explicitly ignore not only Milly’s exploitation, suffering, and untimely death, but Wash’s own, direct involvement in her degradation. As with the deliberate obfuscation of Temple’s pain in Sanctuary, Faulkner’s narrative technique in Absalom, Absalom! colludes with a male abuser to minimize and undermine female trauma.

Humbert, in contrast, is revealed to be a “novice” marksman whose futile performance of masculine bravado causes him to have anxious “[v] isions of bungling the execution” (293). Revenging himself against Quilty, the “subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling!” (295), Hum-bert fails to recognize the perverse hypocrisy of his vengeance – he himself has already abused and “sodomized” Dolores countless times. His failure to acknowledge his shared guilt with Quilty undermines the patriarchal authority he tries to reclaim. Nabokov, then, further engages in a post-modernist rewriting of Faulkner in Lolita by undermining and rejecting any notion that Humbert triumphs in Quilty’s murder. Whereas Wash dies rushing rebelliously “into the lanterns and the gun barrels” of local law enforcement (241), Humbert dies pathetically “in captivity, of coronary thrombosis” (3). Thus, “the refuge of art” Humbert relies upon to ensure his and Dolores’s immortality is, ultimately, revealed by Nabokov to be an inherently futile and compromized refuge to seek. Also, whereas Faulkner was implicit in his admiration and sympathy for Wash, Nabokov was explicit in his detestation of Humbert, describing the “double rumble” of his pseudonym as “a hateful name for a hateful person” (1973, 26). Seen in the context of Nabokov’s statement, the repugnance of Humbert relying upon the “local palliative of articulate art” (283) is clear: his aestheticization of Dolores as Lolita does not counteract the years of abuse she suffered, nor do his tactics invalidate the overarching tragedy of her situation. The actions of Wash and Humbert ultimately expose the devastating consequences of outrage, dishonor, and single-minded pursuits of vengeance and desire.

Faulkner’s “Genealogy” at the end of Absalom, Absalom! records Milly’s birthyear as 1853, while her “Unnamed Infant” was born and died in 1869 (308–09). Nabokov, masquerading as John Ray, Jr. in the “Foreword” to Lolita, reveals that Dolores (deliberately referred to as “‘Mrs ‘Richard F. Schiller’”) “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952” (21). At first glance, these are two minor details embedded within paratexts which do not provide readers with any substantive narrative context. However, once Faulkner and Nabokov explicate the major details of their novels, revealing that Milly was ensnared in the corrosive designs of Sutpen and Wash and that Dolores got married after escaping Humbert, the reader comprehends the significance of these details, which have been deliberately “buried” in the margins. The fact that Dolores was seventeen at the time of her pregnancy and death, while Milly was sixteen when she met her demise, makes clear that, legally, both were still minors. Given their untimely passing and the extent of the abuse they suffered, they never experienced adulthood or motherhood to any significant extent. Instead, they figuratively died during childhood, long before their physical, corporeal deaths. The twin images of Milly’s murdered infant and Dolores’s stillborn baby stand as final, ironic judgements against Wash and Humbert, damning them for their corrosive desires and designs which took the lives of four innocent children as collateral.

________

In closing, Nabokov’s intentions in writing Lolita become clear after tracing a direct line of influence and response to Faulkner. Both authors posit, in their respective modernist and postmodernist aesthetic registers, that “It’s a hard life on women” (As I Lay Dying, 18). In the one letter which Dolores writes to Humbert after beginning a new life with her husband, she says “I have gone through much sadness and hardship” (266). The same sentiment, of course, is true of Caddy, Temple, and Milly, and this essay has worked to amplify the profound degree of the abuse they experience, making their suffering and the terrible losses they face explicit and palpable. Indeed, reading Faulkner’s work alongside Lolita reveals the contradiction at the heart of Faulkner’s modernist representation of sexual victimization. Faulkner’s aesthetic is complicit in exacerbating the devastating trauma which unquenched male desires create in the lives of Caddy, Temple, and Milly, which is especially ironic considering that these themes are also implicitly critiqued and condemned within his novels. While Faulkner’s modernist aesthetics oftentimes obscures and minimizes the suffering his female characters experience, Nabokov’s postmodernist stance in Lolita exposes the mechanics of that obfuscation, showing the degree to which patriarchal society, as embodied by Humbert Humbert, denies the devastating consequences of male desire writ large upon the female body.