Cover art for Lana Del Rey's 2012 single "Lolita" on her debut album "Born to Die."
Movie poster for the original 1962 film "Lolita."
Movie poster for the 1997 remake of "Lolita."
Nabokov's Notecards
Many readers of Lolita don't know that Vladimir Nabokov wrote his classic novel on a series of notecards. Though this may seem to be an inconvenient and rather unorganized writing process, he used many of these notecards to document 1950's pop culture references from which he gained his inspiration. One of the notecards of his that has been archived is a list of songs that he believed pertained to the novel, and Nabokov himself has admitted that because Lolita focuses on American culture, much of the inspiration for his novel came from, well, 1950's American culture. A huge part of American pop culture in the 1950's came from music and television, because those were really the only options for entertainment available to Americans at the time. Here is Nabokov's list:
Sammy Kaye, "You"
Though somewhat charming, this song, in the context of Lolita, is quite eerie. The lyrics, "You're the glow of a summer day / You are the laugh of a child at play" sound uncomfortable, to say the least, if we were to imagine Humbert listening to this song while obsessing over Lolita. Given that Lolita was a 12-year-old child at the start of her relationship with Humbert, and given that Humbert strips Lolita of her ability to be a child and "play," it makes sense that Nabokov chose this as part of his "playlist" for his novel.
Sammy Kaye, "Walkin' to Missouri"
So, it seems that Nabokov had an affinity for Sammy Kaye in his writing of Lolita. This song is a story about a girl who breaks a man's heart, and the audience is made to feel bad for the man. "She gave him kisses and gave him sighs, but oh how she told him lies" is one of the most remarkable lyrics from this corny, upbeat song. This feels reminiscent of Lolita's dynamic with Humbert, mostly near the middle of the novel, when Lolita gives Humbert the intimacy he seeks from her, while plotting an escape plan the whole time. Additionally, Humbert's deceptive narrative attempts to seek sympathy from the "gentlemen of the jury" throughout the novel, similarly to this song's "poor" guy walking to Missouri. Perhaps this song is where Nabokov derived part of Lolita's plot from?
Eddy Arnold, "A Full Time Job"
This hilarious song is truly the cherry on top of the list of songs Nabokov cited. The very first lyric goes, "I want a full time job making love to you." There you have it! This is comical only because a "full time job" is an understatement for Humbert's relationship with Lolita; if you consider 2 year-long road trips and kidnapping a child for years of her life a "full time job," then Humbert certainly was putting in some serious overtime.
TV, Advertisements, & Film
The 1950's were an iconic time - American business was booming, and its nuclear families were working hard, and they were spending money like never before. The culture of American consumerism that we are all a part of today started with a humble beginning in the 1950's, with corny advertisements and their trademark catchy jingles:
In Lolita, Humbert takes Lolita to 342 hotels/motels on a year-long road trip. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita's "Russian-born American author," describes his fascination with American culture in its afterword, when he claims he was faced with the task of "inventing America." Unfortunately, it's difficult to credit only Nabokov with America's re-invention (though Lolita certainly ruffled some feathers); the 1950's was a time of a drastic culture shift in the US. Americans were spending money to show their patriotism, and a new trend of in-home sales that accommodated the American housewife's lifestyle began with Tupperware, which would later evolve to the Mary Kay, Scentsy, and LulaRoe pyramid schemes we hear about today. Humbert's road trip with Lolita is Nabokov's mockery of "the American dream," because Lolita constantly nags him for worthless knick-knacks along the way, and Humbert buys her what she wants each time. With America's increased consumerism came the mass purchases of expensive household staples, like washing machines, cars, and televisions. In 1958, the year Lolita was published, there were about 40 million households with TVs in America. This heightened access to what used to be largely inaccessible to the working class gave way to a large-scale cultural impact; since everyone was watching TV instead of listening to the radio, American culture adjusted accordingly. Politics quickly became televised, and Americans became so invested in what they saw on TV that they began comparing their own lives to those of their favorite characters on shows like Leave it to Beaver (which was sponsored by Chrysler, go figure).
American television in the 1950's is referred to most commonly as the "Golden Age" of television, and similarly, the 50's were also part of the "Golden Age" of comic books, which spanned from 1938-1956. After the war, the popularity of superhero comics began to dissipate. Americans became bored of the same trope they'd been consuming for over a decade, so new genres of comics began to emerge, like horror, crime, and romance. One of the new crime comics took off, the "Crime Does Not Pay" series, and these were comics published between 1942 and 1955. The plots in these comics were usually the same, with a criminal committing crimes and facing a devastating punishment at the end. These comics face some modern criticism for their glorification of criminal activity, and perhaps some of Nabokov's inspiration for Lolita can be traced back to crime comics. The apparent normalization of crime acquainted Americans with it, so the publication of Lolita might have seemed less shocking, given that Americans willingly exposed themselves to crime plots for entertainment. The series was eventually censored in 1955 for their promotion of juvenile delinquency, and Lolita also faced censorship beginning in 1958 for its promotion of immoral, unethical, and criminal behavior.
Lolita in the News
Nabokov's publication of Lolita certainly ruffled some feathers; without analyzing the novel's themes, characters, and their actions, any reader would react in disgust. Humbert, after all, is a monster, and Nabokov acknowledges what a deranged character he is in both the foreword and afterword. Though some well-versed readers were able to grasp that Lolita is a satire of American culture, many at the time scoffed at its "vulgarity," which is the critical term many readers tossed around in the late 50's upon its release. Though, as modern readers, we have the ability to reflect on media publications from the 1950s - when Lolita made its debut in the United States - and form an understanding of what American society looked like. Who determined what was "vulgar," and what wasn't? "Vulgarity" is largely subjective; today, many would argue that abuse, porn, rated R movies, and swear words are all "vulgar" (and pedophilia, I'd hope, is also something we would certainly consider to be vulgar). American society has always been oddly puritanical in discussions about sex and sexuality, especially in the twentieth century, but domestic abuse, it appears, was not only alarmingly common, but also blatantly promoted. In fact, a New York newspaper paid $10 (about $100 today) to each man whose anecdote was chosen for an article with the headline "If a Woman Needs It, Should She Be Spanked?" Though, in hindsight, "spanking" is a covert reference to what we would call domestic abuse today:
An article published by the New York Daily Mirror sometime between 1950-1959.
It's interesting that Miguel Matos, the first man listed in the article, claims that women who act like children should be treated as such; since his anecdote was chosen for the article, it wouldn't be innocuous to assume that many other men during the time period infantilized the women they engaged with. Though infantilization is not at all the same as pedophilia, the patriarchal power dynamic present in the average American household in the 1950s is remarkably similar to that of Humbert's relationship with Lolita. Nabokov, in this way, was likely satirizing the way women were treated by men, in defense of women. As aforementioned, pornography was a major taboo of the 1950's. Anything deemed to be pornographic was censored by a recently formed organization, known as The House Committee on Current Pornographic Materials (established in 1952), and Lolita was one of the works that was cited as pornographic, and it was censored for its "obscenity." Playboy magazine is famously known for its scandalous debut cover of Marilyn Monroe, and this might lead one to question how Hugh Hefner managed to circumnavigate censorship during such a sex-phobic time in America. Because Playboy's photos weren't overtly "sordid," with its tasteful images of the "girl next door," the magazine was granted a sort of artistic freedom that other, less sophisticated works, such as, say, Lolita, were denied. The relationship between artistic freedom and the obscene was something Nabokov was concerned with in his writing of Lolita, and considering where the United States stands today with artistic freedom, it seems that his efforts to challenge the status quo, in true postmodernist fashion, paid off.
The first issue of Playboy magazine, released in 1953.
Although some early readers of Lolita were appalled by its vulgarity, other critics understood its themes and its characters in the way they were intended to be, and praised its "harmless wit," in short. Published in the Manchester Guardian in January 1959 by an unknown author, an untitled article concisely defends the novel's themes and provides explanations for them, and the author even opens the article by advising the reader to "read the book rather than the denunciations of it," if they really want to know the book. This response was one that seems to be ahead of its time in hindsight, but the author is correct nonetheless; in order to truly understand any piece of literature, it's best to give it a chance before reading about its shortcomings. Quite frankly, Lolita deserved some appreciation, after its years of censorship and criticism.