Sexuality and American Culture

In the second half of Lolita, Nobokov utilizes and comments upon American consumerism in relation to sexuality in some very interesting ways. Historically, he is writing during a period in which the structure of social relationships was becoming increasingly defined by cultural practices of consumption. The relationship between Humbert and Dolores represents a commodification of sexual relations and is illuminated by the nuances and peculiarities of the American consumer society of the 1950s.

Nobokov's choice of the highway as a cultural landscape in which the relationship between Humbert and Dolores could thrive is particularly insightful in this respect. The highway and its correlative the roadtrip employ every aspect of the type of consumer society that proliferated in the post-war years. David Harvey provides a concise definition of how this type of society operated in a discussion of Fordism:

What was special about Ford . . . was his vision, his explicit recognition that mass production meant mass consumption . . . a new kind of rationalized, modernist, and populist democratic society. . . The purpose of the five-dollar, eight-hour day was only in part to secure worker compliance with the discipline required to work the highly productive assembly-line system. It coincidentally meant to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to consume the mass produced products the corporations were about to turn out in ever vaster quantities. . . . Postwar Fordism has to be seen . . . less as a mere system of mass production and more as a total way of life. Mass production meant standardization of product as well as mass consumption; and that meant a whole new aesthetic and commodification of culture.¹

The family vacation, specifically the family roadtrip, was one of the major cultural practices that emerged and drove American consumption; essentially, it represents the commodification of leisure time. Every second of the roadtrip is spent spending money, whether it be on the gas that enables the family to move, suitcases and travel clothes, food (provided by chain restaurants), various excursions and souvenirs, and even the time one spends sleeping (of course on the bed of a motel).

Nobokov, quite geniusly I think, twists our whole notion of the roadtrip and the consumer society by saturating it with perversion, oppression, and imprisonment. He gives us an account a perverse family on a roadtrip, and by doing so, the roadtrip itself and all of its nuances also become perverted. Nobokov blurrs the lines between the perverted sexual pleasure experienced and related by Humbert, and the experience/practice of consumption. The relationship between Humbert and Dolores is itself marked by commodification, or as Humbert describes it, “[a] system of monetary bribes” (Nobvokov 148). Humbert goes to great lengths in describing his ability to sexually manipulate Dolores and metaphorically consume her on the basis of her own desire of various commodities:

Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth—these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things. The Lord knows how many nickels I fed to the gorgeous music boxes that came with every meal we had! I still hear the nasal voices of those invisibles serenading her, people with names like Sammy and Jo and Eddy and Tony and Peggy and Guy and Patty and Rex, sentimental song hits, all of them as similar to my ear as her various candies were to my palate [emphasis added]. (148)

Their relationship is sustatained through an exchange of commodities:

Her weekly allowance, paid to her under condition she fulfill her basic obligations, was twenty-one cents at the start of the Beardsley era—and went up to one dollar five before its end. . . . She constantly received from me all kinds of small presents and had for the asking any sweetmeat or movie under the moon—although, of course, I might fondly demand an additional kiss, or even a whole collection of assorted caresses, when I knew she coveted very badly some item of juvenile amusement. (183-4)

Nobokov goes even further to comment on the unfulfilling aspects of this relationship through a discussion of the commodities of destruction: “Our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night” (176).

As such, the following interpretation of Lolita may be insightful: the perverse relationship between Dolores and Humbert reflects the relationship between the consumer and the forces intrinsic to a political economy of consumerism, respectively. Humbert capitalizes on Dolores' fetish for commodities. By simultaneously stimulating and providing an outlet for her fetish, Humbert is effectively able to rape and derive pleasure from Dolores. Humbert, however, has also fetishized the sexual commodities provided by Dolores--the two are prisoners to each other. The relationship between producer and consumer can be viewed the same way. Nobokov's representation is all the more effective because it draws a correlation between a socially unacceptable practice (pedophilia and rape) and a socially acceptable practice (consumerism).