Charlotte Haze, in her short spanning role in Lolita, is seen as the antithesis to her
Daughter, Lo. She is a strict and aging social climber without tact or art,
providing many moments of tongue-in-cheek humor for Humbert and the audience,
as well as painting the archetype of many of America’s women in the 1950’s.
A transformation though overcomes the pseudo-francophile,
when in her heart of hearts, her dream beau, H.H., has remained in her home and
overdramatically climax together in a scene fit for the drippiest of romance
novels:
“…I laid my hands upon her which happened on the threshold
of Lolita’s room whither she tremendously backed repeating ‘no, no, please
no.’”
This metamorphosis from “harsh, cold, contemptuous” woman to
“touching, helpless creature” makes the older Charlotte glimmer in way that
resembles her younger form—Lolita.
“The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had
been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter
adoration—a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with
wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had
when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely
admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would
watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made
that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping
sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had
highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the
child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach within which my
nymphet had been a curved little fish in 1934…. I kept telling myself, as I
wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest
I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a
schoolgirl as her daughter was,…I was able to make out a dim first version of
Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen…So I
tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan and little windows. And when,
by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble
nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it
was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed
through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.” (77)
In this way we can see H.H. transforming Charlotte into
Lolita through his memories, fantasies, and words—while all the while being
unable to fully convert to normalcy or debauchery.
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