Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is controversial, subversive, and mind-bending. A so-called romance between a teenage girl and her much older stepfather. Written from the perspective of the stepfather, Lolita is Nabokov’s “love letter for the English language” that also happens to address a highly controversial subject matter. The reader is gently wooed by Nabokov’s acute talent for writing beautiful prose only to look back and see the monster lurking in the rose garden. While Nabokov mainly focuses on 12 year old Dolores’ turbulent relationship with her mother, her lack of relationship with her biological father is made evident through her “relationship” with the 30 something Humbert Humbert.
While a woman’s mother is her portrait for womanhood, her relationship with her father defines her self image and self esteem. In her book, The Absent Father effect on Daughters: Father Desire, Father Wounds, Susan E. Schwartz discusses how the absence of a strong paternal figure sets up women for a life of longing for said father. Often, fatherless daughters suffer from low self worth, emotional numbness, unsatisfactory intimate relationships, and a general sense of loss and mourning for a father who was physically or emotionally absent. I first felt the searing pain of rejection from my father in my 20’s. Like a frog in a pot of boiling water, it took me years to realize that the void I felt was directly caused by my father’s casual disinterest in me beyond the mundane. Whether intentionally or the byproduct of generations of callous fathering, my father made it evident that his contribution to my growth consisted of paychecks, the cold shoulder, and frequent physical and verbal attacks. Like many women who also grew up with absentee, abusive fathers, I turned my father’s words and actions inwards, believing there to be some devastating fault in me because he did not love me.
For women, fathers are often the only men in their lives who show them love without expecting sexual favors in return. Nabokov goes above and beyond, flipping the father-daughter relationship on its head in sick perversion, as shown by Dolores and H.H.’s last interaction, where she still refers to him as “Dad”. Dolores’ desire for H.H. to be her dad is hard to see through H.H. ‘s interpretations of her innocent actions as sexual, but a clearer interpretation can be seen in the 1997 film Lolita by Adrian Lyne. In the film, Dolores is shown as having a poster of a man bearing a resemblance to H.H. initialed with a heart around the man’s face. While H.H. describes the man as an actor that Dolores has a crush on, the movie shows that the man is actually an actor in an advertisement, where he is playing the father.
Lolita flirts with the concept of the now debunked feminine Oedipus complex theorized by the psychoanalyst Sigmud Freud. Later, Freud’s student, Carl Jung furthered the female Oedipus complex by proposing the Electra complex. Freud and Jung’s theories on how women are sexually attracted to their fathers and sexually competitive with their mothers for the father’s attention are not accepted by psychologists due to a lack of empirical evidence, however these notions are indicative of a need to deeply understand how the father-daughter relationship impacts women.
Perhaps no one summarizes the father-daughter relationship and overcoming the wounds inflicted upon a woman by her father better than popular band, The Neighborhood, in their aptly titled song, Daddy Issues. Daddy Issues juxtaposes obvious lyrics about father wounds with rich visual metaphor to insinuate the process of overcoming so-called “daddy issues” and freeing oneself from the oppressive shadow of their father. The women begin their journey in a house, presumably their father’s, from whence they venture to a garage, which is their father’s workshop. They use their father’s tools to destroy a classic car, also belonging to the father, representing their freedom from their father’s influence on them. The final act, stabbing the music system in the car with a knife, can be interpreted as burying the hilt into the heart of an already dead father-daughter relationship.
The expressions of sadness and rage on the women’s faces are reminiscent of the collective rage felt by women who are abandoned by their fathers. Often the only ones we can be angry at are ourselves for begging for love that was never ours to have. The little girl who was rejected is still there, buried under the self hatred and self doubt we wear like armor from a battle that was never fair to begin with. To heal is to feel, to hate, to scream, to cry. Mourning for a loss that was never our responsibility to mourn for, but one that has become our cross to bear due to the actions of our fathers. “Go ahead and cry, little girl.”
