The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman

Rating: 3/5, average

CW: rape, pedophilia

The Real Lolita posits that Vladimir Nabokov’s (in)famous masterpiece Lolita (which I reviewed in 2014) is based on the true story of Sally Horner.

Sally Horner was kidnapped by a man named Frank La Salle from Camden, NJ, in 1948. He caught her stealing a notebook from a five-and-dime store and told her he was an FBI agent and that if she didn’t come to Atlantic City with him she would be sent to reform school. Frank had Sally convince her mother, Ella, that she was going on a vacation with her friends. He then kidnapped her and raped her as they traveled for two years, moving from Atlantic City to Baltimore to Dallas to San Jose.

Sally was rescued in 1950 when her neighbor Ruth Janisch helped her make a phone call home from San Jose to Camden. She was eleven years old when she was abducted and almost thirteen when she returned home. She died at fifteen in a car accident coming home from the Jersey Shore. Ed Baker, a boy she had just met, was driving the car.

When reading this, I was really struck by how different our modern values are from the 1950’s. Sally’s Mom said that she would forgive Sally, whatever she did. This implies that she was somehow responsible for being kidnapped and raped. Frank La Salle had raped five girls in Camden while he was married to his wife, Dorothy Dare, and when she found out, she blamed the girls for seducing him. La Salle also used the threat of telling her mother she had sex with him to get his first victim to introduce him to the other four. We’ve come such a long way from those days of expecting girls to be solely responsible for any sexual acts they partake in, willingly or not, it’s amazing.

Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra, contested that Vladimir had “studied a considerable number of case histories (“real” stories) many of which have more affinities with the Lolita plot than the one mentioned by Mr. Welding.” However, Sally Horner was the only one mentioned by name in the text of Lolita: “Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?”

Sarah Weinman writes, “Any speculation that Lolita could be inspired by a real-life case went against the single-minded Nabokovian belief that art supersedes influence, and so influence must be brushed off.” She says the Nabokovs resisted the idea that Lolita could be based on anything because if it were, it would take away from Vladimir’s originality. I think Weinman is at least partially right about Lolita being based on Sally Horner’s case. The facts are very close to the plot of Lolita: a girl is abducted and taken across the country by a pedophile who claims to be her father. Nabokov had worked on the same theme many times in previous works. Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allen Poe were part of the inspiration as well, but I think that Sally’s case may have made something click.

This book flips between chapters about Sally Horner and chapters about Nabokov. I appreciate that everything in the book was real, but it went really slow. Some of the chapters felt fluffy, especially the parts about Nabokov’s butterfly-hunting vacations. Weinman is trying to connect what happened to Sally Horner to what happened in Nabokov’s life chronologically, but it ends up covering some pretty dull moments in Nabokov’s life. Weinman also covers the full backstories of everyone who was vaguely connected to Sally Horner, from the prosecutor in her case, to the detective, her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law, the woman who saved her and her family… it’s a lot.

After I finished reading this, I felt conflicted… Sally Horner’s story was interesting, but there’s very little of it. Weinman mentions the memoirs of a few other girls that were abducted and abused (including Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, and Natascha Kampusch) but Sally never got the chance to tell her side of the story. Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a biographer much to work with.

The book ends with this paragraph:

“Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily. She must be remembered as more than a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of monstrous perversion. A girl who survived adversity, manipulation, and cross-country horror, only to be denied the chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped, in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness, like a butterfly with wings damaged before ever having the chance to fly.”

This ending is kind of frustrating because we still don’t know much about Sally outside of what happened to her. It’s also a little hypocritical because the author wouldn’t be writing this book about Sally if she had never been abducted. Sally sounds like she was a really neat person, but she was a pretty ordinary girl. Weinman wrote this to tell Sally’s story, but most of her story remains untold.

The keenest insights we get into her thoughts were the parts when her friend in Texas told her she should stop having sex with Frank and he let her stop, and that she was scared Frank would find a way to get to her until he officially went to jail. Her strongest emotion through her ordeal, it sounds like, was wanting to go home. Frank took her away from her mother and sister, and she missed the birth of her sister’s first child. Beyond that, we have only speculation, which doesn’t seem enough to carry a whole book. Because of that, Weinman’s calls to remember her as more than her victimization fall a bit flat.

I think the basic idea motivating this book is that Nabokov was romanticizing pedophilia in Lolita, and that the true experiences of victims of pedophilia are horrific, not romantic. Weinman has respect for Nabokov as a talented writer and Lolita as a literary work, but she still accuses Nabokov of pilfering from Sally Horner’s story. She avoids directly accusing Nabokov of romanticizing, but if he were portraying Sally Horner’s life fairly, why would using her story be a bad thing? Weinman sticks to mostly real-world, factual arguments and doesn’t get too deep into literary territory, but I think this leaves a logical hole in the book. I think Weinman’s study disproved her hypothesis—perhaps she set out to write an invective against Nabokov and a defense of Sally Horner but found that he wasn’t as bad as she thought.

Though it is hard to say for sure that Lolita isn’t romanticizing pedophilia… it’s pretty ambiguous and people have interpreted it in 4 main ways: 1, it’s not romanticizing and that’s good, 2, it is romanticizing and that’s bad, 3, it is romanticizing and that’s good, 4, it’s only aesthetic and aesthetic is amoral (the highbrow cop-out Nabokov employed). Weinman doesn’t really take a stance on it, but approaches the issue with journalistic impartiality, stepping back and quoting other sources. This is kind of interesting because it shows multiple perspectives of people at different levels of closeness to Nabokov and at different points in time, but it left me curious what she really thought.

Weinman describes the writer Mikita Brottman’s experience reading Lolita with a prison book club, in which Brottman was wooed by the fancy prose, but the prisoners cried, “He’s just an old pedo!” It didn’t cut muster with them at all. This criticism stuck with me… I wonder if there’s a point where you get so smart you’re dumb again. Humbert Humbert really pulls the wool over the literate reader’s eyes while failing to fool the amateur.

On a more positive note, Véra Nabokov wrote this after reading the reviews of Lolita:

“I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along.”

Nabokov also said Lolita was the character of his he admired most after Pnin. Nabokov himself was molested by an uncle as a child (he wrote of it in Speak, Memory), so he would feel compassion for Lolita, even if the character Humbert Humbert doesn’t.

Doussia Ergaz wrote to Nabokov saying that Maurice Girodias, the founder of Olympia Press (Lolita’s first publisher, in France) appreciated it as erotica:

“He finds the book not only admirable from the literary point of view, but he thinks that it might lead to a change in social attitudes toward the kind of love described in Lolita, provided of course that it has this authenticity, this burning and irrepressible ardor.”

Sadly, there are people out there who really do want to normalize pedophilia (see my last essay on Camille Paglia). It’s pretty rare to see someone come out and say it in this day and age, but some people still don’t understand how damaging it can be for a child to be sexually involved with an adult.

This is certainly not the full picture of Lolita, though. If Nabokov had really wanted to give a positive example of a pedophilic relationship he probably wouldn’t have had HH kidnap Lolita or plot to kill her mother. These other crimes expose HH to the reader’s understanding as a villain.

In a Playboy interview with Alvin Toffler, Nabokov said, “She [the book Lolita] was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.”

Donald Malcolm put it really well in his review of Lolita for The New Yorker: “And now the real horror of their previous relationship, which Mr. Nabokov has kept in solution, so to speak, by skillful comedy, is at last permitted to crystallize.” When he sees Lolita living poor but free, malnourished and pregnant with another man’s child, HH comes to a sudden realization of all the harm he had kept repressed. The novel lures you in with sweet perfume and then dumps a bucket of ice water on you. I don’t know if it could be said to fully seduce the reader at any point though… the whole time, there’s an ironic edge to the perfume, something cold, metallic, and chilling that peeks through the illusion. It’s like testing the scent of flowers in a laboratory or looking at a beautiful vista on a computer background. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

Like Don Quixote, Lolita is a book that makes us suspicious of narrative. It shows the limits of literature, that art is not reality, and yet we’re drawn to art to the point that at times it can feel more real than reality. The demarcation between fiction and reality can get blurred sometimes, but ultimately they’re still separate realms. Don Quixote is tragic and comic because he can never be a real knight as much as he self-styles himself as one. Lolita’s tragicomedy works the same way: no matter what emotions HH projects onto Lolita, she doesn’t love him back. The Lolita in HH’s mind that loves him is a fiction. There’s a disconnect between fiction and reality within the book, in addition to one outside between the book’s world and the reader’s reality. This holds up a mirror to the reader, as the reader is experiencing a similar madness as the character.

It makes us think about our relationship to the real world and to fiction. We fictionalize and embroider our memories to ourselves, telling ourselves stories about the things that happened to us, making ourselves the heroic or tragic protagonists. But no matter the stories we tell, what happened to us is objective fact. We can choose to reject the facts if they don’t mesh with our self-concept and go on living as though our personal fictions are true, but that doesn’t change the facts. This quotidian struggle is as tragicomic as Don Quixote or Lolita. It’s a poignant aspect of the human condition.

What does this have to do with Lolita and Sally Horner? Her story influenced Nabokov, but what did Nabokov’s story influence? It didn’t influence Sally Horner, her life was over before it came out. Sarah Weinman argues that Lolita exploited and eclipsed Sally Horner’s legacy, but it could also be that Lolita drew more attention to Sally Horner’s life than there would be otherwise. If anyone’s exploiting anyone here, Sarah Weinman is riding Nabokov’s coattails. Even if she is exploiting Nabokov’s fame, though, Weinman has done so much research into Sally Horner’s life that even though it leaves a lot wanting in terms of Horner’s thoughts and feelings, there are so many interesting facts about Nabokov, Lolita, and 1950s social norms I can’t really be mad about it.

In chapters 26-29 Weinman touches on Lolita’s legacy and cultural impact. I think this aspect could have a whole book to itself.

My first exposure to the word “Lolita” was through gothic lolita fashion. I first read Lolita because I wanted to see where the term came from. Now that I’ve read it I’ve realized they’re not actually related. Lolita fashion in Japan came out of the gothic style and wasn’t actually inspired by Lolita, that was a name given to the style by a male journalist and not something that came from within the community. Most people who wear lolita fashion say it’s not sexual, they just like the look of the clothes.

Lolis in anime are a different thing… anime’s sexualization of young women (usually in their teens but sometimes children) is disturbing at times. Made in Abyss is one of my favorite animes but it has at least three scenes of the 12-year-old main character naked. Usually loli characters are at least covered up (like Kanna in Dragon Maid) but sometimes it’s ambiguous whether the appeal is just cute or if it’s meant to appeal to the viewer in a romantic or sexual way. The Rising of the Shield Hero is a problematic anime in a lot of ways but it raises eyebrows that the main character, Naofumi, is about twenty years old and his companions are a girl of twenty who he met when she was ten (Raphtalia) and two ten-year-old girls (Filo and Melty). He doesn’t show much interest in them and is kind of cold to them, but they all seem to have a crush on him, with Filo trying to get him to sleep in the same bed as her and Melty telling him to call her by her first name (which is a big deal since she’s a princess).

Hentai with young characters is legal in Japan and the US because it’s animated and no real children were harmed in its production, so it’s not really necessary to have a pretext, but if an anime is aiming to be on mainstream outlets it needs to be low-key. I often get the sense that an anime is trying to balance mainstream acceptability with subtle appeals to consumers with pedophilic tastes and it feels… weird if you’re not part of that audience.

There are also some anime that follow in Lolita‘s footsteps and blend pedophilia with horror (more literal, in these cases). One of these is Happy Sugar Life, in which a homicidal teenager kidnaps a child and has a romantic relationship with her. It’s not too bad because it’s clear that what the main character is doing is wrong, but it still shows parts where their relationship is depicted romantically. Another one is Saya no Uta, a visual novel about a teenager who sustains head trauma that causes him to see the normal world as a hellscape of oozing flesh and see Lovecraftian monsters as normal people. The only Lovecraftian monster/normal human he sees for most of the novel is a young girl named Saya. Her character design is very similar to young girls in horror movies, as she wears a white nightgown, and her hair seems arranged into animal ears, a hint that she’s not quite human. There are some graphic sex scenes between the main character and Saya (though the game gives the option to skip them). It seems to be taking the idea of young girl as demoniac seductress (a nymphet?) to the extreme. 

Anime’s concept of the loli character comes not directly from Lolita but from Russell Trainer’s The Lolita Complex, which was a nonfiction psychology/crime book about “real-life Lolitas and Humberts”. I started reading a bit of it on Amazon, and it seems like it’s trying to normalize pedophilia by showing how older men have been with young girls throughout history and in different cultures. As far as I read, there was no condemnation or even a fig leaf of “this is bad, but…” The Lolita Complex was also published by Lolita’s first publisher, Olympia Press.

I wonder if anime would have been the same without Lolita, or if Lolita’s legacy led to the sexualization of young girls in anime? In The Tale of Genji, Genji falls in love with Murasaki when he’s eighteen and she’s nine years old and he raises her to be his ideal woman, so it’s definitely been around in Japanese culture a long time.

Lolita makes us ask some questions:

1. Can art ever be bad enough to be a crime in itself?

Reality’s influence on art is pretty obvious, but art’s influence on reality is less clear. Would some men be sexually interested in little girls without Lolita? Probably. Did Lolita encourage men in their interest in little girls? Maybe. However, I don’t think media alone is powerful enough to change a person’s sexual preferences—gay people are inundated with media romanticizing straight sex, but that doesn’t change their sexuality. Pundits have long blamed video games for gun violence, but there’s still no scientific basis for that. The link from media to crime is tenuous.

That said, people talking about this issue tend to focus on how pedophilic art could help pedophiles not act on their desires, but it’s also possible that pedophilic art could awaken desires that weren’t present before or inflame existing desires.

2. Should the artist be held accountable for not just what their art is, but for how their art is interpreted?

Lolita inspired The Lolita Complex, which inspired lolicon anime, which encourages viewers to see young women as romantically or sexually desirable. Nabokov might have meant for Lolita to depict the horror of pedophilic relationships, but he couldn’t control how people like Maurice Girodias interpreted his work as romantic. Even if Lolita itself isn’t immoral, it could be said that Nabokov opened a Pandora’s Box.

Authors and artists are in a tough position these days, when the trend in criticism is to look at a work’s social implications. I think on the whole it’s good that we are focusing on that because biases can be transmitted via media and we’re finally starting to address some biases that have gone unchallenged for so long, but I also sympathize with creators who have to juggle trying to create high-quality work while keeping in mind the societal effects of that work. I think right now we’re seeing a lot of work that is both high-quality and socially aware and it’s fantastic from a consumer’s perspective.

But it is challenging from a creator’s perspective… when you write, you draw on your unconscious, your culture, your past, your fears, your desires… writing creatively is very revealing, and some of the things revealed might be ugly. I think there is value to being honest and striving to create fiction that rings true.

However, creators do bear responsibility for the societal effects of their creations (whether they want that responsibility doesn’t matter, that’s not how responsibility works). I think it’s fine to create anything as long as it’s going to live in a desk drawer, but when you decide to make it public that’s when you need a good editor with an eye for politics as well as proofreading (hi, I edit!).

So, should Lolita have stayed locked in a desk drawer? My gut feeling is “no, because it’s so pretty” but considering how the concept of a Lolita has entered our vocabulary as “a precociously seductive girl” it seems like Lolita has taken on a life of its own beyond the book that may contribute to the further sexualization and victimization of girls. It’s interesting that the Merriam-Webster definition says “the word is used in contemporary writing without connotations of victimization.” Maybe Sarah Weinstein’s beef is not with Lolita the book, but with the concept of Lolita, which erases the victimization part of Lolita and Sally Horner’s story. Maybe the focus when writing stories about pedophilia should be on not erasing the pain the victim feels.