The women in Lolita: a violent discourse about the female sexuality

Abstract

This article intends to construe a psychoanalytical reading about the women in the literary work Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1955. The book is the autobiography of Humbert Humbert, 38, whose love object is a 12-year-old girl whom that he names as a nymphet. The narrator argues for the existence of two different female categories. The first would be attributed to adult women, named as palliative agents as permitted by the Law to have sexual relations with men. The second to diabolical nymphets, their true object of desire. Starting from a Freudolacanian reading about the feminine and supported by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s studies on the categories of women’s social representation, this paper will return to the narrator Humbert Humbert, creator of such categories of the feminine, to investigate concept about fetishism. At the end of the work, we were able to realize that the discourse about female sexuality is constituted for the exclusive benefit of Humbert Humbert, who determines and enjoys the naming of women, that is, by talking about the feminine, the narrator helps us to produce a knowledge, in fact, about male sexuality.