So part of the significance of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is how our society has responded to it, and for a truly deep dive (that I’m in the process of going through, myself), check out the Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus which begins with the story of how Daniel Handler (that is Lemony Snicket) suggested Lolita to Jamie when she was still a kid looking for book recommendations.
Also as noted by Jamie, both the 1967 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation and the 1997 Adrian Lyne adaptation portray the story with Humbert Humbert as a sympathetic character (with James Mason and Jeremy Irons playing Humbert, respectively.)
So yeah, the story simultaneously invites the reader to walk a razor’s edge between sympathizing with a child predator and watching the story unfold the way one looks at an automotive collision, watching a monster deeply past the moral event horizon justifying his behavior.
Lolita doesn’t play out as a love story. Delores isn’t precocious or mature nor is she mentally equipped for an adult relationship, and yet Humbert insists his pursuit of Delores is proper and justified, despite not only Delores’ age and minor status, but also the power relationship, with Humbert the legal guardian of Delores. The story is psychological horror.
And the story plays out showing in older Delores the psychological consequences of child sexual abuse. This is not a story of a May / December couple in love living happily ever after. Despite Lolita being described as an Erotic Novel by critics and literary indexes.
But then, in the 1980s, one in three American women surveyed were victims of child sexual abuse. Also in 1987 Suzanne Vega put out the song Luka highlighting a long standing culture that whatever happens in your house is none of my business (🐸☕), and before the Satanic Panic and the SRA scares, CSA was not an oft-prosecuted crime (it was assumed incest laws covered them) and the believe was kids who were victimized not by drunken daddy were instead victimized by strangers in white vans offering candy (rather than say, John Wayne Gacy, who held frequent neighborhood barbecues, or the coach of girls’ physical education). Only in the 1990s and the new century have we taken CSA and human trafficking of children seriously, and then, not very, considering how some US states are letting kids work in hazardous conditions and letting children marry. So it doesn’t really surprise me that Lolita is thought of as romantic or erotic even when it is the testimony of an abuser.
Sadly, no. The entire Common Era (that is, the one defined by Christianity) has made sexual hang-ups the social norm throughout all of western society (and eastern, once we started trading there). Combined with the industrial revolution (which moved us away from livestock getting it on, which helped normalize sex), we don’t know how to speak plainly without automatically painting ourselves as sluts and perverts.
It gets worse with the rise of far-right cultural identity movements like the transnational white power movement / Christian nationalist movement in the US, which intrinsically gatekeep and seek to prosecute anyone outside the mainstream norm, and tend to walk back sexual equality, including sexual liberty, suffrage and personhood.
That said, some places we’re actually teaching consent to kids, starting outside sexual context (e.g. can I hug you? You can play with my toys if you like) and including these lessons all the way through adolescence, which might not only inform intimacy, but contracts and terms of service with commercial interests. In contrast those of us without consent training just learned to tolerate transgressions of our privacy and our rights because the serving companies held the power.
With the SCOTUS ruling of Trump v. United States (2024) fresh on our minds, and awareness of the nearness of tyranny, we expect autocracy and hard times ahead, but may emerge from it a more enlightened, more cooperative society who is able to speak more openly about our needs without being judged.
But it’s going to get worse before it gets better.