short paper

Lolita and The Little Mermaid

It would seem that nothing in Nabokov’s Lolita is written into the novel purely by chance, instead every one of the intricate facets carries with it great purpose and meaning. Due to this no simple sentence can be looked over without further examination, so when Humbert Humbert buys Lolita a book for a gift it is guaranteed that the book holds certain meaning in the story. Humbert narrates, “I bought Lo, for her thirteenth birthday, a de luxe volume with commercially “beautiful” illustrations, of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.” (pg.174) It is from this line that one can begin to see the references to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid throughout the story of Lolita.
The similarities drawn between the two characters of Lolita and Ariel are numerous, Lolita is described as a charming dancer throughout the story just as the character of Ariel is said to be the most graceful dancer ever seen, a skill which she must utilize as she is unable to speak. Further the two are both described as young princesses, Humbert calls Lolita “My Frigid Princess” (pg 166) and “A fairy princess” (pg 52) and Ariel is the youngest daughter of the merman king, a beautiful mermaid princess. Humbert notes on the fairy tale aspect of his labeling of Lolita as a princess saying, “And as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess.” (Nabokov, 39) Humbert here seems to acknowledge the fabled sense he gives to both himself and Lolita, he later even describes himself as crying “merman tears” (pg. 255) for Lolita after he has lost her. Near the end of the novel Humbert visits a married, pregnant Lolita and attempts to persuade her to return with him by offering her a clichéd fairytale ending saying “Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.” (pg.278) In a even more blatant illustration of the fairy-tale theme between Humbert and Lolita, Humbert describes himself as a type of prince charming, “What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was.” (Nabokov, 111)
As Humbert refers to Lolita as his little “princess” and even “my little Creole,” (Nabokov, 174) the prince in The Little Mermaid calls Ariel “his little foundling.” Both female characters are made into subordinate objects that both of the Male characters take advantage of. While Ariel wants to “enchant a mortal heart” in order to gain an eternal soul it would seem that Lolita wants to do the same in order to seem like an adult, like one of the movie stars that she loves to read about. Both Lolita and Ariel though are in the end destroyed by the “prince” characters though, just as Ariel is unable to return to the sea and her life as a mermaid, Lolita is unable to return to her childhood and a normal life. The Prince in The Little Mermaid breaks Ariel’s heart by marrying another, thereby killing her and ruining her ability to gain an eternal soul. And by taking away Lolita’s childhood essentially through raping her, Humbert destroys her soul and in the end she too dies.
While the word Nymph is used as a synonym for mermaid, the word enchantress is used as a description for both characters. Both Lolita and Ariel are portrayed by their narrators as enchantresses, but they are also similarly victims.