Misbegotten Covers: What the Design of Lolita Says About Society
[A condensed version of this article was originally published on a personal blog, now deleted. This article talks about rape and rape culture.]
No one knows how to handle Lolita. The book has been corrupted innumerable times, whether it be by the hands of Hollywood, magazine editors or just hearsay. (Magazine editors more than most: the most iconic image in all of Lolitadom is Sue Lyons sucking a lollipop in heart-shaped glasses — an image from a promotional photoshoot, not an “official” source.) This has left the book decidedly confused — and nowhere is this confusion more evident than in its covers.
Lolita has had an awful track record when it comes to covers. This repository of covers only confirms what we already knew; the vast majority of Lolitas buy into the hype, and feature softcore photographs of twelve-year-old girls (or worse, twenty-year-olds) in scant clothing, often in a seductive pose.
This is problematic because it buys into the Humbert’s hype: that Dolores Hays seduced Humbert Humbert — that a twelve-year-old could somehow manipulate a forty-year-old man into raping her in a motel room. This is the narrative the film peddles, that Katy Perry and Lana del Ray peddle, that teenage girls on Wattpad must peddle.
(A sidenote: the Wattpad Lolitas is an interesting phenomenon that deserves its own article and seems to have come out of nowhere — who was teaching these girls that Lolita was an epic love story? Who was teaching these girls that Dolores Hays was a slut who’d have sex with any men who’d have her? Honestly, I have no idea. Most of these writers haven’t even read the book. My best guess is the media, but even that doesn’t fully explain it.)
Indeed, Nakobov foresaw this problem, and so gave directions for a cover:
I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.
These instructions were not followed. My god, there were girls. There were girls clinging onto an older man, there were girls posing, there were girls in bikinis, there were nubile twenty-somethings in the nude. (Like Lolita is a story about an adult woman. Don’t normalise this. (Unless your perceptions of sex are as skewed as mainstream society, Lolita can’t be normalised. Too bad most don’t read it and find this out.))
Somehow, the covers outpaced the book in term of erotic content: a child crying while getting fucked by a grown man is not erotic. No, not fucked. Raped. Dolores Hays was raped by her legal guardian/kidnapper in a motel room. It is sad, tragic — anything but erotic.
This is how our culture has co-opted the narrative of Lolita to confirm its deepest desires — that maybe children aren’t so innocent and maybe they just need a good fucking. Preferably from a grown man. We need only look at the case of the Long Island Lolita, where 16-year-old Amy Fisher was raped by Joey Buttafuoco. This was ignored completely by the media, in favour of salacious gossip. Was the gossip worth a child’s innocence?
Lolita is the most culturally important work on paedophilia we have — hell, maybe the most culturally important work on rape we have. The fact that these publishers — unanimously giants in the book world — have allowed the seminal work about rape to be marketed like a young adult comedy (bottom right) or an image of a rapist “saving” his victim (top left) is a disgrace.
And, ultimately, this is how we treat rape. Like something that can be marketed with bright colours because it doesn’t matter anyway, like the victim could ever be to blame for it because they’re a slut, or because of large or small or oval or green or whatever body parts. It doesn’t matter.
Dolores did not ask for it. And neither did any rape survivor.
