One Page Annotation

Dr. Sexson asked us to annotate a single page from Lolita. I have procrastinated, sadly, this project for some time now, but in the spirit of putting Lolita to rest, if only for a moment, here are my discoveries from page 45 of Part One.

(Some of my annotations may echo Alfred Appel's. Rather than glancing to the back for every line, I simply researched whatever caught my attention as I scanned the page, line by line for all those hidden gems and details).

"Look, make Mother take you and me to Our Glass Lake tomorrow".
>Humbert misspells Hourglass Lake as Our Glass Lake. The hourglass symbol implied in the first lines of the Foreword with these words, "the Confession of a White Widowed Male" (3). The White Widowed Male references the Black Widow Spider, whose markings greatly resemble an hourglass.

"The leafage of a voluminous elm played its mellow shadows upon the clapboard wall of the house. Two poplars shivered and shook."

>The elm tree is said to signify "strength of will and intuition," however, the poplar reference, a recurrent symbol in the novel, holds much more significance.
>Poplars are sacred to Hercules, as he wore a crown of poplar leaves around his head when performing one of his labors in the underworld. The legend says the leaves are darker on the top due to the flames of Hades and lighter on the bottom because they were drenched with Hercules' sweat. Another legend tells of how the nymph Leuce was turned into a white poplar either by Persephone or by her abductor, Hades himself. The reference here to the abduction of a young girl by an older man parallels Lolita's abduction by Humbert Humbert.

"'Little Carmen' record"
> Carmen (in Italian or Spanish "carmel" or "carmelo"). The Hebrew form, Karmel means "garden", perhaps a reference to the garden of Eden. There are numerous references to Eden and temptation throughout the novel (see apples, the color red, garden references, and the line "when I stood Adam-naked" on pg 299). In Latin, the name means "song". In several cases the name is used for both men and women, making it ambiguous. We see here a reference to Quilty's own ambiguous name, as Clare can be used for women as well. On page 61, the Carmen song itself foreshadows Quilty's death in the lines, "And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen".
> Carmen here also refers to the violent opera by Georges Bizet.

"finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she andL. had seen"
> Though I could not find a reference to the exact movie Humbert describes, this article goes into the various movie references in the entirety of Lolita.

"when I had ocmpletely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses"
>The reference here is, again, to the spider symbol. Humbert traps unknowing Lolita in his devious web.

"I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin"
> Here is a picture of a gooseberry. Though I could find no definite symbolic significance, the fruit itself greatly resembles that of the pomegranate. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Persephone eats pomegranate seeds in Hades, forcing her to return and stay there one month for every seed eaten, explaining the seasons. The reference to Hades and Persephone has particular significance in this novel (see above).