Alisa Scott
A conflict’s advancement within a novel is the direct result of a protagonist’s decision-making process. When an antihero is motivated by his or her vices, he or she may demonstrate a story’s deeper meaning while negatively impacting other characters. The protagonists of Frankenstein and Lolita, Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Humbert Humbert, worsen their struggles by traumatizing the Creature and Dolores Haze. Though the protagonists’ treatment of their victims is significantly different, with Frankenstein depriving affection and Humbert providing excessive, immoral affection, their conditioning ultimately results in violent outbursts inflicted by trauma. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the Creature and Dolores Haze serve as punishment for the novels’ anti-hero protagonists because they are misguided victims who respond appropriately to their captor’s vices.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s unwavering ambition is driven by a desire to create life without aid from a supernatural force. Victor craves validation from a scientific endeavor, declaring, “no father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s” (33). Eventually, he is forced to acknowledge his flawed skill. After first observing the Creature, “the beauty of the dream vanished,” and Victor’s pride is diminished (36). Chris Baldick states, “The parts, in a living being, can only be as beautiful as the animating principle which organizes them…. [I]n Victor’s creation, from tormented isolation and guilty secrecy, the resulting assembly will only… display its moral ugliness” (175). Victor Frankenstein victimizes the Creature by avoiding responsibility and willfully causing harm. The Creature is genuinely distraught, stating, “feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept” (70). Frankenstein presents himself as a prideful, self-distinguished individual, a character deserving of the novel’s conflict.
Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, Humbert Humbert displays zealous adoration for his victim. After first seeing her, he says, “I find it most difficult to express with adequate force that flash, that shiver, that impact of passionate recognition” (39). Humbert’s attraction to prepubescent girls has led him to commit unjustifiable perversion, and he presents himself as a disturbing character who is also deserving of the novel’s conflict. As Charles Mitchell notes, “The beautiful female is the ideal alter self which the male longs to become or to unite with through sexual ritual” (330). Since he never finishes copulating with Annabel Leigh as a young boy, Humbert uses Dolores as a medium to indulge in his lust; he reveals “that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since- until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). Mitchell continues: “In despair, man rejects his finite limitations… by inventing an image of his infinite self, thereby creating or recreating himself” (329). Since Humbert has been consistently limited by societal rules, he is relieved by Dolores. Similar to Frankenstein’s Creature, Dolores Haze is Humbert’s creation and the adaptation of an ideal sexual partner.
Though Frankenstein and Humbert inflict harm differently, the Creature and Dolores Haze’s reactions are strikingly similar. Despite being presented as traumatized victims who endure the vices of their captors in isolation, it can be argued that they also act as the novels’ antagonists. Frankenstein’s creation focuses on punishing the doctor throughout the plot: “I will work at your destruction… so that you curse the hour of your birth” (102). The Creature is the epitome of a brute despite displaying a profound, human-like consciousness and sense of morality: “Although Shelley does not ground her Monster in reality, she does use the Monster as a way to reveal how human social acceptance has the power to determine the outcome of an individual’s life” (Lancaster 134). The Creature resorts to violence because he is reminded of his poor experience with Frankenstein’s immediate rejection, allowing these feelings to resurface and manifest after being rejected by the De Lacey family. He recounts, “he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb… But my heart sunk within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained” (95). By sparing Felix, a stranger who beats him, and murdering William, an innocent child who is only guilty by association, the Creature sheds his victim complex by strategically deciding how he will cause others harm.
The Monster’s actions begin to complement his physical appearance and validate Victor’s initial disgust. Though the Creature is undoubtedly wrong, he is more of a disregarded victim than an antagonist: “Unfeeling, heartless creator! you had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad… for scorn and horror of mankind” (98). Even after realizing his creation’s proclivity for violence, Frankenstein chooses to worsen the plot’s conflict by continuing to deprive the Creature of affection. The doctor is disappointingly self-absorbed. William’s death and Justine’s indirect murder reveal the innate evil of homicide, but Elizabeth’s murder was not an irrational act. If the Creature is not allowed to receive redemption or partake in an exchange of humanizing love, the individual who deprives him is unworthy of such affection.
Dolores Haze does not terrorize other characters in Lolita, as does Frankenstein’s Monster, but she still has observable, antagonistic qualities. While residing in the Haze family’s home, Humbert begins to initiate subtle and extreme sexual exploration. On one occasion, he admits to secretly touching Dolores’s bare back through her shirt while speaking with Charlotte. His experiences become more explicit: “every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to… improve the secret system of tactile correspondence… between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its cotton frock” (59). After his nymphet leaves for summer camp, Humbert’s sexual frustration worsens, and his love life is reduced to the “repugnant flesh of Charlotte which Humbert repeatedly but involuntarily possessed” (Michell 331). Dolores’s antagonistic qualities become evident before her departure when she reciprocates Humbert’s actions. Humbert recalls, “she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of dark male jaws” (66). Humbert and Dolores’s sexual endeavors seem to be complementary because of their curiosity.
Dolores continues to abandon her victim complex by being promiscuous. Humbert says, “Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed- during one schoolyear- to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks” (184). Dolores’s surface-level actions are not representative of underlying issues which construct her victim complex. Though Dolores appears to be antagonistic for driving Humbert to madness with her sexuality, she is not pleasing Humbert for her own enjoyment; she is coping with abuse. After having another erotic experience following Charlotte’s death, Humbert admits, “She saw the stark act merely as part of a youngster’s furtive world, unknown to adults” (133). Dolores is an immature child being exploited by a disturbed man, and her own disturbance is evident to those around her. Ms. Pratt from the Beardsley School tells Humbert, “both teachers and schoolmates find Dolly antagonistic, dissatisfied, cagey- and everybody wonders why you are so firmly opposed to all the natural recreations of a normal child” (196). Clearly, it is wrong to perceive Dolores, a young, sexually inexperienced child, as a tyrant committing sexual misconduct, especially when she has fallen prey to a sexual predator.
Julian Connolly, the author of an introductory text to Lolita, mentions “Leslie Fiedler’s astonishing critique: ‘Annabel [Leigh] as nymphomaniac, demonic rapist of the soul- such is the lithe, brown Campfire Girl’ and the idea that audiences may view Dolores as a stereotypical, rebellious girl despite being abused” (56). Stephen Blackwell also describes Lolita’s antagonistic qualities: “Lolita turns the tables on the man who has hunted her: she becomes the huntress” by initiating her first sexual encounter with Humbert (279). In the Beardsley School production of “The Enchanted Hunters,” created by Clare Quilty, Dolores is given the part of a farmer’s daughter who successfully puts hunters in a trance. Quilty’s inspiration for the enchantress is Dolores, and her role in the play is reminiscent of her relationship with Humbert (Blackwell 279). Connolly notes that critics who view Dolores as an antagonist “have been taken in by Humbert’s pronounced anxiety about the loose morals he perceives in Dolly and the teenagers who surround her” later in the novel (56). Dolores’s victimhood is questionable because her unusual receptiveness to Humbert’s desires and the romanticized, unreliable narration from Humbert overshadow her trauma. However, once again, it is simply unjust to perceive a victim of abuse as a predator.
Dr. Frankenstein and Humbert Humbert’s shared, destructive behavior mainly impacts the Creature and Dolores Haze, but it also affects the protagonists towards the endings of Frankenstein and Lolita. By allowing themselves to become conditioned by their vices of pride and lust, the protagonists must suffer the inevitable consequences of their actions. After losing track of the Creature, Frankenstein has a new, self-destructive mission to find his creation and end its tyranny. He says, “Never will I omit my search, until he or I perish” (147). Since the conflict of Frankenstein has worsened, the doctor has become a fugitive bound to the Monster’s actions, a form of punishment Frankenstein must face for succumbing to his own vanity. Similarly, Humbert Humbert dedicates himself to finding his doppelganger, Clare Quilty, for stealing Lolita; earlier in the novel, Humbert steals Dolores from her ordinary life, and in like manner, his equal decides to do the same. Humbert states, “To myself I whispered that I still had my gun, and was still a free man- free to trace the fugitive” (247). Victor and Humbert’s objectives display their lack of growth as characters and offer the impression that their punishments are well deserved.
Despite experiencing traumatic events, the Monster and Lolita do not find pleasure in the suffering of their captors. Though they initially express anger and resentment for being wronged, the alleged antagonists are surprisingly respectful. After seeing that Victor has passed away, the Creature shows signs of mourning and regret for leading him on a silly manhunt, admitting, “I […] irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst” (158). He even wants to die following his creator’s death. Dolores Haze is also respectful when she meets Humbert as Mrs. Schiller. Earlier in the novel, Humbert describes her outburst: “She said I had attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother’s roomer. She said she was sure I had murdered her mother” (205). Dolores could easily dismiss Humbert and bring up the past, but she calmly declines his request to live with him again.
When antihero protagonists are rightfully confronted by characters they have wronged, it may become difficult to decide if victims of the protagonists’ actions are antagonists; there may not always be a clear differentiation between the two. Dolores and Frankenstein’s Monster possess traits associated with typical antagonists because they counteract the protagonists’ actions. When presented with brutality, both victims act harshly and eventually have the great ability to become superior and to victimize their abusers. Victor Frankenstein and Humbert Humbert create conflict, and the Creature and Dolores Haze are victims who respond appropriately to their vices.
Works Cited
Baldick, Chris. “Assembling Frankenstein.” Hunter, pp. 173-182.
Blackwell, Stephen Hardwick. Fine Lines: Vladimir Nabokov’s Scientific Art, Yale UP, 2016.
Connolly, Julian W. “Who Was Dolly Haze?” A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s “Lolita,” Academic Studies Press, 2009, pp. 53–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxsk0k.10.
Lancaster, Ashley Craig. “From Frankenstein’s Monster to Lester Ballard: The Evolving Gothic Monster.” The Midwest Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, 2008, p. 132-148. Literature Resource Center, https://www.pittstate.edu/engl/midwest.html.
Mitchell, Charles. “Mythic Seriousness in Lolita.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 5, no. 3, 1963, pp. 329–343. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40753768.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. Random House, 1955.
Hunter, J. Paul, editor. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1996.