The portrayal of a child gone bad, offering the ultimate sin to man is no mistake. Humbert describes her appearance:“She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.”Lolita is a young American flirt who flaunts countless erotic signs in an attempt to make herself desirable. Hence the three adjectives used by Humbert to describe the apple which is objectively beautiful, artistically vulgar and superfluous in this context, but marvelously appropriate and functional in this scene. Lolita is no longer a vulgar little flirt but the archetypal seductress and temptress, Eve in the Garden of Eden. Humbert, the protagonist, mocked by Humbert the narrator, is too excited sexually to be distracted by such clichs. The apple serves as a prop in a first erotic exchange: Lolita tosses it up as if she were juggling with it, he catches it, and she begs him to give it back: “I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under thin crimson skin.” “Delicious” does not only designate a species of apples but also, metaphorically, the penis which, in the present scene will be turned into a poetic object. It is remarkable how Nabokov gradually replaces the clichs lavishly displayed by Lolita on herself and around her by a subtle play of superimposed images, thereby showing the difference between the vulgar yet “fey” nymphet and the refined connoisseur. Here the narrator does not dissociate himself from his protagonist self: he unambiguously brings his personal contribution to the staging of this poetic and erotic scene in which the reader finds it increasingly difficult to dissociate his aesthetic from his erotic pleasure. The sc...
