For starters, she's too young to consent to anything adult and has a perfectly natural crush on her step-father, who isn't even really that. He's just some handsome stranger who came to stay at the house (perfectly portrayed by Jeremy Irons, if you haven't seen this modern adaptation of Lolita, I highly recommend it), and secondly, Lolita has just lost her mother and been removed from everything she had known her entire life - her friends, her neighborhood, her house, her family. She is traveling, full-speed ahead across the country on the run with a man who though yes, he loves her on some level, is still a bit of pervert to say the very least.

What Nabokov does to threaten us in a way, to make us complicit, and the threatening thing about the film adaptation of Lolita with Jeremy Irons and cast is that Humbert Humbert is an attractive and charming and desirable man and one can easily see how any teenage girl would be attracted to such a man. It makes sense and by making us see this, by making us see Lolita's come-hither stares and pouts and even tantrums all designed for Humbert's attention, we are made by the author complicit in the crime of incest and rape.

We keep reading. Most of us ] not yet horrified, we see Lolita's role as much as Humbert's (to not see it would be to give the book a shallow read, but again, this does not mean that she can consent to anything that happens; she is still a victim here, though confusingly so is Humbert - though he more of circumstance.) The best we can say of Humbert is that he is so pathetic, so desperately in love with his nymphet, his ideas of who she is and the memory of Annabel from long ago (a childhood memory) that he is slave to his own pathology. He lives in constant dread of Lolita's eventual and inevitable growing up - her metamorphosis and eventual leaving of him, and we can only watch as he begins to slowly lose his mind.

The same is true of Charlotte Vale in Now Voyager only this time, it is the mother who keeps her confined in her cocoon. In Now Voyager, we are told time and time again that "every family has one, you know... a spinster aunt" and somewhere in there, perhaps we see a bit of ourselves, or I suspect that some women who see the film and like it see themselves at some point in their life, if not now, then years prior.

Mother Vale, like Humbert Humbert, wants to keep her chrysalis intact. She does not want any metamorphosis on her watch and she will not have her own daughter changing into an independent and most importantly, free individual, and while one may not have thought to compare Now Voyager and Lolita at first glance, on closer inspection the two stories are not dissimilar. Charlotte Vale is not a victim of incest, true, and nor is she raped, but she is a victim of a kind of emotional abuse at the hands of her own mother who tries to control everything, including her daughter's sexuality, that this almost borders on a kind of emotional incest. When Charlotte returns from her cruise, a full-=fledged butterfly, in love with J.D. wearing her Jolie Fleur perfume that he bought her with her hourglass figure and the rest of it, the mother wishes to attribute the change to "severe illness" in which "after severe illness one often loses one's hair and eyebrows." she is also told to "wear your glasses, that way you'll be less of a shock to the others" at the party they are having to welcome Charlotte home.