The 50th Year of Lolita: A Discussion of the Two Films and the Book

Most of us will remember our first love. Our first non-paternal love stays with us forever. Whether first love is a soft memory or a life-long obsession, society’s attitudes of first love’s importance changes with time. There is on one extreme, a medieval notion of first love, loosely defined as loving one person, only once. Contrasted with the liberal practice of free love in the sixties that claimed as long as you have love for everyone your physical actions are dismissed because you have universal love for the world inside your body. Modern ides of first love obviously fall some where in the middle. How can love so dominate a persons thought?

The emotional intensity we can display in the first post-pubescent relationship we experience will scar our emotional skin. Because we have no wear or age to this skin, any new mark, especially the first will be etched into memory. Whether good or bad. “It is not, Celia(Lolita), in our power…To say how long our love will last; It may be we within the hour… May lose those joys we do now taste…”(1) Sir George Etherege understands the intensity that a new first love can invoke. He also comments on the extreme anxiety one can face in light of the glorious first union coming to an end. The failure to find these feelings in subsequent relations would have the parties involved feeling that they have failed at love completely. Countless writings over centuries contest loves’ power. After understanding that, one should sympathize with Humbert Humbert’s layered love of a young girl in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.