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The title character of Lolita is as controversial and complicated a character as exists in 20th-century literature. She is controversial for reasons that were obvious even in 1955 when Nabokov made the decision to center his book on a sexually active (barely) teenage girl. What makes Dolores “Lolita” Haze complicated is that she simultaneously inhabits two spaces, with the first being what the deranged pedophile Humbert thinks her to be—which, unfortunately, is best summed up by the dubious word he uses to describe her: “nymphet.” The novel is, after all, Humbert’s telling of his depraved story, so we cannot avoid the repellent fact he is attracted to Lolita precisely because in his eyes (the novel’s point of view) she is his ideal combination of childishness and seductiveness.
The other space that Lolita inhabits is what the reader sees: she is a victim. To the non-pedophile, she is a rather ordinary American girl of her age (which starts at 12 in the novel). She adores popular culture, enjoys mingling freely with other people, and, like many prepubescent girls, has a tendency toward drama. However, when she shouts and rebels against Humbert, she exhibits more than the frustration of an ordinary adolescent: she clearly feels trapped by her arrangement with Humbert, but she is powerless to extricate herself. As the novel progresses, the abuses of Lolita compound and what we end up with is a young girl whose life is destroyed not because of anything she does or doesn’t do (regardless of what Humbert might think) but because she was exploited by an unhinged man who is clearly a malefactor no matter how well he happens to dress and speak.
