Personally
I think this notion of legal consent is very interesting, and sort of
co-wafts into the other thing Jansy brought up about it seeming odd to
her that H.H. was only in jail for murder and that his affair with
Lolita came out via his freely given confession. About that H.H. was
not, as someone else suggested, ever convicted of Quilty's murder; he
had merely been arrested for it and died before trial. The reason H.H.
goes into the Lolita affair is to justify to a jury his murder of
Quilty. First Humbert sort of admits to his own sleaziness, mitigating
that with what people might see as a corruptness in Lolita, and then
showing us in the end how Quilty is somehow supposed to be worse than
H.H. Therefore, runs Humbert's reasoning, the murder doesn't really
matter. Remember, toward the end Humbert sentences himself to
thirty-five years for rape and lets himself off the hook entirely for
the killing. In terms of the realistic elements of the story, Humbert
is rhetorically using the sleazy tale of obsession and jealousy as a
diversionary tactic that lets him commit cold blooded murder with
impugnity. It's intriguing that H.H. claims to be against the death
penalty, and then carries out this exact sentence personally without a
second thought on Quilty. Some things that make all this weird is that
N., through H.H., ladles over the top of the account a fake symbolistic
narrative, in which H.H. vaguely implies that he can purify himself by
killing his dark side in the form of Quilty, his "brother", only of
course that's just a conceit. Also, attitudes about sex between those
above and under the "age of consent" have become even more grotesquely
and unnaturally hysterical in the years since Lolita's publication,
which I would not have thought possible. Not only in common talk, but
especially in fiction, it has become a matter of received wisdom that
child molestation or rape is just about the worst crime on the
planet, worse than murder, and that it can justify just about any
action--I've come across this maddening notion in numerous books of
varying quality in the last fifteen years: from the wonderfully trashy Hannibal
to Rule of the bone to Mystic River
child molestation either justifies anything a character does or
mystically rots their souls inside out. Isn't this what's underlying
Jansy's point about H.H. "only" be in jail for Q's murder? If I
understood the point, isn't this why it seems strange then for Humbert
to have gone into all that side business about his crimes against
Lolita, which to modern readers is really is far more damning than his
killing? I suspect that these days, because of the cut and dried way
people have to talk about "the age of consent" in public what N. meant
to complicate the notion of pure and simple innocence in the case of
Lolita has in some ways become officially moot, so that people may not
speak of their qualms about whether a little girl can or cannot seduce
an older man without being accused of sympathisizing with child rape,
even as they actually do
think it's possible and talk about it in crude terms in closed company.
This is an interesting legal and social development, which affects
responses to the book, I think.