Lolita through a Marxist-feminist lensAfter looking beyond its controversial sexual nature, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita can be read as a critique of the capitalist system. Nabokov uses the relationship between the novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, and the novel's namesake, Lolita, as an extended metaphor to show the inherent exploitative nature of the system in a way that shocks the reader out of their false consciousness, making the former a man in a position of power - a repugnant and manipulative pedophile - and the latter a young victim - as well as a spoiled, vapid and rebellious child. Each is nothing more than a commodity to the other: Lolita is the perfect consumer and Humbert Humbert is a privileged man who sees others only as objects to be used or consumed. Humbert Humbert is the definitive representation of a privileged capitalist individual. Mostly, as the novel's narrator, he has complete power over the audience's perspective of the story. He grew up immersed in the upper middle class: his father owned a resort hotel on the Riviera, and was constantly surrounded by his wealthy patrons. As a boy he studied at an English school, then at a French secondary school in Lyon, before attending college in both London and Paris. He studied English literature and is a master of the language. Language is an important tool in manipulating both those around him and the reader, using cunning wordplay and casually inserting French, German, and sometimes Latin into his speech. After the death of Lolita's mother, Charlotte, Kinsey 2, Humbert Humbert tells the story of his relationship with her to his two closest friends, John and Jean Farlow. Ultimately, Jean is convinced that Humbert Humbert is Lolita's real father (101...... half of the newspaper ...... union or revolution. Lolita ends up working in various restaurants for two years, before getting married and move into a “board shack” (269) Kinsey 5Humbert Humbert, with a guilty conscience and the knowledge that he will go to prison for murder, gives her, her husband, and her unborn child four thousand dollars, even though she he dies while giving birth and never gets to enjoy it. It could be read as a symbol of the fruitlessness of the capitalist system. However, the reader's eyes have been opened to the corruptive and exploitative nature of capitalism, to one's consumption habits and how. these add up. The problem simply promotes its own repression. What we do with this new enlightenment is up to them, but the more this knowledge can be conveyed through literature, the more likely we are to move towards an equal society...