research paper topics about lolita

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: The Representation and the Reality Re-Examining Lolita In the Light of Research into Child Sexual Abuse

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science (IOSR-JHSS), Volume 25, Issue 8, Series 7 (August. 2020) 22-31, http://www.iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.25-Issue8/Series-7/C2508072231.pdf

10 Pages Posted: 17 Nov 2020

Lawrence Ratna

Independent

Date Written: 2020

Lolita has become a cultural icon, normalizing, sometimes celebrating, the sexualization of children — this is known as the Lolita effect. This study seeks to examine the role the novel and aspects of its scholarship have played in creating this effect. Combining textual analysis and a literature review, this study juxtaposes the fictive depictions of the novel with the actuality of abuse as delineated by research studies. These findings are contrasted with elements of the discourse that have influenced their interpretation. Significant levels of concordance were found, revealing that Nabokov had a remarkably prescient knowledge of the feelings and cognitions of an abuser, the strategies utilized in grooming, and the diagnostic category of hebephilia long before these issues were discovered by research. Given the novel‘s social and cultural impact, this paper calls for a re-examination of the relationship between the novel‘s fiction and the clinical reality of child sexual abuse.

Keywords: Pedophilia, Cultural Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Nabokov, Lolita

JEL Classification: 119,124,128,114

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — Lolita

Essays on Lolita

When it comes to writing an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel "Lolita," students often find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential essay topics to choose from. The novel, first published in 1955, has been the subject of much debate and discussion due to its provocative and unsettling subject matter. However, despite its controversial nature, "Lolita" remains a widely studied and critically acclaimed work of literature, making it an excellent choice for an academic essay.

In this article, we will explore a variety of potential essay topics related to "Lolita," as well as provide tips for choosing the best topic for your essay.

Before delving into specific essay topics, it's important to first consider the novel's major themes and motifs. "Lolita" is a complex and multi-layered work that touches on a wide range of topics, including obsession, desire, morality, and the nature of art and literature. Additionally, the novel raises important questions about the ethics of storytelling and the role of the reader in interpreting and understanding a narrative.

Potential Essay Topics

One potential essay topic could focus on the character of Humbert Humbert and his unreliable narration. Throughout the novel, Humbert presents himself as a sympathetic and tragic figure, claiming that his obsessive love for the young girl Dolores Haze, whom he nicknames "Lolita," is beyond his control. However, as readers, we are constantly reminded of Humbert's manipulative and predatory behavior, leading to questions about the reliability of his account. An essay could explore the ways in which Nabokov uses Humbert's narration to comment on the nature of storytelling and the power dynamics between author, character, and reader.

Another potential essay topic could center on the novel's portrayal of childhood and innocence. "Lolita" forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the sexualization of young girls and the exploitation of vulnerable individuals. An essay could analyze the ways in which Nabokov challenges traditional notions of innocence and purity, as well as the ethical implications of representing such taboo subjects in literature. Additionally, the essay could consider how "Lolita" has influenced discussions about the representation of childhood in art and media, particularly in the context of contemporary debates surrounding censorship and freedom of expression.

One of the most enduring themes in "Lolita" is the concept of forbidden love and taboo desires. Humbert's infatuation with Lolita is portrayed as both tragic and grotesque, and the novel raises important questions about the nature of love and attraction. An essay could explore the ways in which Nabokov uses Humbert and Lolita's relationship to comment on societal attitudes towards sexuality and the ways in which love can be twisted and distorted by external forces. Additionally, the essay could consider how "Lolita" has influenced the representation of taboo desires in literature and popular culture, and how the novel continues to challenge conventional notions of romantic relationships.

Of course, these are just a few potential essay topics related to "Lolita." When choosing a topic for your essay, it's important to consider your own interests and strengths as a writer, as well as the specific requirements of your assignment. Additionally, it can be helpful to conduct preliminary research to gain a better understanding of the existing scholarship on "Lolita" and to identify potential areas of inquiry that have not been thoroughly explored.

Writing an essay on "Lolita" presents a unique opportunity to explore a wide range of compelling and thought-provoking topics. By considering the novel's major themes and motifs, conducting thorough research, you can create an essay that is both intellectually rigorous and accessible to a wide audience. Whether you choose to explore the complexities of Humbert Humbert's narration, the novel's portrayal of childhood and innocence, or the theme of forbidden love and taboo desires, there are countless avenues for engaging with "Lolita" in a meaningful and impactful way. By approaching your essay with creativity, critical thinking, and a commitment to excellence, you can produce a piece of writing that contributes to the ongoing conversation surrounding this challenging and enduring work of literature.

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Vladimir Nabokov

1955, by Vladimir Nabokov

The protagonist and unreliable narrator, a French middle-aged literature professor under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, is obsessed with an American 12-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, whom he sexually molests after he becomes her stepfather. "Lolita" is his private nickname for Dolores.

The main themes of the novel include: language and communication, love, youth, innocence, justice and judgment, morality and ethics, and visions of America. Lolita is also filled with sordid subjects, including rape, murder, pedophilia, and incest.

Humbert Humbert, Dolores (Lolita) Haze, Clare Quilty, Charlotte Haze, Annabel Leigh, Valeria, Jean Farlow, John Farlow

The novel is narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with word play and his wry observations of American culture. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word that has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser-used "faunlet". Most writers see Humbert as an unreliable narrator and credit Nabokov's powers as an ironist.

The novel was adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and another film by Adrian Lyne in 1997. It has also been adapted several times for the stage and has been the subject of two operas, two ballets, and an acclaimed, but commercially unsuccessful, Broadway musical. It has been included in several lists of best books, such as Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, Bokklubben World Library, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, and The Big Read.

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” “And the rest is rust and stardust.” “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” “Words without experience are meaningless.”

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The Influence of American Popular Culture in Lolita

Colby payne.

This paper explores the role of popular culture in Lolita, as well as how perceptions of the text’s protagonists may shift based on the reader and time period.  “bicycle” by Conal Gallagher /  CC-BY 2.0.

Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita has faced controversy from its initial release in France; the book has given “rise to debates over censorship, pornography, appropriate subjects for fiction, and the definition of art and literature.” (Fine 196). Among the book’s most controversial elements is the fact that many readers find themselves reluctantly sympathizing with the book’s narrator, the pedophile Humbert Humbert. Lolita is rife with references to both high and low culture; references to American popular culture in particular are used by Humbert to characterize his stepdaughter and victim, Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze. These references both allow Humbert to justify his actions, and open him up to more sympathy from readers – a phenomenon which was particularly prominent at the time of the novel’s initial publication. However, in the present day, readings of the novel tend to lend more empathy to Lolita, perhaps due to the diversification of voices within academic and intellectual circles.

In the novel, Humbert recounts his abuse of 12-year-old Lolita while on trial for the murder of Lolita’s second, similarly inappropriate lover, Clare Quilty, who also serves as a double for Humbert. Humbert is a European émigré to America, and he never allows the reader to forget it, making frequent mention of his Old World manners and sensibilities. Humbert is a professor, with his principal focus being French literature. He laments of Lolita’s resistance to high culture, and consistently condescends Lolita’s mother Charlotte Haze, whom Humbert marries in an attempt to get closer to Lolita. To Humbert, Charlotte is “a wondrous example — an ideal type — of the person trying to be something other than herself” (37), as described by David Castronovo in his article “Humbert’s America”. Castronovo also describes Charlotte as “the embodiment of pretentiousness” (37); however, Humbert sees through this performative pretension to a deeply insecure woman trying to be more cultured than she is.

Humbert is also highly condescending towards Lolita’s tastes for American popular culture; on page 148, Humbert states that Lolita “was to whom ads were dedicated; the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster” (Nabokov 148). Humbert sees Lolita as a “disgustingly conventional little girl” (Nabokov 148), who enjoys “hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth” (Nabokov 148), and this disgusts him. Lolita and Humbert’s respective cultural tastes are perhaps best demonstrated in their radically different descriptions of one another; whereas Lolita thinks that Humbert looks like the movie idol she hangs on her wall, Humbert describes Lolita as having “the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty” (Nabokov 270) of “Botticelli’s russet Venus”. This demonstrates Humbert’s pretentious, and likely false, cultural approximations, alongside Lolita’s fairly typical American sensibilities. Daniel Horowitz’s book Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World suggests that Humbert’s view aligns with European perceptions of American popular culture, and America more broadly, in the post-war period; Horowitz quotes historian C. L. R. James, who states that many Europeans at the time attempted to mold America “into ‘old world’ categories, dismissing it as a brash, new society, a cultural wasteland deficient in all those features of social life which they identified with civilization.” (qtd. in Horowitz 109).

However, for all Humbert’s derision of American sensibilities and culture, he is not exempt from its influence; he agrees with Lolita with regards to his striking, movie-star good looks, and focuses on them significantly more than she does. Further, on page 222, while looking at a poster of a sex offender in a post office, Humbert informs the reader that “if you want to make a movie of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look”. This line shows that, for all that he pretends to be above American pop culture, Humbert is at least familiar with standard cinematic techniques and clichés, and is not above being influenced by Hollywood film just as Lolita is, given that they watch “one hundred and fifty or two hundred” films together in the course of a single year (170); for instance, Humbert’s description on page 156 of “ante-bellum homes […] the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor,” suggests familiarity with the features of such films. In his book The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s , M. Keith Booker states that Humbert is more naïve than Lolita given that “she is still able to perceive a difference between the world of ads, movies, and magazines and the real world in which she lives” (Booker 60), while Humbert “literally attempts to act out desires that, for Lolita, remain mere fantasies” ( ibid ).

Humbert’s actions in Lolita are obviously despicable and irredeemable, and often render the book difficult to read; he kidnaps and emotionally and sexually abuses his 12-year-old stepdaughter for two years. Not only that, but Humbert is also the narrator of the majority of the novel; thus, all the action of the novel is filtered through his twisted worldview. Most importantly, his narration, including the popular culture references, are crucial in shaping the reader’s perception of Lolita. In Gary Alan Fine’s book Difficult Reputations: Collective  Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial , he analyzes numerous reviews of the novel, written at the time of its release. Many reviewers have extremely negative perceptions of Lolita, indicating not only the impact of Humbert’s narration on Lolita’s characterization, but also how the reviewers’ own preconceptions and biases impact their interpretation.

Many of the reviews Fine examines, particularly favourable ones, depicted Lolita as “a sexually precocious, unpleasant, and ill-willed girl even though she is known only through Humbert’s presentation of her.” (Fine 198). One reviewer quoted in Fine’s book, Richard Schickel, went so far as to call Lolita “‘that most repugnant of all females, a mid-twentieth century pubescent American girl-woman,’ […] (Schickel 1957)” (Fine 201). Given that “in many reviews, positive statements about Humbert were accompanied by comparative assessments of Lolita’s faults” (Fine 202), it seems that many reviewers at the time of the novel’s release agreed with Humbert’s worldview and did not stop to consider how Humbert’s biases impacted their perception of Lolita; this could also explain why more modern readers struggle with their sympathy towards Humbert. In her 2016 article “Lolita Reading Lolita : Rhetoric of Reader Participation,” Kate Kokinova frames Humbert not only as a character, but as a narrative instrument who “appears to be just as interested in seducing and subordinating the reader as he is in seducing and subordinating Lolita.” This suggests that, particularly for readers who may see elements of themselves in Humbert, it is all too easy to be seduced by Humbert’s narration and disregard his heinous crimes. Articles such as Kokinova’s suggest that modern readers and scholars may analyze the text with more awareness of how Humbert manipulates the reader, perhaps reflecting the broader perspectives and experiences of such readers.

In her 2016 article “Lolita Reading Lolita : Rhetoric of Reader Participation,” Kate Kokinova frames Humbert not only as a character, but as a narrative instrument who “appears to be just as interested in seducing and subordinating the reader as he is in seducing and subordinating Lolita.”

Readers’ own biases can also help readers to justify or minimize the extent of Humbert’s actions allowing them to accept him as a more conventional protagonist. As Fine states, “Admirers of the book could not endorse Humbert’s socially unacceptable desires and behavior. They could, however, ignore, redefine, or justify them according to the prevailing moral standards of the time.” (Fine 97); though Fine’s text was published in 2001 and standards have evolved in the two decades since, such analysis of contemporaneous reviews remains relevant. Teenage girls are consistently stereotyped as vapid and easily influenced by popular culture, and Lolita is no exception; by defining Lolita in large part by her relationship to American consumerism and popular culture, Nabokov makes her easily influenced by readers’ previous notions about American teenage girls. Nabokov admitted ignorance of American youth culture, stating, “‘I did not know any American 12-year-old girls, and I did not know America; I had to invent America and Lolita.’ ( Strong Opinions 22)” (qtd. in Simonetti 151). This admission did not, however, stop many, though not all, contemporaneous and modern readers from interpreting the novel as depicting reality, and the “perception of Lolita’s disreputable qualities was sufficient to turn her into a character based on teenagers” (Fine 203) that readers imagined to be real. In his article “Artist in Exile: The Americanization of Humbert Humbert”, John Haegert states that Humbert’s “denigration of America is designed, at least in part, to rationalize his relationship with Lolita and endow his criminal conduct with a sense of high heroic purpose” (786); clearly, many readers, particularly those bearing similarities to Humbert, accept this at face value and treat Lolita in a similar manner, based on their own opinions of teenage girls and popular culture.

It is difficult to say whether or not Nabokov intended for Lolita to be viewed in such a derogatory manner, given the author’s staunch position as an aesthete and reluctance to acknowledge any deeper meaning or intended social message in his work. In fact, Nabokov wrote an entire essay, 1959’s “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” in which he “argues that the sole purpose of Lolita is “aesthetic bliss”” over any ethical or moral purpose (qtd. in Meek 153). However, as the fact that Nabokov felt the need to write an essay explaining his perspective on the novel suggests an assumption that readers will feel compelled to impose moral judgments on the text and its characters in one direction or another. As Michele Meek addresses in the article “Lolita Speaks: Disrupting Nabokov’s “Aesthetic Bliss”,” feminist scholars and readers in more recent years have encouraged reading the text through Lolita’s perspective and interpreting her as an abuse victim rather than as a love interest.

As feminist scholars responded to readings of the text which favour and sympathize with Humbert’s perspective, I wrote this essay in response to the teaching of Lolita in ENGL 100, where my professor repeatedly framed Humbert Humbert as objectively sympathetic despite the persistent resistance of students in the class to this idea. I think that varying interpretations of Lolita since its publication demonstrate the importance of diverse voices and perspectives and voices in academia; if the voices which dominate critical discourse belong to individuals who are at least superficially similar to Humbert Humbert, then critical interpretations are likely to assign their sympathy accordingly. With this paper I aimed to directly counter dominant narratives and assert my own perspective, one which may not be as commonly heard in academia.

If there is a moral value or social message in Lolita , it has certainly been influenced, for better or for worse, by the use of popular culture and the portrayal of Lolita as an American teenage girl. It is likely that many readers and reviewers have brought their own biases about these topics to their interpretations of Lolita; further, because many of them likely relate more to Humbert as a middle-aged, male ‘intellectual’, they are more likely to be sympathetic towards him, appreciate his European, high culture sensibilities, and accept his interpretations as the truth. However, as a young woman to whom popular culture has been very influential and important, it is much more difficult to relate to Humbert Humbert without considering my own similarities to Dolores Haze.

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This academic essay is licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC 4.0.

Booker, M. Keith. The Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s . Greenwood Press, 2002.

Castronovo, David. “Humbert’s America.” New England Review (1990-), vol. 23, no. 2, 2002, 33-41.

Fine, Gary Alan. Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and  Controversial . University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Haegert, John. “Artist in Exile: The Americanization of Humbert Humbert.” ELH, vol. 53, no. 3, 1985, pp. 777-794.

Horowitz, Daniel. Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World . University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Kokinova, Kate. “Lolita Reading Lolita : Rhetoric of Reader Participation.” Nabokov Studies , vol. 14, 2016.

Meek, Michele. “Lolita Speaks: Disrupting Nabokov’s “Aesthetic Bliss”.” Girlhood Studies , vol. 10, no. 3, 2017, pp. 152-167.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita . Random House, 1955.

Simonetti, Paolo. “The Maniac in the Garden: Lolita and the Process of American Civilization.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012, pp. 149-163

Colby Payne just finished her fourth year in the Honours English Literature program with a minor in Russian; she is particularly interested in exploring intersections between literature and pop culture. She previously served as co-Editor-in-Chief of UBC’s English undergraduate journal The Garden Statuary .

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Introduction

• Published: November 2002
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While the scandal and controversy sparked by Lolitas provocative subject has never fully abated, the critical acclaim it received during the 1960s and 1970s served to dampen, if not quell, the outrage expressed by some readers (and nonreaders) of the novel. By 1970, a mere dozen years after its American debut, Alfred Appel, Jr., published a hefty scholarly edition, The Annotated Lolita, adding to the novel’s three hundred pages of text nearly as many pages of scholarly notes and commentary.

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Lolita Speaks

Disrupting nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss”.

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Since Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 publication of Lolita , numerous feminist scholars have argued for rereading the novel from the girl’s point of view to understand Lolita not as a sexual agent, but as an incest victim. In this article, I examine how revisionary texts like Roger Fishbite (1999), Lo’s Diary (1999), and Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) give voice to the girl in the text, disrupting Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss” and emphasizing aspects of Lolita’s victimization. Ultimately, I discuss how a contemporary analytical shift from valuing the aesthetics to a consideration of the ethics of the novel has led to restricted critical readings of the narrative, which, nevertheless, remain open through the acknowledgement of the girl’s sexual desire and agency within these female authors’ revisionary texts.

Dating back several centuries (recall Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740), the trope of the sexual encounter between the young girl and her benevolent and/or malevolent father figure has epitomized a tangle of consent, agency, and coercion for the girl. As the quintessential twentieth-century text in this genre, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) has inspired abundant scholarly analyses, popular cultural critiques, and numerous novels, films, and other creative works. Lolita has also continued to evoke debate on how to read the text—both aesthetically and ethically. Although Lolita has been read as a “love story” ( Patnoe 1995: 83 ), many feminist scholars have urged readers to reconsider the text from the perspective of Lolita, as a child incest victim. In this article, I examine several revisionary texts that present Lolita’s voice as a first person narrator, such as Kim Morrissey’s Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) ; Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (published in Italian in 1995 and translated into English in 1999); and Emily Prager’s Roger Fishbite (1999) . I argue that these texts emphasize an ethical reading of Lolita by drawing attention to the girl’s victimization while, nonetheless, retaining notable ambiguities that acknowledge the girl’s sexual desire and agency.

• Aesthetics or Ethics?

In his 1959 essay, “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” Nabokov argues that the sole purpose of Lolita is “aesthetic bliss,” which he defines as “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (314–315). Nabokov states, “ Lolita has no moral in tow.” The novel, he argues, does not exist for any ethical purpose, but simply an aesthetic one. He describes himself as “neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction,” and states bluntly, “I detest symbols and allegories” (314). Here, Nabokov directly contests the novel’s foreword by John Ray, the imagined psychologist who introduces Lolita as a factual account. Ray insists that the book is first and foremost ethical; he writes, “Still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader” (4–5, emphasis added). Ray also describes the book’s aesthetic “magic,” but unlike Nabokov, Ray argues that it connects directly to the ethical impact of the text: “How magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!” (5). Quite clearly, Ray argues that his publishing the “case study” (4) of Lolita is ethical because, despite Nabokov’s claim, there is in fact a “moral in tow” for readers who appreciate both the ethics and aesthetics of the text.

Feminist criticism of Lolita in the 1980s and 1990s initially argued that Nabokov’s “declared dedication to ‘aesthetic bliss’” proved that “the novel’s design encourages readers to sympathize with the protagonist and artist-figure, Humbert Humbert, to the detriment of the child” ( Pifer 2005: 186 ). Linda Kauffman articulated the feminist academic debate about the novel in her essay, “Framing Lolita: Is There a Woman in the Text?” as she considers Lolita ’s erasure of its titular character, in particular how “through a variety of narrative strategies … the inscription of the father’s body in the text obliterates the daughter’s” ([1989]1992: 131). Kauffman suggests that Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss” is a “trap”—an ethical trap, perhaps—for “sophisticated readers of Lolita ,” who tend to sympathize with Humbert while “ignoring the pathos of Lolita’s predicament” (138–139). Kauffman argues that critics and readers “fail to notice that Humbert is not only a notoriously unreliable narrator but that he is an unreliable reader too” (135), especially of Lolita, whom he has not only “‘solipsized’ but annihilated” (136). In urging feminist scholars to “read against the text by resisting the father’s seductions,” Kauffman challenges feminist readers to understand “what [Lolita’s] victimization is like” (133). She insists that a feminist reading of Lolita must acknowledge that the novel is “not about love, but about incest” (131) and that Lolita is not a seductress or even a willing participant in Humbert’s executed fantasy. Similarly, Elizabeth Patnoe, in her essay “Lolita Misrepresented, Lolita Reclaimed: Disclosing the Doubles” locates the “problem” in widespread “misreadings” of the novel that have “embrace[d] what they consider the book’s pleasures” while “almost always skirt[ing] its pains—Lolita’s pains, as well as the readerly traumas associated with this novel” (1995: 116). Patnoe suggests that to read the text pleasurably through Humbert’s myopic vision is to fail to acknowledge how that pleasure comes at the expense of trauma to a girl child and how it derives from a culture that “violates and punishes women, that denies, trivializes, and fragments the female personal—especially trauma—while hegemonically advancing the male personal—especially pleasure” (120). The challenge put forth by scholars like Kauffman and Patnoe is thus to re-read the novel from Lolita’s point of view with the girl’s victimization in mind.

• Rewriting Lolita in her own Words

Perhaps recognizing this urgency to unearth a voice for Lolita, several writers in the 1990s reimagined Nabokov’s novel through Lolita’s voice. As Naomi Wolf notes in Promiscuities , “Lolita is created and re-created by men, but she rarely writes her own account of events” (1997: xx). Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these texts emphasize Lolita’s victimization. In an interview with Camile Paglia, Morrissey stated that her motivation for Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) was for “people to never be able to say the word ‘Lolita’ again and use it in the clichéd way that we have” (157, emphasis in original). Similarly, as Timothy McCracken points out, Prager’s “political agenda” for Roger Fishbite (1999) appears “quite clear beginning with her dedication: ‘To all the little girls I’ve met who have started out in desperate circumstances’ and through her numerous references to child abuse and the sexual slavery of children” (2001: 137). Even Pera’s Lo’s Diary (1999) , which Julia Vaingurt has argued was “not motivated by feminist critique” (2005: 20), took as her impetus the voiceless, and imprisoned Lolita. Pera explained in an interview with Alexandra Gill, “She was a little girl trapped in a cage. I wanted to see if she could write” (1999: D4).

In each of these texts, Lolita articulates her physical and emotional violation. In Morrissey’s poem, “stepfather,” Humbert’s violence and Lolita’s visceral disgust become apparent:

Lolita’s recurrent horror of this old wound with its “stale blood” also emerges in the next poem, “sometimes I dream he’s my mother.” Here, she says she wakes “dreaming blood” (17), which evokes Humbert’s molestation of her:

Sex is repeatedly depicted as an injury or a nightmare, and Morrissey’s poems stress Lolita’s youth, with the opening untitled poem reminding us that she is twelve “and almost a quarter” (3) and the title of the poem, “stepfather,” emphasizing the incest and child abuse inherent in their relationship. Through the poems’ chronicling of sex with Humbert, we do not experience any sense of her desire, pleasure, or consent; Morrissey’s rewriting underlines their interaction as being purely a violation. Later, in “stepfather,” Lolita stomachs sex with Humbert by reimagining the flavors of her reality:

The imagery here reminds us of Lolita’s status as a child and evokes her apparent disgust with the sights and smells of sex with Humbert, rendering it impossible to read this sexual interaction as anything but nonconsensual.

Prager’s Roger Fishbite also accentuates Lolita’s victimization. The narrator, Lucky Linderhof, has murdered her adult lover, Roger Fishbite, and now recounts and interprets her affair with him. The initial sexual encounter between Lucky and Fishbite is described as a clear violation of parental rights. In the hotel bed, Lucky snuggles up to her adoptive father, and then he makes his move: “He felt warm and good and I was very happy. I was just about to say ‘I’m glad to have you for my dad’ when I felt his fingers play across my nipple.” To accentuate the nonconsent of their sexual relationship, Lucky narrates her subsequent detachment from her body and compares herself to “little slaves in Thailand” (1999: 85). In this moment, Lucky finds Fishbite “blissfully unaware of possible trauma” (86) that he imposes on her in this situation. After this “psychic shift” Lucky becomes “once removed” or disembodied, stating that “as they say in juvenile detention, there are infinite degrees of casualty” (85). Furthermore, when Fishbite wants to “show [her] something else,” Lucky clearly says “No” several times, until Fishbite pleads, “Can I show you later?” to which she responds, “Maybe … Maybe not” (86). At this point, Lucky has already irrevocably changed. When she cries and exclaims, “I want my mommy,” Fishbite tells her that her mother is already dead, propelling her deeper into a “shock” of “sorrow and aloneness” (89). Later, Fishbite remains “blissfully unaware” as he begins to molest her again and asks her if she is okay. She recalls, “I didn’t answer. I wasn’t okay, of course. I would never be okay. It was astounding how self-centered he was” (92). Like Morrissey, Prager leaves no room here for an interpretation in which Lolita is the sexual aggressor, and, rather, represents her clearly as a victim of child abuse.

Pera’s novel, however, depicts Lolita’s sexual agency, illustrating what no feminist scholar today would be likely to argue—the validity of Humbert’s “very strange” assertion that “it was she who seduced me” ( Nabokov 1955: 132 ). Even what has become known as the “lap scene” in the original novel comes about in Pera’s rendition through Lolita’s contrivance. She approaches Humbert with “lips … almost impeccably painted” carrying a “red apple” with the intent of “hypnosis” since “no man can resist a woman who has an apple in her hand” (1999: 101). She gets his attention by sitting on the couch and tossing the apple until he grabs it from her, and they scuffle. As she begins to “feel that trunk of his swelling, bigger and bigger,” she lets him inspect a bruise “so he can touch me right at the edge of my underpants” (102), knowing that he concocts this excuse to arouse himself. Notably here, it is not only Humbert who “tries to act normal so I can’t tell how excited he is,” but also Lolita who must “pretend nothing’s happening,” despite being “all hot inside” and wanting to “hug and kiss him without all these pretenses” (103). Lolita even seems to share in the climactic moment saying,

I fling my head back, and for a second feel his mouth on my throat. I press against him, until he holds me still, interrupts the nursery rhyme, and, all trembling, forgets to keep up his pretense. I feel weird, too, I melt, and something goes by without my really seeing it, a whir of swift wings, it disappears in an instant and we sit there looking at each other, all blushing, not knowing what to do. (103)

Lolita’s erotic experience followed by a post-climactic stillness transforms her from what Humbert in the original Lolita imagined as being a “safely solipsized” ( Nabokov 1955: 60 ) child into an active orchestrator and participant in the sexual act.

Still, even Pera acknowledges Lolita’s victimization. After their first episode of intercourse in Lo’s Diary , Humbert becomes “all perked up and wants to do it again and again and again, and in the end it hurts” (1999: 132). And after Lolita learns that “the hen is dead” (135), she regrets her actions, thinking, “If he’d told me right away … I wouldn’t have gone in for that wild screwing. I would have taken it more slowly, much more slowly. Today all day it’s been hurting, because this morning he made me do it three times in a row” (136). Her status as the “poor little orphan” who is “lonely” and “scared of the dark” pushes her into his arms where he “starts with caresses” and “comes back in and he doesn’t give a god damn that I don’t want him to, that he’s hurting me” (138). From this point, Humbert is depicted more overtly as a violator, which directly contests her fear that “he’ll tell the hen I raped him” (132). Instead, as she describes, “He pins my hands down and he says, See, you’re all wet, you want it; and he holds me still and I don’t have the strength to kick. I don’t care about anything anymore, nothing in the world.” She now feels that she “stink[s] of incest” (138) and is “the sex slave of a French creep” (140). Despite their initial sexual encounter during which she was the actor upon his unresponsive body, the realization of her mother’s death (and the accompanying fact that she is now legally, bodily, and psychologically at Humbert’s mercy) depicts her more clearly as a victim.

• Undermining Nabokov’s “Aesthetic Bliss”

These writers underscore Lolita’s victimization to combat Nabokov’s aesthetic bliss, seeming to subscribe to the theory that such “bliss” comes at the expense of the girl. At one point in Roger Fishbite , Lucky realizes that “another person’s pain was like a picture on the wall to him, an object you could take off and put in the closet if it got in your way.” Here, Lucky questions the ethics of not only Fishbite’s bliss, but also the ethical stance of a reader or watcher who can enjoy another’s “pain … like a picture on the wall” (1999: 92). Morrissey’s poems, too, suggest a protest against aesthetic bliss by aligning the reader with Quilty and Humbert. The title of the book, of course, suggests that these poems are specifically addressed to the “men who dream of Lolita.” Not only are Quilty and Humbert these very men, but this evocation also includes Nabokov and all male readers who derive aesthetic bliss from the story of Lolita. It is as if Morrissey has taken up the issue that Kauffman objects to in Lolita ’s lap scene: “the father’s body is the site and the source of not only aesthetic bliss but literal orgasm; both come at the same time—if, that is, the reader is male” ([1989]1992: 135). Kauffman’s accusation that male readers derive both aesthetic bliss and physical orgasm at the expense of the victimized Lolita echoes with Morrissey’s lines from “Parlour Tricks” when Lolita says,

The reader longs for this “dream” girl without culpability. To “want a lover you can love without sex” perhaps is to be aroused by Lolita without feeling complicit in the formation of the girl’s pain. But Morrissey’s Lolita suggests that aesthetic bliss comes not only at the expense of the imagined girl, but also of real girls. She accuses Quilty of wresting his “plays” from the “girl who cries” (1992: 39) and being only self-interested, as she says, “for you there is only the sex … only your pleasure” (34). Still, Morrissey’s opening untitled poem suggests the warning that the “private” “Book of Dolores B. Haze” comes “with a curse” (3). She suggests,

Here, Morrissey seems to link the girl’s story to opening Pandora’s Box, an invitation to misery for both the girl writer/Lolita as well as the male reader.

In Roger Fishbite , Prager mimics the direct address of Lolita , also seemingly to disrupt aesthetic bliss. The construct of her novel is that Lucky has become famous, empowering her to bring her salacious story to the mainstream, while advocating on behalf of girls. Lucky says, “Dear Readers and Watchers of tabloid TV and press, I want you to know the truth” (1999: 6). Some might criticize the heavy-handedness of Prager’s irony here, but what she does is constantly remind us, as readers, of the “tabloid” sensationalism of the story and our complicity in its enjoyment. The first time that Lucky allows Fishbite to perform oral sex on her, she interrupts the story by saying, “Dear Readers and Watchers, I must stop here lest I join the illustrious company of titillators and muddy my intent” (93), much like Humbert interrupts Lolita with exclamations, notably shifting to “gentlewomen of the jury” (1955: 135) from “gentlemen” (1955: 125) as he describes the night they became “technically lovers” (132). In Roger Fishbite , Lucky states that she is “not so interested in the pornography of the affair as in chronicling the sort of man who initiates it” (1999: 93). Of course, we are left to wonder if perhaps not only Humbert but Nabokov, too, is meant to be part of this “illustrious company of titillators” (93). Lucky never mentions Nabokov, but she offers the “example” of Lewis Carroll “who may or may not have interfered with his Alice,” although Lucky believes this to be so “from the sad look on her face in the photogravures” (12). Lucky asks, “You think great literature comes out of nothing? Nothing can come out of nothing.” And then she contemplates, “Is the innocence of one girl child so important next to Alice in Wonderland ? Does it matter if it wasn’t quite soooo wonderful for her? A hundred years of beautifully bound editions? Can anyone honestly say that they would save the child and lose the book?” (13). Here, Lucky picks up an unspoken question in Ray’s foreword to Lolita when he suggests that if Humbert had received psychological help “there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book” ( Nabokov 1955: 5 ). What would we truly give up in exchange for aesthetic bliss? Is the girl more valuable than art? Or, in other words, is an ethical narrative more important than aesthetic bliss?

What is ultimately at issue is not only the lack of ethics of the writer, but also of the reader. In addition to reading “you” as both Quilty and the reader, Morrissey more directly addresses the complicity of the audience. Her poem “Parlour tricks” begins thus: “You push pins through my flesh at a party” (1992: 33). Here, Lolita accuses “everyone” of enjoying a trick that involves “pressing silver through skin” despite her pain.

The audience derives “all” the pleasure here, again at the expense of the girl’s unspoken stillness and pain. So later, when she writes,

we might imagine the un-erotic scene of the reader of Lolita who denies complicity with a tale in which a young girl is abused. In this way, Lolita’s accusation,

and her wake-up call

is as much for Quilty as it is for any author or reader who “dreams” of Lolita. The interchangeability of “girl” is a trap for writers and readers who generalize the girl and fail to confront the real child victim.

• The Ethics of Girls’ Victimization

Perhaps ironically, contemporary critical re-interpretations of Lolita suggest that the novel’s aesthetic bliss is not at the expense of the imagined or real girl, but in support of her. In short, they advance a so-called moral message of the novel, despite Nabokov’s warning that there is no such moral. Susan Quayle notes, “It is through Humbert’s awareness of the ‘real’ Lolita that Nabokov advances his “moral message on pedophilia” (2009: n.p.), while Nicolas Estournel suggests that the “incuriosity” (2013: 3) of Humbert leads the novel to be “ethical” in the way it “lead[s] the reader to consider morality by questioning the narrators’ points of view” (7). Christine Grogan notes how “Nabokov anticipated that the pendulum tracking the book’s reputation would swing. Confident in the immortality of his masterpiece, he predicted the day when some critic would cry that Lolita shows that he was really a moralist at heart” (2014: 53). Grogan notes that although originally feminists “criticized Nabokov for portraying the sexual exploitation of a pubescent girl as a joke, or, worse, a romance,” more recent critics “have gone so far as to argue in favor of Nabokov’s feminist sympathies and claim Lolita as a proto-feminist narrative” (2015: 53). These scholars find the moments of Lolita’s lack of interest and her “revulsion and reluctance with regard to engaging in sexual activities” ( Quayle 2009 ; n.p.) as proof of even Humbert’s acknowledgement of abuse. Rather than Lolita’s having been successfully “solipsized” ( Nabokov 1955: 60 ) as Humbert suggests and earlier scholars feared, recent scholars contend that her lack of consent comes through her “weeping and her stony silences” which “even Humbert cannot control,” and her narrative or linguistic “disruptions” ( Shelton 1999: 289 ), and Lolita’s ultimate escape from and rejection of Humbert. Scholars have noted that Lolita’s words in the original novel, such as “the word is incest” ( Nabokov 1955: 119 ) or “the hotel where you raped me” (202), clearly highlight her nonconsent, emphasizing “the fact that Humbert is holding her against her will” ( Grogan 2014: 202 ), so that “Humbert inadvertently makes available to readers a mechanism … through which they can attend to Dolly’s story” ( Shelton 1999: 289 ). In our current moment, to read Lolita ethically is to understand it as a tale of victimization—and to argue otherwise would place one in untenable critical terrain.

In consideration of the ironic multiplicity of apparent authorial intent (Humbert’s, Ray’s, Nabokov’s), it seems hard not to find a critical shift from aesthetics to ethics, or from an enjoyment of the novel’s aesthetic bliss to interpretations of the novel as a feminist fable, rather ironic. In Ray’s foreword, he asserts that “in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac,” which “warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils” (1955: 5). Such hazards require protective action; he suggests that “ Lolita should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world” (6). Ray partially sees the object of disciplinary action as the “wayward child” (5) who must be subjected to greater parental and pedagogical influence, observation, and control.

What might it mean that mainstream critical reception now finds itself more aligned with Ray than not? Ray’s warning sounds strangely similar to the Report of the Task Force on The Sexualization of Girls , in which the authors note that it developed in response to “journalists, child advocacy organizations, parents, and psychologists [who] have become alarmed, arguing that the sexualization of girls is a broad and increasing problem and is harmful to girls” ( Zurbriggen et al. 2007: 1 ). In effect, Lolita is the quintessential “sexualized girl” as Simone de Beauvoir first articulated in her 1959 Esquire essay, coining the term “Lolita Syndrome” and arguing, as McCracken puts it, that “Lolitas” are not “sexual young girls but rather … young girls being sexualized by men” (2001: 130). Lolita’s narrative, in fact, fits at least two of the four sexualization criteria developed by the Task Force: “the imbuing of adult sexuality upon a child” and “being sexually objectified” ( Zurbriggen et al. 2007: 2 ).

Yet, the question that continues to resound with girlhood studies scholars is how to read girls’ sexual desire and agency amidst the realities of sexualization. Scholars often declare the need to hear from girls themselves to unravel these complexities. Deborah Tolman et al. note that “there is a dearth of qualitative psychological research on how girls navigate sexualization that can capture the contradictions, nuances, complexities and various venues in which girls engage with sexualizing processes. The voices of girls themselves are disturbingly absent in the US psychological literature to date” (2015: 79). However, if we allow girls like Lolita to speak, do we believe them?

What we do choose to believe may have more to do with adults’ perception than that of girls, and it directly connects to how we “read” girls—aesthetically and ethically. Kathryn Bond Stockton considers the alternating “dialectic of harm and agency” (2009: 140) for Lolita and inspires us to understand the matter of Lolita’s consent as a matter of aesthetics. She notes how Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film adaptation of Lolita was nearly banned “due to its depictions of a sexual child” (33), while Angelica Houston’s 1996 film adaptation of Bastard out of Carolina , which includes the young girl Bone being “raped on-screen at agonizing length” was not (33). Stockton argues that what makes Bastard more acceptable is, in fact, Bone’s lack of consent. A raped child confirms “the child’s need for protection and her weakness in these moments confirms the child’s innocence” whereas a desiring, consenting child suggests an “erotic pleasure” (33) on the girl’s part, which clearly makes audiences uncomfortable. In other words, the representation of a girl’s rape can be “art” (and thus ethical aesthetic bliss), while a girl’s sexual desire and agency must be pornography (often perceived as bliss lacking aesthetics or ethics). Stockton argues that “Lolita can be sexual on her own terms only if, definitely, and also finally, we can’t accuse ourselves of perversion” (151). As readers or viewers, we may be reluctant to imbue Lolita with sexual agency because we view her agency, and our own pleasure in it, as perverse. This reluctance may have much to do with what Allison Pease notes as a shift from early twentieth-century “dominant aesthetic practice … to validate as fine arts only those that invoke disinterested contemplation rather than a sensuous interest on the part of a reader or viewer” to a new “aesthetic project: to bring the body and its senses more overtly into relation with the ethical and social realm” (2000: 165–166). With the “body, and a bodily response” as a “necessary constituent of the modern reading practice,” the only way to “avoid a purely pornographic reading” is for “the body … to be attached to a greater ethical project” (191). In other words, today it might be seen as ethical to derive intellectual pleasure from Lolita ’s literary prowess and style, but it would likely be seen as unethical to derive sexual pleasure from the novel’s depiction of a young girl and an older father figure. In our contemporary American cultural understanding of childhood, pornography, and sexual abuse, the ethics of consent preclude this as ethical aesthetic bliss.

• The Puzzle of Lolita’s Sexual Agency

Today, it might be equally urgent to acknowledge Lolita’s sexual desire as her victimization. M. Gigi Durham acknowledges how “Nabokov’s Lolita is a nuanced character whose sexuality is complex—like many preadolescent girls, she is sexually curious—but she has no control over her relationship with Humbert, which is abusive and manipulative” (2008: 25). Although Durham’s interpretation clearly labels Lolita a victim, she also recognizes the girl’s sexual curiosity. What Lolita and its iterations offer us are representations of the complexity of a girl’s desire and sexual agency amidst her oppression. Here, we might recall Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity; she argues that “the subject might yet be thought as deriving its agency from precisely the power it opposes, as awkward and embarrassing as such a formulation might be” (1997: 17). It is perhaps for this reason that all the revisionary texts of Lolita attempt to demonstrate the girl’s sexual desire and agency, despite her victimization.

Prager’s novel, in particular, demonstrates the choices Lucky makes as a subjugated girl with a lecherous father figure. Unlike Humbert and Lolita, Fishbite and Lucky never have intercourse. In their first sexual encounter, Lucky pushes his hand away, saying, “Okay, okay … You can give me oral sex” and despite his initial confusion manifesting in “an odd look on his face as if presented with a dilemma he simply could not solve,” he “did as I asked” (1999: 92). When he finishes, he “dully” asks her, “And will you do me?” to which she responds, “No” with “irritation” telling him “Yucchy. Never. No, I will never touch you. Why would I want to?” (93). At another time when Fishbite proposes intercourse, begging, “Please can’t we make love?” she responds:

‘Officer!’ I would shout as loud as I could, and he would cringe. ‘Lose my virginity to you? What are you, nuts? What’s in it for me?’ Then he would list the presents and clothing and trips we would take if only I would give in. (103)

She refuses intercourse despite these bribes, but her allowing him to perform oral sex on her convolutes the lines of consent and nonconsent of their interactions since she says, “So I enjoyed it while I was forced to, and enjoyed forcing Fishbite to, and it amused me that we were both being forced to do it, and it was pretty confusing” (128). Throughout the novel, Lucky envisions herself both as prey and predator—as a rabbit being chased and as a “rabid ferret girl” (174). Even when Lucky alludes to her victimization, she refuses to accept it simplistically. When Lucky replies to her “Dear Readers and Watchers” who want to know “Do they rape here?” in reference to her residential facility, her response creates a consent puzzle. “And the answer is, they rape—some do—like anywhere. Even at Chutney, some did. Did they rape me? Not without my consent they didn’t” (69). For Lucky then, rape means something other than simply nonconsensual sex, although exactly what it does mean is unclear. Thus, the novel resists a straightforward ethics of consent in which there is a clear perpetrator and victim—at least from the point of view of the girl.

Even Morrissey addresses the confusion often inherent in a girl’s sexual consent. In her poem, “Saturday Matinee, June 3,” Lolita experiences a more palatable feast for the senses with her peer Kenny Knight,

that belies her reaction to his advances. We read that he

Here, Lolita’s no does not mean no. She says,

This confusion seems to be explicitly tied to a cultural presumption that coercion exists within seduction. While girls are often seen as the gatekeepers of sexual behavior, boys and men are often depicted as the drivers of the seduction, attempting to persuade the girl to engage in some activity ( Bay-Cheng: 2015 ). Although they do not state it explicitly, many of the Lolita iterations seem to ask the question of how we might find the ethical line between persuasion and coercion for the girl.

• Conclusion: The Ambiguity of Lolita’s Ethics

Consciously or not, these writers have written girls’ sexual subjectivity into the text of Lolita . If these novels espouse a moral it might be that to maintain Lolita’s sexual desire is not to deny her victimization, and to acknowledge her victimization is not to deny her sexual subjectivity and agency. Michael Wood ponders “the moral question” (2003: 191) in Lolita ; he says, “At the risk of sounding like a chastened John Ray, Jr., I would suggest that one of the most important things Nabokov’s novel does is help us understand better just what an offense against a child is and understand this morally, not merely technically. But it does this only by getting everything slightly wrong and leaving the rest to us” (193). Wood draws on the concept of consent to demonstrate his point, suggesting that when Lolita goes to Humbert in despair after she has learned of her mother’s death, “a double confusion reigns in this scene, in Humbert and Lolita, and that it centers on the unnamed notion of consent. This confusion is precisely Nabokov’s point.” He argues, “Neither of them knows anything about consent. Humbert doesn’t know that Lolita can’t have consented, even when she seemed to, even when she came sobbing in the room. She doesn’t know that the very chance of her consent has been destroyed for good” (194). I would agree that “confusion [seems to be] precisely Nabokov’s point” here, although I would not reach the conclusion that “neither of them knows anything about consent.” Rather, I would argue that the novel suggests how consent can be distressingly unclear, remaining in this novel, as in its many iterations, a puzzle, even, as Guy Hocquenghem has called it, a “trap” (1988: 285). We may design laws that protect girls from statutory rape but the lines we draw remain unstable (demonstrated in, among other ways, the constantly shifting age of legal consent). Lolita ’s moral may be simply to point out how flawed our over-simplified dichotomies of lust and love, seduction and rape, child and adult, child and girl are. Lolita does not merely show us “just what an offense against a child is” as Michael Wood says, but shows us that “Humbert is not an ordinary pedophile, and Nabokov’s Lolita is not a Lolita. But are there ordinary pedophiles? Isn’t this a dangerous notion in itself, and doesn’t Humbert, in spite of himself, do us a bit of good by giving the notion such a hard time?” (2003: 189). The Lolita narratives force us to rethink the boundaries we draw for the girl for her own good and to wrestle with the complex nature of consent, and the vastness of the gray area between the black-and-white cases. The ethical and aesthetic puzzles of consent, in fact, persist in Lolita ’s reiterations because they are part of what makes the narrative so endlessly fascinating, disturbing, and perplexing.

Bay-Cheng . 2015 . “ The Agency Line: A Neoliberal Metric for Appraising Young Women’s Sexuality .” Sex Roles 73 : 279 – 291 .

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Contributor Notes

M ichele M eek is an assistant professor in the Communication Studies department at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. Her current project “Consent Puzzles” investigates post-second-wave feminism narratives (novels, films, television, and media) that present perplexing depictions of a girl’s sexual consent to show how these moments demonstrate the gray area of consent and validate girls’ subjectivity, desires, and agency. Her essay “‘It Ain’t For Children’: ‘Shame-Interest’ in the Adaptations Precious and Bastard Out of Carolina ” has been published in Literature/Film Quarterly . E-mail: [email protected]

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Lolita , novel by Vladimir Nabokov , published in 1955 in France. Upon its American publication in 1958, Lolita created a cultural and literary sensation.

The novel is presented as the posthumously published memoirs of its antihero, Humbert Humbert . A European intellectual and pedophile, Humbert lusts obsessively after 12-year-old nymphet Lolita (real name, Dolores Haze), who becomes his willing inamorata. The work examines love in the light of lechery.

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Mental Health, Substance Use, and Child Maltreatment

Child maltreatment is a pressing concern in the United States, with more than four million children referred to child protective services in 2022. Reducing child maltreatment is a national health objective given the substantial, negative consequences for children who experience maltreatment, both in the short- and long-term. Parental mental health and substance use disorders are strongly associated with child maltreatment. In this study, we use administrative data over the period 2004 to 2021 to study the relationship between the number of mental health and substance use treatment centers per county and child maltreatment reports. Our findings provide evidence that better access to mental health and substance use treatment reduces child maltreatment reports. In particular, an 8% increase in the supply of treatment would reduce maltreatment reports by 1%. These findings suggest that recent and ongoing efforts by the federal government to expand mental health and substance use treatment availability may lead to reduced child maltreatment.

All authors contributed equally to this study. Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 1R01MH132552 (PI: Johanna Catherine Maclean). Dr. Meinhofer acknowledges support from the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts GR00015582 and the National Institute on Drug Abuse K01DA051777. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institutes of Health or the Foundation for Opioid Response Efforts. We thank Douglas Webber and Jiaxin Wei for excellent comments. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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