The Roving Psychopath in Love

“The White Negro” and Lolita

Authors

  • Heather Braun University of Akron Author

Keywords:

The White Negro, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, the psychopath, hipster and existentialism, desire and transgression

Abstract

“The White Negro” and Lolita first appeared at a moment when Americans were terrified and fascinated by the figure of the psychopath. Mailer and Nabokov drew extensively on these contemporary discourses of psychopathy, criminality, and existentialism. Mailer saw the psychopath’s juvenile, pleasure-seeking narcissism as an opportunity for self-knowledge and rebirth. The psychopath’s drama of fantasy is fatally imagined in Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that recounts Humbert Humbert’s quest for an ethereal Lolita, a tortuous journey that ends with his startling revelation that what he has been seeking is at once everywhere and nowhere, an ideal that keeps him in perpetual motion yearning for an unknowable Lolita who is always just beyond his grasp.

Author Biography

  • Heather Braun, University of Akron

    Heather Braun is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron. Her research and teaching interests include Romantic and Victorian literature, women writers, the Doppelgänger, and Young Adult literature. Her book, The Rise and Fall of the Femme Fatale in British Literature, 1790-1910, was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2012.

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Published

2015-09-30

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2015): Maestro

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Braun, Heather. “The Roving Psychopath in Love: ‘The White Negro’ and Lolita”. The Mailer Review, vol. 9, no. 1, Sept. 2015, pp. 148–156, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/519.

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