The patterning of obsessive love in Lolita and Possessed

Abstract

Repetitions, doubles, and mises en abyme are a constant in Nabokov’s work and Lolita is one of the best examples. One of those repetitions in time and space has to do with Humbert Humbert going back over the times when he was happy with the nymphet in 1947. He finds that in that year the film Possessed was premiered. If a comparison is made between that movie and the novel, both text and film seem to reflect each other. The main purpose of this article is to show that the film is a mise en abyme of the novel because both novel and film display the same pattern of obsessive love, which includes idealization, feelings of hostility, obsession with the disappearance of the beloved and a textual and filmic reconstitution by way of unreliable narrations through plenty of flashbacks and analepses.

Keywords

• Lolita
• mise en abyme
• Possessed
• patterning
• cinema.