Beardsley

Beardsley is the college town in an eastern state where Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze settle after their yearlong cross-country road trip, from the autumn of 1948 through the spring of 1949. It provides the setting for the second major phase of their relationship: a fixed domestic life under the scrutiny of neighbors, school authorities, and Humbert's own jealous surveillance. The town's Beardsley School for Girls, with its progressive educational philosophy, becomes a central arena of conflict, as Humbert attempts to control Lolita's social life while she maneuvers for independence through dramatics and friendships. Beardsley also introduces the figure of Gaston Godin, whose presence offers Humbert a false sense of security, and it is from here that the final rupture begins, when Lolita's involvement in the play The Enchanted Hunters brings her into contact with Clare Quilty.

A Fixed Domicile and Its Pressures

Humbert chose Beardsley not only for its sedate girls' school but also for the presence of Beardsley College, where a man he knew in the French department used his textbook and had tried to get him to deliver a lecture. He craved "a label, a background, and a simulacrum" and thought the company of Gaston Godin would be particularly safe. The house they rented at 14 Thayer Street, through Godin, bore a dejected resemblance to the Haze home in Ramsdale: a dull gray frame affair with a shingled roof and dull green drill awnings, though Humbert's study was larger, lined with two thousand books on chemistry belonging to the landlord, a professor on sabbatical. Humbert had hoped that a fixed domicile and a routine schoolgirl's day would improve their powers of impersonation, making him seem a more plausible father and her a more plausible daughter. He immediately foresaw the pleasure of using powerful binoculars from his study to watch the statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl children playing around Dolores during recess, but workmen arrived on the first day of school and built a fence that blocked his magic vista, and then never appeared again.

The Beardsley School and Its Progressive Philosophy

At his first interview with the headmistress, Miss Pratt, she explained that the school was not so much concerned with making students into bookworms as with the adjustment of the child to group life, stressing the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. She told Humbert that Dolores would presently enter an age group where dates, dating, date dress, date book, and date etiquette meant as much to her as business success meant to him. The school's philosophy, as Pratt articulated it, was more interested in communication than in composition, wanting girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. Humbert was appalled by this program, but two intelligent ladies connected with the school affirmed that the girls did quite a bit of sound reading and that the "communication" line was more or less ballyhoo aimed at giving old-fashioned Beardsley School a financially remunerative modern touch. Dolores's school reports were poor, and she was described as defiant, rude, and given to sighing in class. Miss Pratt later summoned Humbert for a talk, expressing concern that Dolores was "shuttling between the anal and genital zones of development" and that her marks were getting worse and worse. She urged Humbert to allow Dolores to enjoy the company of schoolmates' brothers and to participate in the dramatic group, specifically the play The Enchanted Hunters.

The False Security of Gaston Godin

Gaston Godin, a flabby, dough-faced, melancholy bachelor who taught at Beardsley College, was the main reason Humbert enjoyed or at least tolerated with relief his time in Beardsley. Godin cast a spell of absolute security on Humbert's secret, not because he knew it, but because he was much too self-centered and abstract to notice or suspect anything. He was a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, yet everybody in Beardsley considered him a supremely lovable, lovably freakish fellow. He knew by name all the small boys in the vicinity and had them perform simple chores about his house, feeding them fancy chocolates with real liqueurs inside in the privacy of an orientally furnished den in his basement. Humbert preferred his own house for their chess games, and Godin, with his outgoing senses comfortably dulled, remained unaware of the sounds of Dolores's bare feet practicing dance techniques in the living room below. Humbert reflected bitterly that Godin, devoid of any talent, was crooned over by the old and caressed by the young, having a grand time and fooling everybody, while he himself was trapped.

The Seeds of Betrayal

During the Beardsley period, Humbert instituted a system of monetary bribes to keep Dolores in submission, raising her weekly allowance from twenty-one cents to one dollar five before its end, and paying a bonus price of three or four dollars for a fancy embrace. He was obsessed with preventing her from accumulating sufficient cash to run away. He drew up lists of "absolutely forbidden" and "reluctantly allowed" activities, absolutely forbidding dates, single or double or triple, and reluctantly allowing her to visit a candy bar with girl friends while he waited in the car at a discreet distance. He promised her a party at their house if she behaved. Dolores's involvement in the play The Enchanted Hunters, which Humbert assumed was just another anonymous version of some banal legend, proved to be the crucial development. He did not know that the play was a recent and technically original composition by Clare Quilty, who had been present at a special rehearsal. When Humbert discovered that Dolores had been skipping her piano lessons to rehearse the magic forest scene with Mona Dahl in a nearby public park, a violent quarrel ensued. Dolores accused him of attempting to violate her when he was her mother's roomer, said she was sure he had murdered her mother, and declared she would sleep with the very first fellow who asked her. She then fled on her bicycle, but later returned, announcing she wanted to leave school and go on a long trip again, wherever she wanted. Humbert agreed, and they left Beardsley the following morning, beginning the journey that would end with Dolores's escape from the hospital in Elphinstone with Clare Quilty.