Humbert Humbert and Rita

Identity and Introduction

Rita enters Humbert's life in the spring of 1950, a period when he is adrift after losing Lolita and has been living in a void that he fears will drive him to sudden insanity when confronted with a chance temptation. He picks her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, at a darkly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she is amiably drunk. She insists they had gone to school together and places her trembling little hand on his ape paw. Humbert's senses are very slightly stirred, but he decides to give her a try and then adopts her as a constant companion. Rita is twice Lolita's age and three-quarters of Humbert's: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, an angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back. Humbert thinks she has some Spanish or Babylonian blood.

Life Together and Rita's Character

Rita is the sweetest, simplest, gentlest, dumbest companion imaginable. Humbert, comparing her to his previous partners, reflects that in comparison to her, Valeria was a Schlegel and Charlotte a Hegel. She is so kind and such a good sport that Humbert daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy—an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine—out of sheer chumminess and compassion. When Humbert first meets her, she has but recently divorced her third husband and a little more recently been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant; the others, the mutables, are too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother is a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and booster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he has been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never enter great little Grainball City. Rita tells Humbert, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it is a fatal attraction, and before she knows what is what, she finds herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, following the flood-lit drive that encircles it "going round and round," as she phrases it, "like a God-damn mulberry moth." She has a natty little coup, and in it they travel to California so as to give Humbert's venerable vehicle a rest; her natural speed is ninety. They cruise together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer 1952.

Humbert's Search and Rita's Role

Humbert tells Rita he is trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully. Rita solemnly approves of the plan, and in the course of some investigation she undertakes on her own—without really knowing a thing—around San Humbertino, she gets entangled with a pretty awful crook herself; Humbert has the devil of a time retrieving her, used and bruised but still cocky. Then one day she proposes playing Russian roulette with Humbert's sacred automatic; he says she cannot, it is not a revolver, and they struggle for it until at last it goes off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it makes in the wall of the cabin room. Humbert remembers her shrieks of laughter. The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, and her slow languorous columbine kisses keep Humbert from mischief. He reflects that it is not the artistic aptitudes that are secondary sexual characters as some shams and shamans have said; it is the other way around: sex is but the ancilla of art.

Separation and Aftermath

When Humbert receives Lolita's letter in September 1952, Rita is still dead to the world. He glances at her as she smiles in her sleep, kisses her on her moist brow, and leaves her forever with a note of tender adieu which he tapes to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. Later, during his journey to kill Quilty, Humbert recalls Rita with a kind of rueful affection. He addresses her directly in his memoir: "hi, Rita—wherever you are, drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!" He acknowledges that she was the most soothing, the most comprehending companion that he ever had, and certainly saved him from the madhouse. After the murder, when Humbert is driving on the wrong side of the road and being pursued by police, he thinks of Rita again, and the memory of her is one of the few human connections that surface in his final, disintegrating consciousness.