Characters / Lolita

Humbert Humbert

• Abusive Parent: With marrying Charlotte Haze, Humbert is Dolores' stepfather, and he sexually, emotionally, physically, and financially abuses her.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Like many real-life abusers, Humbert is as good at deceiving himself as he is others. Throughout the story, he repeatedly shows that he honestly believes himself to be innocent or at least not nearly as bad as he actually is, seeing his love for Dolores as pure and wholesome and even thinks of himself as the victim and a good, principled man who was powerless to resist her corrupting influence. It reaches a point of wondering if he's just outright delusional.
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Humbert is a really sick example of this trope. He bars Dolores from having any kind of romantic relationship and shoots Quilty for taking advantage of her — but only because he wants Dolores for himself.
• Condescending Compassion:
  • Humbert frequently claims to care for Dolores, but no matter his protestations to the contrary, how he actually treats her is very much seeped in this; especially following Charlotte's death. He constantly assaults and exploits her sexually, victim-blames and gaslights her, laughs off, downplays, and ignores her attempts at fighting him off, holds an iron-fisted control over every aspect of her life, calls her by a dehumanizing nickname, and looks down upon her tastes and interests in pop culture, dismissing them as "shallow" and "annoying".
  • This is as nice as he gets toward Charlotte once they're married. He still has a dismissive attitude toward all her interests, her intelligence, her sentimentality, but tries to appreciate her presence since their marriage will let him be close to Dolores. Rather tellingly when trying to describe himself as a caring husband he primarily focuses on the various ways Charlotte tried to remodel her house and work as a homemaker as positive traits.
• Control Freak: He views Dolores as his personal property and is fixated on controlling every aspect of her life so she remains pure in his eyes.
• Crazy Jealous Guy: Dear God, is he ever. Humbert is impossibly jealous of any boy who ever shows Dolores even the slightest bit of attention, and for that matter he isn't fond of her having lady friends or older acquaintances either. At least part of this is because, like many real-world abusers, he doesn't want her to have anyone she can reach out to for help, but also just because he sees Dolores as his property and doesn't want her "besmirched" by anyone else. Interestingly, Humbert's narration paints both Dolores and especially her mother Charlotte as this trope and presents his own jealousy as reasonable fatherly concern for his stepdaughter, so it's possible he was projecting his own negative faults onto his victims.
• Domestic Abuse: Towards Dolores, but also towards his first wife: he once mentions off-handedly how he would twist her chronically-injured wrist to get her to comply with him in arguments.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He dabbles in this from time to time. He finds himself unable to kill his wife (according to him, anyway) even though he doesn't really like her and she's in the way of his domination of Dolores, he's (rather hypocritically) horrified by Quilty who is an even worse pedophile than him, and when Dolores spells out to him how badly he's ruined her life, he has a pang of guilty conscience and gives her money to help with her childbirth. Deconstructed as Humbert tries to use these small moments of guilt and humanity as proof that he's not actually all that bad, when the evils he's committed vastly outweigh any standards he might have had.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Humbert regularly shows himself to be utterly baffled by basic human emotions, seeming genuinely confused as to why Dolores would be upset at her mother's death and unable to understand why she hates and resents him so much when he is sexually abusing and controlling her.
• Faux Affably Evil: For most of his account Humbert makes a concerted effort at making himself appear, if not outright sympathetic, then at least Affably Evil. The fact that he at several occasions just can't help himself but tip his hand and reveal the true depths of his depravity ends up completely undermining this.
• Financial Abuse: While it's practically an afterthought given all the other ways he abuses Dolores, he does this too. She pushes to be given a larger and larger allowance (or Humbert increases it to curry sexual favors and then blames her for it), and it's clear she's not spending all of it. Humbert proceeds to go through her things while she's at school and steal the money back (or snatch it directly out of her fist after sex), openly admitting to the reader that he's trying to keep her from saving up enough money to flee. For her own good, you see.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Humbert's first sexual experience occurred when he was thirteen and had relations with a twelve-year-old. Even if this is why he's sexually attracted to children even as an adult, Nabokov makes it clear it doesn't make it okay for him to act on those feelings by kidnapping and molesting Dolores, in addition to his faults that are unrelated to being a pedophile (his sexism, his abusive and possessive nature, his being a contemptuous and unpleasant person in general). Humbert himself dismisses the idea of needing an excuse for his behavior at all. Because he's really not that bad of a person, you see.
• Gaslighting: Humbert frequently does this to both Charlotte and Dolores, constantly trying to explain away and downplaying the numerous transgressions and crimes he does against them. He is ultimately not too successful; once Charlotte realizes what he is up to, this approach fails to hold any sway over her, and after he rapes Dolores the first time, she also quickly realizes what he is all about. And of course, he tries to do this to the reader as well.
• Heel Realization: Has this toward the end of the book, seemingly. After seeing Dolores Happily Married with a man who genuinely loves and cares about her, he stops and lists to the reader all the ways normal parents treat their children that he failed to do, and all the times he never tried to connect with her emotionally or comfort her when she needed it. He finally admits that he was a monster who ruined her childhood and she's better off without him. The fact that he then proceeded to go on to write a novel casting her as a Fille Fatale and pulling out countless rationalizations to his behavior makes it hard to determine how much of this trope really stuck, though.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Humbert is not aggressively misogynistic, but there still is a undercurrent of it in pretty much all of his thoughts and opinions on women; subtle at some times, and crystal-clear at others. He frequently describes the women he interacts with in condescending and even mocking language, clearly believing them to be less intelligent than him. At frequent points in his narration, it becomes apparent that what really annoys, and at times even outright angers him is when he believes a woman "fails" to act appropriately subservient to him, even in the smallest of ways. Early on, he describes soliciting services from a young sex worker named Monique because she appears to be underage (despite her own protestations to the contrary), but when he later visits her again, he notices that now she is familiar with him, she is beginning to act more confident around him, which immediately turns him off because he sees her confidence as making her appear "older". He reserves especially angry hatred for his ex-wife, because she was the one who left him. When he criticizes Charlotte, it is easy to pick up on the fact that some of his many criticisms are extremely petty and even ridiculous, such as being angry at her for being in a book club; in other words, having an interest outside of him. Even when looking back at his first sexual experience (when he was a thirteen-year-old with a girl his own age), he outright says he's unhappy knowing that the girl he was with a peer and not an inferior.
• Hypocrite:
  • He several times complains that Lolita has bad morals. Even if he's actually right—and not, say, interpreting a kidnapping and rape victim's desire to not be around her rapist all the time as bad behavior—he hardly has the high ground to judge other people's moral standing.
  • Tries his best to paint Quilty as an even worse kind of pedophile but again, isn't really in a position to throw stones. While there's nothing about Quilty that's really better than Humbert, the main issues Humbert seems to have with him is that Quilty "stole" Dolores (since he sees her as his personal property) and expects her to perform in pornographic films (which he sees as trashy and distasteful). A more meaningful difference is that Quilty is rather blunt about his perverted interests in Dolores, rather than trying to dress it up as true love or romance the way Humbert does.
  • Humbert's first wife, who he only marries to help maintain his Mask of Sanity and because she looks passingly young for her age, eventually gets sick of him and elopes with a Russian taxi driver. Despite having no real affection for her, he's not just outraged that she would actually leave him, but is deeply offended when her new husband asks about her diet and education in a way that Humbert thinks sounds possessive. This from someone who perpetually views and treats the women in his life as objects.
• Ignored Epiphany: He seems to have a Heel Realization when talking to Dolores as an adult and she tells him off for ruining her life. Out of guilt, he gives her all the money he has on him, so she'll have a safe delivery of her baby and hunts down Clare Quilty in revenge for stealing Lolita from him. When imprisoned, however, he writes this memoir to clear his name and paint Lolita as a Fille Fatale.
• It's All About Me: Humbert is very self-involved and barely seems able to even acknowledge other people, let alone care about them or consider their feelings, and seeing Dolores as existing only for his pleasure, however much he tries to delude himself into thinking their relationship is an epic romance.
• Jizzed in My Pants: Does this the first time he lets Dolores sit in his lap. Rather than being embarrassed, he views this as a sign that their relationship is meant to be, as he can relieve himself sexually in her presence without tempting an arrest from law enforcement.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: He rapes his stepdaughter on a regular basis, gaslights her and steals her allowance so she never has money to run away. Except Dolly eventually does and as an adult calls him out for what he did to her. Humbert then proceeds to shoot Claire Quilty in revenge for "taking" Lolita from him. He ultimately can't cover this crime up and gets arrested, dying before he stands trial. The foreword also makes it clear to take his words with a grain of salt.
• Lecherous Stepparent: He has a very, very troubling sexual obsession with his stepdaughter Dolores. In fact, he actually married her mother Charlotte to have more opportunities to molest her; disturbingly, multiple real-life child predators were known to have gotten closer to their victims by romancing an adult who was already close to said victims, usually a parent or legal guardian.
• Madonna-Whore Complex: As a hardcore misogynist, he believes in this trope about as much as one possibly can. To Humbert there's a massive difference between the pure, innocent, untouched (and virginal) "nymphets" he lusts after and the disgusting, used up women he has to put up with in his day-to-day life. Even when he's planning to have sex with Dolores, he at first only wants to do it while she's drugged unconscious so she's spared the experience of sex and remains "pure" in his mind. When she sleepily confesses that she's done things with friends from camp, Humbert is stunned and disgusted, even though she passed out before she could elaborate and could've been talking about innocent kisses for all he knows. He winds up pacing around for some time trying to clear up his cognitive dissonance and rationalize a way to put Dolores in the rigid mental category he's decided she belongs in.
• Mask of Sanity: Humbert frequently brags about his knowledge of psychology, and how he believes it gives him a edge in appearing being to be "normal" around other people. He especially takes overt pride in the fact that despite having being committed to mental institutions at a couple of points in his life, he has always been able to fake a semblance of sanity effectively enough to trick the various doctors treating him into securing him early release.
• Never My Fault: The entire tale is essentially him trying to charm both his jury and the reader and convince them that all the events described in it are not in any way his fault. On the very rare occasion he will admit to being guilty of anything, he will still try to frame himself as the victim of Dolores' manipulation or his own urges.
• Obliviously Evil: Humbert is absolutely convinced that he's a good person, someone who is at most imperfect and flawed but generally well-meaning, and not an abusive sexual predator.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: He's extremely sexist, seeing women around him as existing only for his pleasure and to be controlled and discarded as he sees fit and getting angry when any push back against his control. He's also openly classist and makes no secret of his withering disdain for anyone he views as lower-class, particularly Charlotte.
• Properly Paranoid: Soon begins to become genuinely upset that someone is following himself and Dolores, probably a police detective who knows of their relationship. Because Humbert has a history of mental illness, he starts to doubt his own senses and recognizes how delusional these beliefs might be, helped along by Dolores insisting it's nothing. Turns out it's real; Dolores has been arranging things with a third party to escape.
• Punny Name: As a native Russian speaker, Nabokov chose the name of the character to sound as funny as possible when pronounced correctly due to phonetic similarity to "хуй" ("huy"), Russian vulgar word for penis.
• Raging Stiffie: Early in the book, Humbert talks in detail about going to public parks to leer at the prepubescent girls who play there. He pretends to read books so he'll have something to hide his erection, and at one point he complains about the afternoon being ruined when a concerned old woman asked if his stomach hurt when she saw how he was holding it.
• Reckless Gun Usage: A more subtle example; as Humbert becomes more and more paranoid that someone knows about his relationship with Dolores and is following them, he starts to worry he's growing mentally unstable. A responsible gun owner would ask that the weapon be held for him or put it somewhere difficult to access if they thought they weren't thinking rationally, but Humbert goes the opposite route and starts carrying the gun with him everywhere at all times just in case he gets a mad craze to use it.
• Repetitive Name: His last name is the same as his first. Given the author's hobbies, it's a pun at taxonomy's use of repetitive genus/species names, which are called tautonyms.
• Self-Serving Memory: The entire novel is an exercise in Humbert's astonishing ability to remember events in a way that paint him as utterly blameless for his actions and no worse than a flawed but well-meaning romantic partner.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Stops the narrative more than once to outright tell the reader in plain English, no, he absolutely did not murder his wife so he could gain sole custody of his daughter. Yes, she did just so happen to die almost immediately after finding out he was a sexual predator but before she could tell anyone, but it was because she tripped on wet asphalt and tumbled into traffic. It certainly wasn't his fault, and the fact that he now had his secret safe and sole custody of Dolores was merely a happy coincidence. Well, happy for him, at least.
• Tranquil Fury: By his own admission, when he's angry he becomes eerily quiet and withdrawn. His first wife recognized this tendency and it terrified her when he was like this since she didn't know what was coming next. Charlotte doesn't even notice, with only infuriates Humbert more.
• Unreliable Narrator: The entire story is framed as Humbert presenting an account in his defense before a jury during a trial. As such, he frequently lies, exaggerates, leaves out certain details and invent others out of full cloth, all in the name of making himself appear as sympathetic as possible, despite being a murderer and a child groomer and molester. Readers who pay attention will note that his attempts to excuse and rationalize his behavior tend to contradict each other. There is also the fact that Humbert admits having been committed to sanatoriums and mental institutions at several points in his life for "breakdowns" (the nature of which he refuses to elaborate on), implying that, outside everything else, his account might also be colored by the fact that he is not entirely mentally stable. The narrator of the foreword, John Ray Jr., doesn't mince words in his opinion on Humbert, and outright warns the reader against putting too much trust in his account:
  "I have no intention to glorify 'H.H.' No doubt he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and the scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman."
• Villainous BSoD: Has a rather melodramatic one when Dolores escapes his captivity, writing miserable poems and pining for her endlessly. Has a (seemingly) more genuine one when they finally meet again, and he realizes how horrible he was to her as a father and as a person.
• Villain Protagonist: Humbert might try to downplay, and even at times outright refuse this, since the story is told from his point of view, and he is presenting it as an account in his defense at a trial, but even filtered through all this, it is a tale about the awful crimes he committed, chiefly against a young girl, and it is still readily evident that he is a horrible, depraved social vampire.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: One of the many tricks he pulls out to try and manipulate the reader is to go into detail about how he could've been far worse so his actual crimes don't look as bad by comparison. When he finds out Charlotte plans to send Dolores to a boarding school he embellishes the reader in a prolonged scheme he concocted to murder her without any witnesses. He chooses not to go through with it, which he presents to the reader as if proof that he really isn't that bad of a person after all. That said, Charlotte winds up dying not long after anyway suspiciously just after discovering Humbert is a pedophile.
• Would Hurt a Child: Even beyond the gaslighting and sexual abuse, Humbert is shown in the story to have no issue with hitting Dolores if she makes him angry enough. When he starts to think she's conspiring to leave him, he slaps her hard across the face.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Humbert fervently believes he's in a great romance story, and the fact that his true love is a prepubescent girl he exerts control over is simply an unimportant detail. At other times, he believes he's in a story about a good man corrupted by a seductive temptress and who is utterly blameless for his actions. Needless to say, he's very wrong on both counts.

Dolores "Lolita" Haze

The character at the heart of the novel, Dolores is the only child of Charlotte Haze and eventual step-daughter of Humbert.

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• Age Lift: Multiple film adaptations changed Dolores's age to fourteen, as opposed to twelve, in order to minimize the audience's discomfort.
• Bittersweet Ending: Dies a week before her 18th birthday from childbirth, but with freedom and with a man who genuinely loves her and treats her like a human being.
• Brainy Brunette: In the book. She has dark hair, and is said to have an IQ of 121.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Within normal limits when her mother was still alive. It gets worse once her step-father begins sexually and physically abusing her. It is also, again, worth remembering that this behavior is described from Humbert's point of view, and Dolores has pretty much every good reason to despise and distrust him.
• Break the Cutie: She's a normal twelve-year-old girl before Humbert starts to abuse her, no matter what he tries to tell you.
• Break His Heart to Save Him: A platonic version. When she realizes that Humbert is sending lusty looks at one of her closer friends, she stops seeing her in order to protect her from Humbert.
• Daddy's Girl: An unusually disturbing example, as she's being abused by the stepfather in question.
• Dead All Along: The final major twist of the story is that she is the "Mrs. Richard Schiller" whom John Ray Jr. mentions in passing as having died in childbirth in the intro.
• Death by Childbirth: How she eventually dies, one week before her 18th birthday. On Christmas Eve.
• Defiant Captive: After Humbert functionally abducts her, Dolores is shown to constantly be looking for subtle ways to stage an escape from him, or at least belay his abuse, or even just making attempts at resisting him in general. When Humbert believes they are being followed by a car and writes down its license plate number, she erases it in secret. She frequently tries to convince Humbert to go on public outings with other families, and whenever they are in public she makes sure to always attract the attention of strangers, and often brings up the subject of how far she is from home, as if she is trying to make it apparent that there is something very wrong going on, or at least discourage Humbert from trying anything by making sure to have witnesses around. She tells an employee at a hotel gift shop her real last name just as Humbert is about to check in, forcing him to sign the register as Haze to avoid suspicion, thus leaving a trail. She also sometimes fights back physically, as Humbert once gets a remark that he looks like he has a feisty cat at home.
• Died Happily Ever After: For what it's worth, she died on her terms, rather than remaining a victim for Humbert or Quilty.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In the 1962 Kubrick Film, where she doesn't die from childbirth and escapes from Humbert and Quilty's sexual abuse.
• Fille Fatale: Though pop culture would lead you to believe she is this played straight, she's actually a deconstruction. Humbert denies it, although it's eventually made clear that what she goes through is his fault alone. If she does come onto him, which is debatable given Humbert's extreme unreliability, it's because she's a child badly in need of positive adult guidance and with no way to get it, not because she's a cunning seductress.
• I Have Many Names: She goes by "Dolly" at school, and "Lo" or "Lola" to her mother. Humbert is the only one who actually calls her "Lolita". And of course there is the twist towards the end that she is the "Mrs. Richard Schiller" who is referred to as having died in childbirth in the foreword.
• Little Miss Badass: For God's sake, the girl survived the death of her entire biological family and being exploited by two pedophiles before she was fourteen. Overlaps with Little Miss Snarker.
• Little Miss Snarker: A rather tragic example. Snarking quickly becomes the only real option she has left at least trying to fighting back against Humbert, the abusive adult who controls every aspect of her life, so she does it frequently.
• Master Actor: A relatively downplayed example; after Humbert takes custody of her, Dolores (after much begging) starts taking drama classes and performs in a school play. Humbert eventually realizes that he has a harder time predicting her actions, since she now uses her acting skills to hide her feelings and thoughts from him. She even develops an intense love of motion pictures immediately after he abducts her, implying she learned early on that mastering acting would be the best way to get out from under his thumb.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Dolores means "pain", "suffering" or "sorrow" in most Latin-based languages. It is very apt for everything she is forced go through under Humbert.
  • Also, try to say "Dolores Haze" in the stiff, clipped accent (parroting upper-class speech) which a poorly-educated snobbish woman like Charlotte Haze was supposed to use.^ExplanationIt's supposed to sound like "Delirious Haze", which is essentially what Humbert put her in.
• Meaningful Rename: Most people at school or camp call her Dolly, but Humbert renames her as Lolita while her mother affectionately calls her Lola. As an adult, she goes by her husband's name Mrs. Richard Schiller and treats it as a symbol of freedom.
• Orphanage of Fear: Is told by Humbert that if anyone where to find out about his sexual abuse of her she'd be sent here, and that she'd be raised into a life of dull, unloved servitude. This is, of course, an especially bold-faced lie to keep her from trying to contact the authorities.
• Orphan's Ordeal: By the story's start, Dolores has already lost her father in her early childhood, and during the course of it, she ends up losing her mother too. This effectively leaves her at the mercy of Humbert and his abuse.
• Smitten Teenage Girl: Before everything happened, Dolores actually had a crush on Humbert, something that unsurprisingly dies a very messy death after the first time Humbert assaults her. Later she develops an even more unhealthy infatuation on Quilty, another pedophile (though this is actually only in Humbert's besotted eyes; in reality, she really just sees Quilty as a way to escape Humbert's clutches).
• Spared by the Adaptation: While she suffers a Death by Childbirth in both the novel and the 1997 film, there is no mention of her death in the 1962 film.
• Spoiled Brat: One consistent complaint Humbert has about Lolita is how impossible she is to keep happy, and the narrative often lapses into bitter rants about the large number of gifts, trips, attractions, and allowance money he's forced to give her to keep her satisfied. He portrays her as a spoiled child who knows he's in a tight spot and is milking him for everything he has. Outside of that viewpoint, she's a deeply traumatized young girl being abused by someone who only wants her for sex, so it's more likely he keeps giving her presents so he can justify claiming sexual favors.
• Took a Level in Badass: By the time she's nearly an adult, she's immune to Humbert's manipulations, telling him off for the creep he is. Humbert is so moved, he gives him the money she demands of him.

Charlotte Haze

• Abhorrent Admirer: Humbert describes her as such, frequently expressing overt disgust both for Charlotte's body and her sexual desire for him.
• Age-Gap Romance: Her first husband, Dolores's father, was twenty years her senior. Humbert only mentions it as an offhand curiosity and then blows off the subject, having no interest in the man and what their relationship was like.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: According to Humbert's narration this is her most defining feature. She's fiercely protective of Humbert's affections not just from other women, but even from her own daughter, and keeps them apart so she can have him all to herself. Of course since Humbert viewed her mostly as a roadblock to his and Dolores being together, it's possible this is just how he interpreted normal parental protectiveness, and he might either be playing the detail up or adding it entirely.
• Hot Guy, Ugly Wife: The Ugly Wife to Humbert's Hot Guy, according to Humbert himself. Humbert's self descriptions paint him as a tall, mysterious, and aloof gentleman with an irresistible allure. Meanwhile his description of Charlotte starts with "I suppose I should get it over with" and is almost nothing but demeaning and unflattering terms (except for when he sees the resemblance to her daughter). Though rather tellingly, the only people Humbert describes as physically beautiful are pubescent girls or younger, so what else could be expected?
• Killed Offscreen: Humbert gives an incredibly detailed account of where he was when she died, so he wasn't present for her actual death. According to him he didn't even notice when she ran out of the house and into the path of an oncoming car.
• Last-Name Basis: For most of their time together Humbert mentally only refers to her by her last name and his narration describing her is dripping with contempt, which is in a stark contrast to the "loving" pet name he uses for her daughter. After they get engaged, Humbert stops seeing her as an obstacle to being with Lolita and suddenly starts using her first name and talks about her in a more Condescending Compassion sort of tone.
• The Lost Lenore: A rare male version. Charlotte's husband, Harold, died under vague circumstances, not too long after their son passed away. It is clear that the event affected Charlotte deeply, and it is what leaves her vulnerable to Humbert's machinations, as she is trying to find love again. This aspect of the story is ultimately not really explored too much, because Humbert doesn't really care about it, and shows overt signs of annoyance when Charlotte tries to bring it up.
• Mama Bear: Once she figures out that Humbert is out to molest her daughter, she snarls at him to get out of her house and life and leave Dolores and her alone, angrily shooting down all of his attempts at making excuses.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: It is at least implied that her death (killed in a freak car accident) just as she had figured out that Humbert was a predator who was after her daughter and she was about to expose him to the proper authorities might not be entirely accidental after all. Humbert readily admits that it certainly was extremely convenient for him, but is otherwise suspiciously eager to just quickly move past the incident in his narration and clearly wants to discuss it in as little detail as possible.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Played With. Humbert does his level best to portray her as annoying, attention-seeking, and very overbearing in his account in order to make her appear as unsympathetic as possible, and it is evident that he greatly exaggerates and caricatures her flaws. That said, it is implied that she genuinely does have some less sympathetic sides to her, most notably in how she is sometimes overtly verbally abusive towards Dolores and makes a couple of thinly-veiled anti-Semitic comments.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Charlotte's young son died at some point in his early childhood, very shortly followed by her husband Harold, leaving her as a single mother. It is not elaborated on much, because while it is made clear that it was a great personal tragedy to Charlotte (and definitely also impacted Dolores), Humbert, true to form, is just sort of uninterested in the subject, and even shows overt signs of annoyance in his narration whenever she brings it up.
• Out of Focus: There's clearly a lot more going on with Charlotte than Humbert is telling us, and her relationship with Dolores is strained and complex but not necessarily unloving. We never get a full picture of her entirely because Humbert either didn't care about her enough to find out more or is actively trying to make her look as unflattering as possible (or both).
• Parents as People: Charlotte is portrayed by Humbert as a vain woman who couldn't care less about Dolores, but once she discovers his true nature, she immediately plans to send Dolores away from him, implying that Humbert is lying about, or at least exaggerating, Charlotte's lack of care for her own daughter.
• Unwanted Spouse: Humbert elopes with and eventually marries her. Meanwhile, he makes it very clear to the reader just how much he can't stand her and is really only doing it so he can easier prey on her daughter.
• Unwitting Pawn: Humbert couldn't stand her from the moment he met her but was enraptured with Dolores and inserted himself to her life to get close to her daughter. Even when they get married he rarely sees her as anything more than a useful idiot.

Claire Quilty

• Gender-Blender Name: Lolita uses the fact his name could easily be feminine to convince Humbert that Quilty is actually the female half of the duo assisting her drama class in putting on the Enchanted Hunter (and therefore keep Humbert from making her quit).
• Mirror Character: To Humbert, with Quilty also being a predatory paedophile who fancies himself a man of culture and an artist. But where Humbert makes a concerted effort to explain away or downplay his crimes and tries to romanticize his sexual abuse of Dolores, Quilty in contrast doesn't seem to care all that much about his image and never really makes any effort to deny or hide that his preying on underage girls is about anything else than satisfying a perverse need for lust and power.
• Troll: When he manages to elope with Dolores, Humbert attempts to trace his steps, only to find that Quilty left a breadcrumb trail of clues behind him specifically designed to mock anyone following him. For example, Humbert succeeds multiple times at finding out what hotels Quilty has stayed at, but is horrified to find Quilty never registers under his own name, only ridiculous pseudonyms like "A. Person" or Arsène Lupin. Some pseudonyms are even the name of Humbert's cousin or Dolores' dead father (whose home is listed as "Tombstone"), just to make sure Humbert knows he had been actively working with Dolores to help her escape.

Rita

• The Alcoholic: One of the few notable details Humbert divulge about Rita is that she is a heavy drinker.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: What defines Rita more than anything through Humbert's narration is that she is constantly afraid of being left alone. And he evidently uses it to string her along.
• Noodle Incident: Seems to attract these, and Humbert's life gets very weird when he's living with her. At one point the two of them wake up in a motel room to find an albino with amnesia neither of them remember ever seeing in bed with them, and dump him at a local hospital before speeding off. Later Humbert has to bail her out of jail for stealing several blue furs that she claims were gifts that were only reported stolen when the person who gave them to her sobered up. If not for Humbert's stoic narration you'd be forgiven for thinking the book had suddenly had a hard Genre Shift into a screwball comedy.
• Younger Than They Look: Downplayed. Rita is described as being somewhere in her early twenties; Humbert describes her as looking somewhat pre-pubescent, or at least pre-pubescent "enough" for him.

Dick Schiller

• Foil: To Humbert Humbert, being his opposite in nearly every way. He's a kind-hearted and friendly blue-collar nice guy who genuinely loves Dolores, against the selfish, sneering, classist monster Humbert who never saw Dolores as anything besides a sexual plaything. Talking to him and recognizing the difference seems to help trigger Humbert's Heel Realization.
• Nice Guy: Dick is probably the only character in the entire cast to who neither manages to harm Dolores nor fail her; in fact, he is by all appearances a very supportive husband, despite being poor and deaf. It says a lot that even for as self-serving as Humbert's narration is, even he can't deny that Dick just seems to be a sweet, friendly person with no ill-will toward Dolores.

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