The narrator personifies America, and in almost exact parallel with Lolita, attempts to seduce her. The phrase ‘wiggles and whorls’ when describing their path across America parallels Humbert’s first sexual encounter with Lolita, where he achieves orgasm by rubbing against her. Humbert says that ‘she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back’ and the parallel between the two uses of ‘wiggle’ shows that it is clearly explicit for him. Subsequently, use of this verb to describe both his journey and his sexual intimacy with Lolita demonstrates how Humbert views his journey across America as a form of sexual access to the country. Jonathan Sawday, in fact, observes that erotic poems in 17th Century frequently compare a conquest of America to that of a woman’s body. Compare Humbert’s travels to Donne’s famous Elegy XIX, ‘To his mistress going to bed’, for example: it seems an intuitive link with Lolita’s description of the journey insofar as its lines License my roving hands, and let them go | Before, behind, between, above, below. | O my America! my new-found-land, | My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned, parallel the paternalistic yet passive attitude that the conquester holds over the country. He subsequently and consistently parallels his conquest across America with his sexual conquest of Lolita herself; he mirrors Lolita in the settings around him, where ‘the […] mountains seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting Lolitas who dissolved in their haze’. Note the irony of usage of the word ‘haze’: of course this also alludes to Lolita’s surname, of whom the various iterations of her entire name pervade the novel. More interestingly, however is the sexualisation of the setting; Humbert continuously conflates America the country and Lolita the individual. That Humbert sees his journey in terms of corruption and not conquest is evidenced when he says: ‘I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country’. Monica Manolescu->