“yearlong travels” of Humbert and Lolita across the United States function as a means of seduction, […] leading astray, which is precisely Humbert’s project’. To these ends, the plot becomes more confused insofar as the obsession over the portrayal of setting and Lolita as beautiful and analogous and aesthetically connected add description which weaves into the novel, yet undermine the believability of the narrator. For such a subjective viewpoint, however, there is a value in the painstaking way in which Lolita resonates through settings. Symbolising Lolita’s femininity and sexuality, Humbert describes ‘Lolita, just before our departure from Beardsley, […] studying tour books and maps, and marking laps and stops with her lipstick!’. Lolita’s marking of the journey with a lipstick symbolises Humbert’s association with the journey being a progression towards possession over Lolita, sexually. The journey continues to parallel the defiling of the young Dolores: Humbert says that ‘the tour of your thigh, you know, should not exceed seventeen and a half inches. […] We are now setting out on a long happy journey’. The placement of the ‘tour’ of her body, in apposition with the ‘long happy journey’ that they will conduct, is the epitomisation of Humbert’s approach to the conquest of each: he sees Lolita and America as interchangeable.>