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-Oancea argues that ‘the “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 ‘>