Savannah FraserLumsdenENG4U60May 22, 2014ISU Comparison Essay “Lust is temporary… Without love, lust and romance will always be short-lived” (Steel). In Lolita written by Vladimir Nabokov, the protagonist and middle-aged professor, Humbert Humbert, has a sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, also known as Lolita. In the novel Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan, four middle-aged women are seen at different points in their lives and all share one aspiration: to find romance. Fleeting sexual desires are illustrated in the two irreconcilable novels. The protagonists are subjected to a false conception of true love through sexual obsession and the pains of a new 20th century society. Male characters in novels seek romance using dominance. In Lolita, the protagonist Humbert Humbert believes that marriage "...will help him, if not to purge himself of [his] degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep [his women] under peaceful control" (Nabokov 24). This shows that Humbert uses marriage as a mechanism to not only prevent himself from pursuing nymphets, but also to control the women he has sex with. In Waiting to Exhale, after eleven years of marriage, the protagonist, Bernadine, called her husband "selfish and selfish" because he never allowed her to pursue anything she was interested in, which shows also his controlling nature (McMillan 226). . In Lolita, Humbert gets angry because his wife cheats on him. The cause of his anger is that a man could so easily take what he controlled and owned for his own “comfort and destiny” (Nabokov 28). Humbert felt like his territory was being violated and that smacks of ignorance. This is also illustrated when Bernadin... middle of paper ......ist, Savannah, moves from Denver to Phoenix and experiences the social struggle of being a "successful black [woman]" (McMillan 28) in a white-dominated area Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale clearly demonstrate that the fallacy of romance is reinforced by dominant possession, sexual obsession, and societal norms of the previous century. What we can learn from the themes of Lolita is to increase the protection of children in the care of their parents or social workers to prevent pedophilia, because whether Humbert is in love with Lolita or not, it is always morally wrong. Generally, a lesson can be learned from both novels to be careful in all aspects when acting on the feelings of a loved one, as this can have negative results, as has been the case for some of the main characters of the second novel discussed..