The beginning of the academic year made it impossible for me to join
the discussion of "swooners" earlier. I found it interesting, however,
because I've been exploring swoons, trances, and various forms of
enchanted slumber in Lolita.
I think it's significant that Humbert buys Dolores the "swooners,"
along with many other gifts, in a vain attempt to mollify her and
assuage his own guilt a few hours after the rape at The Enchanted
Hunters. He identifies several denizens of the hotel with the romantic
word “swoon,” which suggests not only a partial or total loss of
consciousness but, more precisely, a fainting spell caused by
infatuation or erotic rapture. In the lobby, “a pale-faced,
blue-freckled, black-eared cocker spaniel swoon[s]" in response to
Dolores’s caress (117); a family called “the Swoons” has already taken
the hotel’s last spare cot, so that Humbert and Dolores must share a
bed (118); and the desk clerk, “Mr. Swine,” is transformed by
consonantal rhyme into “pink pig Mr. Swoon” the next morning (118,
139). It is also with a “swooning curiosity,” at the end of the novel,
that Humbert searches old issues of the Briceland Gazette for a
photograph of himself "on [his] !
dark way to Lolita's bed" (262). I suggest, therefore, that Humbert's
neologism not only evokes various items of clothing, as others have
pointed out, but also echoes the imagery of enchanted slumber -
-especially Humbert's fantasy of drugging Dolores and fondling her
unconscious body -- that pervades the hotel episode.