Written by contributor Megan Laing
“Vanessa Wye was fifteen years old when she first had sex with her English teacher”
The premise of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut My Dark Vanessa at first appears, while not impossible, not the most relatable.
Playing on her parents’ post-Columbine anxiety and working her ass off for a full scholarship, Vanessa returns for her second year at Browick School, a prestigious boarding school in Maine where she falls into what she believes to be an epic love affair with her forty two year old English teacher, Jacob Strane.
Cut to 2017, deep in the midst of the #MeToo movement (#BelieveWomen), multiple girls come forward claiming sexual abuse from Strane in the early 2000s. At first, Vanessa, who has remained in contact with her abuser all this time, immediately disbelieves the other victims despite obsessively checking their Facebook posts. Her affair with Strane was deeply romantic and intensely passionate, wasn’t it?
Over the course of the novel, Vanessa re-examines her past relationship with Strane and the events that unfolded during her formative years. Through the use of dual perspective, she comes to the conclusion that she was, in fact, taken advantage of and statutory raped by a man who abused his position of authority and duty of care as her teacher.
As the premise suggests, sex is an integral theme throughout the novel but, despite the social change, Vanessa’s relationship with sex remains from when she loses her virginity at fifteen to the present day chapters set in 2017. Whilst Vanessa does not appear to find the actual act of sex itself to be shameful, Russell implies that she seldom finds pleasure in it either, sobbing the first time Strane ‘makes love’ to her and, in the present day, allowing a man she meets at a bar to have sex with her while she simply just lays there.
Vanessa is a character who maintains that she was not a victim, has conditioned herself into believing that she wasn’t ‘raped raped’ because, through years of Strane’s manipulation and her own love, she believed that she was equally to blame for the affair. The fact of the matter is that Strane was wolf in sheep’s clothing, a predator hiding behind the excuse that he genuinely loved Vanessa, that he was attracted to her academia equally as he was attracted to her girl-like figure and qualities. He manipulates Vanessa into his perfect Lolita character, with himself Humbert by allowing her tentative sips of beer, sneaking her secret or ‘forbidden’ books, or buying her a set of dainty strawberry-print pyjamas. When their ‘relationship’ is eventually discovered, Strane orchestrates Vanessa to take the fall, getting her expelled for pursuing him while he remains unscathed. A shocking yet sadly predictable plot point with more repercussions for the victim than for the assailant.
Another example of this that springs to mind in the Stanford Rape case, in which Brock Turner was caught (literally in the act of) sexually assaulting a young woman behind a dumpster. The scene was so horrific that one of the two men passing and who chased Turner when he tried to flee was sobbing. Turner’s punishment? Six months in jail (half of which he didn’t serve) and three years probation. Why the light punishment? Because Turner was a talented athlete (the same way Strane was a high quality teacher) and his father said that to punish his son was ‘steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life’. Much like one of Strane’s other victims who reported her story through Facebook, Chanel Miller relinquished her right to anonymity in 2019 and bravely shared her story in her memoir Know My Name. Whereas Vanessa, a character whose emotional and mental growth is stunted by her adolescent years, is reluctant to speak to anyone, especially reporters or her parents, about her experience and is unwilling to even share the experience with her therapist, Ruby.
My Dark Vanessa shines a spotlight on the onslaught of victim-blaming that perpetrated the #MeToo movement, the absurd notion that victims must take responsibility for the detail of their own assaults or risk the aggressive and violent invalidation of their traumatic experience. Vanessa’s journey is ultimately one of healing and self-growth, seeking to regain the autonomy that Strane robbed from her in her formative years. She recognises that she doesn’t need to forgive him in order to forgive herself for being fifteen, in love and naive to his manipulation.
Despite rating the book highly, I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone else. Kate Elizabeth Russell crafts an uncomfortable and sometimes controversial read that unsettles and uncovers the lasting effects of sexual assault without romanticising or glorifying abuse.
