vp-banner-advertise-with-us
Now Reading
My Dark Vanessa: A Lolita’s Point Of View

My Dark Vanessa: A Lolita’s Point Of View

my-dark-vanessa-FI

An insight into Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa and a predatory affair story between a teacher and a student in light of the #MeToo.

Photos | Damian Dovarganes (Background image of protesters) & Getty Images (Overlay photo of #MeToo founder Tarana Burke)

Trigger Warning: This book includes discussions on pedophilia, trauma, suicide, victim-blaming, and sexual abuse.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, a wave of women started outing their powerful abusers and harassers. While many empowered women share their stories, others stay in the dark with a different perspective. This eventually inspired the author Kate Elizabeth Russell to write her debut novel, My Dark Vanessa.

The difficult novel not only ignited my fury against pedophiles and manipulators. It also made me struggle to grasp the main character’s choice of actions. Nevertheless, it made me understand how complicated it is to be a victim, especially if one did not know or cannot accept that they are. Thus, My Dark Vanessa is a book for all the real-life Lolita and Vanessa, whose experiences have not been heard nor understood. This is Russell’s story as well as mine.

If there’s one thing you take away from this class, it should be that the world is made of endlessly intersecting stories, each one valid and true.

Jacob Strane (My Dark Vanessa)

A 15-Year-Old’s Forbidden First Love

My Dark Vanessa switches from two parallel timelines of Vanessa Wye’s life. One thing she is back in her all-girls boarding school in 2000, and the next she is in her present reality in 2017. This is the usual case for stories revolving around a character’s trauma. In this way, readers get to see where the character comes from and how they deal with their past as an adult at the same time.

Photo | Literary Elephant

At 15, Vanessa involves herself with her 42-year-old English teacher Jacob Strane. He successfully lures her to have romantic relations with him as he feeds her with literature and compliments on her writing. Without any experience of kissing a boy, Vanessa welcomes the teacher’s advances as she delves into Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. As a matter of fact, Russell takes inspiration from the controversial novel, mixing it into her characters as somehow a plot device for their distasteful relationship.

It isn’t only the plot, it’s the story of a seemingly ordinary girl who is really a deadly demon in disguise and the man who loves her. It’s that he gave it to me. There’s now a whole new context to what we’re doing, new insight into what he might want from me. What conclusion is there to draw besides the obvious? He is Humbert, and I am Dolores.

Vanessa Wye (My Dark Vanessa)

Meanwhile, the 32-year-old Vanessa found herself still tied to what happened to her in the past. In between love and trauma, she struggles to realize and accept that it was abuse. Despite her recounts of his moments of manipulation, Vanessa cannot help but blame herself more, admitting that he loved him. However, what does a 15-year-old truly know about love when it is with a fully-grown man who should know better?

Vanessa’s Internalize Victim-Blaming

I just feel… I can’t lose the thing I’ve held on to for so long. You know? I just really need it to be a love story. You know? I really, really need it to be that.

Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it?

It’s my life. This has been my whole life.

Vanessa Wye (My Dark Vanessa)

Many of us do not often understand why some people choose to silence themselves during an abuse. While there are many ways to get out of an unfortunate situation, others cannot truly escape at all. This is because they are their own prisoner. Following the events that led to her expulsion from the school, Vanessa never really escaped Strane’s influences. She grew up still seeking admiration from men far older than her. After he took away her innocence and childhood, she was never the same. It consequently became her life.

As she read Lolita, Vanessa immediately internalized that she was the same as the character. In the book, Humbert described Lolita as an evil sexual demon that lured him to fall in love. However, this made me think if it was the same reality for Lolita, or was it just a figment of his imagination to validate his perversion?

Moreover, just like Humbert, Strane manipulated Vanessa and made use of her naivety and fear of abandonment. “I’m mad at the world that turned him into a monster when all he did was have the bad luck of falling in love with me,” she says as she defended him despite knowing he did the same thing with other students. Perhaps it was pride that kept her from accepting, but it was also her years of settled internalization.

Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not – and it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I’ve never wanted to be, and if I don’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is a state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?

See Also

Vanessa Wye (My Dark Vanessa)

Behind The Thought-Provoking Novel

For a book, so figuratively heavy, I find it perplexing that My Dark Vanessa is mere fiction. In fact, it is impossible to write something so disturbingly detailed, especially when it talks about trauma and abuse. Russell subtly admitted in her Author’s Note how feasibly accurate her book could be with her real-life story. Hence, it explains how it could somehow be linked to her own experiences.

Photo | David Kasnic

I grew up in Maine and was educated there – first at a private (day) school in ninth and tenth grades, until I withdrew for personal reasons, and later at college. Because of the similarities between those broad facts and certain fictional elements of My Dark Vanessa, I am aware that readers who are loosely familiar with my background may jump to the erroneous conclusion that I am telling the secret history of those events. I am not; this is a work of fiction, and the characters and setting are entirely imaginary.

Kate Elizabeth Russell

Russell did not tip-toe nor sugarcoat her words. She expressed it the way Vanessa would express it. The writer surfaced what was long hidden from the public – another side of victimhood. As everyone was beginning to explore sexual consent during the Me Too movement, Russell came out with an incredible anti-thesis that further strengthened its cause. With such a page-turning novel, My Dark Vanessa is a masterpiece worth investing your time on.

Russell’s My Dark Vanessa brings light to the depth and complexities of love and trauma.

Although it was a brutal and painful read, Russell’s beautiful and thought-provoking writing compels you for an emotional ride. As I read this now as a 22-year-old, it made me comprehend that the baggage I have been carrying should not have been mine, to begin with. Evil is cunning and slick, but it is never one’s fault to fall into its trap. Love is both a strength and a weakness.

But as The Guardian‘s Sofka Zinovieff wrote in her review,

Love is never the justification for harm.

Interested in articles like this? Click here to read more.

View Comments (0)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Scroll To Top