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By: Kate Elizabeth Russell

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Trigger warnings for My Dark Vanessa include: rape, child abuse, child sexual abuse, rape of a child, grooming, addiction, drug use, child drug use, suicide, suicide ideation.

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The novel takes place in 2000 at Browick, an illustrious boarding school. The boarding school is known for its rigorous class load, its high performing students, and its charismatic teachers. Underneath the rigorous class load, however, is highly critical and demeaning teachers who expect the most from their students at all times. Underneath the high performance is the all-consuming drive for perfection that leads to students to depression, anxiety, and addiction. And underneath the charisma lies the monsters, the predators who take advantage of lonely children, the enablers who laugh and look the other way, and the ignorant who overlook the signs and let students fall through their grasp.

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"'Look at that,' he says. 'It matches your hair perfectly (Russell, 2020, p. 33).'"

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2000: Vanessa Wye is 15 a year old girl attending Browick, a boarding school in Maine. She has no friends after her last roommate, Jenny, and her got into a huge fight about Jenny's boyfriend. At Browick, Vanessa meets Jacob Strane, a charismatic, hard to please teacher that the girl students refer to as sexist. At Browick, Vanessa is groomed by Strane, manipulated into believing the consistent rape and abuse she suffers from at his hands is consensual.

2017: Vanessa Wye is a 32 year old woman, still deeply affected by the sexual trauma she experienced at a young age. Suffering from depression, anxiety, and addiction, Vanessa struggles to reconcile her "relationship" with Strane with the new reality she is being forced to accept.

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Excerpt from the Facebook post Taylor Birch made in 2017 with sexual assault allegations against Jacob Strane.

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"His lips are dry, like laundry stiff from the sun. His beard is softer than I expected, but his glasses hurt (Russell, 2020, p. 82)."

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Jacob Strane is the monster every parent is afraid of, every girl is warned about. From the beginning of the novel, Strane is extremely inappropriate with his students, cursing in front of them, abusing his power to bully them and embarrass them in front of the class. He is, also, extremely mentally ill; he suffers from depression, suicidal tendencies, impotence, and an unknown personality disorder. Strane idolizes youth and he lives vicariously through her, continuing to manipulate her until his suicide in 2017. Strane acts as a parallel to Vanessa, a demonstration of how mental illness can rot and corrupt a mind.

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"and here i am again, my girl,
wondering what on earth i'm doing here
maybe he doesn't love me"

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"His cabinet is full of the usual [...] plus two orange prescription bottles labeled with names I recognize, Viagra and Wellbutrin (Russell, 2020, p. 103)."

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Throughout the novel, Strane and Vanessa demonstrate a cyclic or causal relationship of mental illness. Strane, who is suffering from depression and an unknown personality disorder, traumatizes Vanessa and causes her to develop depression and anxiety. As their romantic and sexual relationship intensifies, we see the symptoms of Vanessa's disorder intensify; for example, the more Strane rapes her, the deeper and longer her dissociative episodes last beyond the initial rape and into the school week and, eventually, the school month. Additionally, the progression of Vanessa's depression parallels the progression of Strane's depression. When Strane's progression, however, reaches a peak and he commits suicide, Vanessa is given a choice to follow in her former teacher's footsteps and commit as well or seek help. Vanessa seeks help, diverting from the path Strane set her on.

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Excerpt of the chat messages between Vanessa and Craig, a 36 year old man she met at a bowling alley.

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The word "gay" is only mentioned twice throughout the entire novel, and in reference to a side character, Jesse Ly. The author's minimal use of any explicit reference to confirmed sexuality is intentional and is used to reflect Vanessa's own confusion and lost connection with romantic and sexual intimacy. It is up to the readers to infer and conceptualize what Vanessa's sexuality would be and how the effects of sexual trauma can corrupt or obscure desire and attraction. For example, when Vanessa was 14, she found herself irrationally angry that her roommate, Jenny, had a boyfriend and spent all her time with him. Eventually, they had a fight were Jenny claimed that Vanessa was too attached to Jenny. Vanessa vehemently disagreed and refused to speak to her until they were no longer friends, claiming "[d]eep down, I knew she was right; I did love her too much, and I couldn’t imagine ever stopping (Russell, 2020, p. 116)." Later on in life, Vanessa finds herself drawn to girls, but instead of understanding it as attraction, she convinces herself it's Strane's influence on her to desire women the same way he did. The book concludes with never providing a definitive answer on Vanessa's sexuality, in the same way Vanessa never finds a definitive answer to her own sexuality.

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"my body's outdated and hell is my doom"

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"'And if anyone catches you with it, you didn't get it from me (Russell, 2020, p. 73).'"

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Since its publishing in 1955, Lolita has become conceptualized to mean a sexually alluring young girl. In My Dark Vanessa, Strane gives Lolita to Vanessa. This act drastically influences Vanessa's thinking, manipulating Vanessa to draw the parallels between Humbert and Strane. As Vanessa sees the parallels, she begins to sympathize with Strane, seeing him as the victim for risking his job by being with her. Vanessa begins to see her assault and eventual rape as her fault for using her beauty and sexuality to trap Strane, that Strane is being brave and that she is being selfish. Vanessa becomes obsessed with Lolita reading it over and over for reassurance that the power and fault belongs to her, a gross and violent misunderstanding of the power dynamic between the two. What parallel Vanessa cannot recognize is between her and Lo; the parallels between two victims who were taken advantage of because of their loneliness and innocence.

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"they only want you when you're seventeen
when you're twenty-one
you're no fun"

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The major conflict begins in 2017, when Taylor Birch, a former student of Jacob Strane, releases an accusation of sexual assault against Strane in accordance with the rising #MeToo movement. Vanessa is then forced to reconcile her perception of the relationship she had with Strane with the reality that she was groomed, raped, and abused by Strane for several years. Additionally, Vanessa is still suffering mentally, emotionally, and sexually from her trauma and still heavily depends on Strane for validation even 17 years later. The novel alternates chapters between her at 15 and her at 32, where the Vanessa of the past has to undergo horrors unimaginable and the Vanessa of the future has to face the consequences of those horrors.

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"But these barks are desperate and scared. They sound more like please please please (Russell, 2020, p. 365)."

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The resolution of the novel begins with Vanessa finally opening up to her therapist, Ruby, about her relationship with Strane. Vanessa admits to Ruby that she can't let go of the love story that she has held on to for so long, that if she does, she will have to admit to herself that it wasn't a love story, but her whole life. Vanessa begins grieving her death, as she sees that everything Strane has touched as dead. As Vanessa grieves, she reconnects with her mother and the first assault victim to come out with allegations, Taylor Birch. The novel ends with Vanessa getting a rescue dog and beginning her new life with something that Strane will never get the chance to touch.

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Vampirism in literature isn't strictly reserved for the explicit depictions of blood-sucking, undying monsters. A vampire, according to Thomas Foster (2014), author of How to Read Literature like a Professor, is usually an alluring, captivating older man who preys on the young and beautiful girls, growing younger, more alive, and virile by taking the life from the girls. Jacob Strane is, by archetypal definition, a vampire. Strane uses Vanessa's obsession and admiration of him to feel younger and more alive, while raping her in order to combat his clinical erectile dysfunction. Vanessa, in turn, loses her life to Strane's manipulation; she is expelled from school, suffering depression and addiction, and her connection to intimacy in all forms is destroyed. Additionally, after Vanessa is expelled, Strane moves on to continue abusing and assaulting new female students, signifying that he has finished sucking the life out of Vanessa and has moved on to newer, younger, and fresher blood.

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Excerpt from the chat messages between Jenny Murphy and Vanessa Wye confirming Jacob Strane was the one who got Vanessa expelled from Browick. 