Lolita's Ghost Speaks

"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?"

23. This is the exact number of years that Harvey Weinstein, notorious Hollywood producer and all-around predatory creep, received for sexual abuse in the New York courts. Years. Not months. Years. What does this mean? As the celebratory confetti swirled, this question lingers. Have we reached that watershed moment of taking abusers, even the highest, the whitest, the most financially secured to task? Clarifying what consent is? Are we even going forward? (Over 70 million voting for an orange sexual assaulter and serial rapist shitbag to occupy the White House means we're still stuck in the ditch...). 

Weinstein's and Bill Cosby's convictions, the Jeffery Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell unraveling, the judicial victory of E. Jean Carroll's sexual asssault suit against Agolf Shitler, the ferocious surge of the #MeToo movements telegraph a sociopolitical sea change this as we enter into a new decade and contest with the now opened Pandora's box as more victims are finding their voices, wielding the weapon of words to strive for accountability and truth.

My Dark Vanessa adds its voice to a stream of fiction that attempts bring context to our current cultural response to sexual violence, but it takes on a language that is raw and realist, rather than veiled and implied. Its wealth of pages explores the complexities of sexual abuse --- the gaslighting and accusations that encompass it, the trauma that endures from it, and the persons who become ensnared in its insidious manipulative rhythm. For her debut, Kate Elizabeth Russell has drawn one sinister account of a young girl's abuse, and how this abuse continues to defile and define her into adulthood. As a whole, this book is disturbing, devastating, and stirs disgust, and sadly it doesn't offer solutions, or solace. More so it's a reminder of what silences, denials we're still facing today and how rot-rooted sex abuse is within our society, and how the truth is the only antidote to combating against it. Many an emotion was had by reading this, and I can't say it was enjoyable, we're viewing a woman's dissent into the quagmire of her past, and its a wretched way down. 

33-year-old Vanessa Wye might seem 'normal' on the outside. She's holding down a job as a hotel manager, is independent and in control, but her brick-laid exterior shields the vandalized interior within, as Vanessa is a damaged, broken woman haunted by the sexual and abusive relationship she had with her then 45-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, this when she was fifteen-years-old. At present, another young woman has publicly accused Strane of sexual abuse when she was a student of his, and has reached out to Vanessa knowing she was his first known victim. With the accusation going viral in the new age of social media and pressure to add her voice to growing calls for justice, Vanessa is forced to reevaluate the relationship she had with her teacher, wondering if she was a victim of his abuse, or if she was in love. 

Yeah..."in love". Housed in a hellish spiral of Stockholm Syndrome our Vanessa is in, all due to at an pubescent, impressionable age she was led into a false narrative about her 'wise beyond her teenage years' maturity level that has deluded her into thinking she has found her handsome prince in her predatory English teacher. There is an impressive multi-layered nuance to how Russell approaches such an odious ordeal as sexual grooming. The denials, the bargaining, the anger, the depression, the reconstructing of events...Vanessa goes through all those steps, over and over again, going up and down. The language, the inner streams of conversation that she mentally volleys throughout her mind are maddening and churn the stomach. 

"It wasn't about how young I was, not for him. Above everything else, he loved my mind. He said I had a genius-level emotional intelligence and that I wrote like a prodigy, that he could talk to me, confide in me. Lurking deep within me, he said, was a dark romanticism, the same kind he saw within himself. No one had understood that dark part of him until I came along."

Crushes on teachers can happen within the school ecosystem. We've all known of one teacher, or coach who vibed different from the rest of the autocratic ones. I can remember one such teacher, a coach/science teacher hybrid who was as if an Adonis had decided to take residence in our high school. Gorgeous he was, and there wasn't a girl in the class who lingered a little longer to discuss osmosis as if it was the latest plotline on The O.C. Still, even with raging teenaged hormones ricocheting around, boundaries are set. Not an innocent "school girl crush" Vanessa has on Strane. This is going left a la Amy Smart and Mary Kay Letourneau. Where boundaries between teacher and student have been criminally and abusively crossed.

Russell has Vanessa walk a tightrope, where she's unsure of where her consent ends, and where her victimhood begins, this when she believes she was in control the entire time. Where she believes that every flirtation and initiation she's thrown Strane's way is why she's not a victim, and justifies that she was "in love".

"It's fine. The drinking, the pot, the Ativan, even Strane---it's perfectly fine. It's nothing. It's normal. All interesting women had older lovers when they were young. It's a rite of passage. You go in a girl and come out not quite a woman but closer, a girl more conscious of herself and her own power. [...] He made me see myself in a way a boy my own age never could. No one can convince me that I would have been better off it I'd been like the other girls at school, giving blow jobs and hand jobs, all that endless labor, before being deemed a shit and thrown away. At least Strane loved me. At least I knew how it felt to be worshiped. He fell at my feet before he even kissed me."

As an adult, Vanessa emotional maturity is at an standstill, as she hasn't developed past fifteen. So she supplements: her attentions towards younger girls are almost a way of her analyzing herself through her lost innocence, where she'll one minute find teen girls asking for cigarettes charming (leading her to believe she may have adopted predatory tendencies herself...), but find disdain at a teen co-worker who being sexually harassed, projecting throughout ("What do you want from me? You really need me to rescue you? This is nothing. You're safe; he's on the other side of the desk and he's not going to get you. You should know how to handle this."), coming off as a rape apologist. 

"Not that I've been raped. Not raped raped. Strane hurt me sometimes, but never like that. Though I could claim he raped me and I'm sure I'd be believed. I could participate in this movement of women upon women upon women lining the walls with every bad thing that's ever happened to them, but I'm not going to lie to fit in. I'm not going to call myself a victim. Women like Taylor find comfort in that label and that's great for them. He said it himself---with me, it was different. He loved me, he loved me."

She denies, denies, denies. Romanticizing their relationship to having utter repulsion for it. She defends, defends, defends her abuser, and still competes for attentions from him, this knowing she's now "too old" for him. When she compares herself to her fellow female classmates and Strane's future victims, she's a mix of smug and jealous, even mocking, as she believes Strane's victims get "carried away" in the 'hysteria' of constant accusations --- this a veiled sneer towards the #MeToo movement and its push for accountability. She further exerts anger over victims' ability to tell their stories so openly, all while she's only able to convince herself of the abuse through an anonymous blog.

 

"Once the truth is out, he'll come to define my entire life; nothing else about me will matter. [...] It's easy to imagine how my life could become one long trail of wreckage leading directly back to my decision to tell."

The intensity of conflictions, the delusions Vanessa wraps herself in, and her attitudes to other women make her a difficult character to even sympathize with. She is frustration to the tenth power and at times it became difficult to read this as much as the triggering "foreplay" grooming and rape scenes between Vanessa and Strane. Her abuser has groomed her well, as he has successfully made a grown woman still see herself as fifteen-year-old as "in love". Yet, for all the words, Russell is driving the point home, as painstaking and repulsive as it is, that within this ball of predatory confusion, there is still a little girl hurting within Vanessa. Someone who feels neglected and wants to be saved and we must see her as a victim even when she doesn't want to believe she is. 

Even in frustration, I did hurt for teenaged Vanessa having to stand in front of students forced to lie, about "making up" her association with Strane, as her school fails to protect her. I also hurt for the adult Vanessa as she waffles from feeling she was abused by Strane, to feelings of love, to feelings of guilt over initiating the relationship, and how such feelings have carried well into adulthood, and affect her sexuality, every relationship she attempts, and the types of men she allows in her orbit, including Strane who still slithers about the fringes. 

"He's still inside me, trying to keep me seeing them in the same way he did, a series of nameless girls sitting at a seminar table. He needs me to remember they were nothing. He could barely differentiate between them. They never mattered to him. They were nothing compared to me."

The vitriol, the frustration and the condemning should be directed to Strane. He laid his head on her lap and told her "I'm going to ruin you" and he does, insidiously so. He gaslights her into believing that she had/held the power, she wouldn't be a conflicted, confused hull of a person without him, and you despise him for it. He was the adult, she was a child, he knew the boundaries and not to cross them, but he selfishly didn't care.  

Still, what falters somewhat in Russell's assessment is a well-rounded look at Strane. Yes, he's a piece of monstrous predatory shit, but how did he become so? What drove him to focus so much on young girls? Why did he pick Vanessa? Was she really his first victim? True: why should we give a flying fuck? This is about women taking back their voices. Let's silence the predators as much as they've silenced their victims. Yet, the failing of defining Strane isn't giving him an excuse, or garnering sympathy. If we find out that he too was abused, it provides a sense of the cycle. A sense of "why", which is always the lingering questioning in situations as this. 

"Why" is often placed on how society has greenlit misogynist abuses, Madonna/whore complexes, etc. within our popular media, and Russell cleverly peppers in the ways it has glorified and justified men into viewing and pursuing young, underage girls, leading to victims like Vanessa and a generalization of a gender as a whole. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee", the perverse jailbait appraisal lyrics of The Knack's 1979 hit "My Sharona", the intentional wide-eye private school girl image orchestrated for Britney Spears in her debut music video "...Baby One More Time"...such strike sensory nerves on how padeophila/pedophilia have infiltrated popular literature and music, often praised for being high art (Lolita) or simply passed over as manufactured pop star fodder (Britney Spears).

Lolita stands in the shadows of My Dark Vanessa as Vanessa searches for validation of her relationship with Strane within its pages, this a woefully misguided practice as Lolita is told from the delusional, unreliable viewpoint of Humbert Humbert, the predator. (The Nabokov connections continue as the book's title comes from Nabokv's Pale Fire). For too long Lolita has been misinterpreted, especially through its film versions, its variant book covers, and the real crime that inspired Nabokv. Russell does a reversal with My Dark Vanessa that gives Lolita back her fictional voice as it defines the abuse from the beginning. We're not hearing excuses of padeophila from the abuser or wistful recollections of a misspent youth, or viewing a book cover tempting sexual innuendo by way of a lollipop. In Vanessa, we're seeing the real-time psychological and physical toll of abuse on a manipulated victim. For some, that might have been too close for comfort, and felt gratuitous or sensationalist in its own way, hence the mix of praise and dissent this book has received.

Much has been made about how My Dark Vanessa is a runway hit, and a social media darling, with heaps of praise from Gillian Flynn and Stephen King. I usually read a book because it interests me, not because of hype or because some blurb told me it was the bestbookeverinthehistoryoflife, but one conversation floating around that caught my attention concerned Wendy Ortiz's criticism towards Russell and her debut, as she asserts that her 2020 memoir Excavation mirrors Vanessa to an intimate degree. Ortiz's claims weren't about plagiarism, but about access, and lack thereof for voices of color when we discuss abuse, how little anyone cares when its being spoken about through a black and brown source. 

As a Black woman, I understand Ortiz's ire. Our sexual and bodily abuse history has always been a fraught silent march, and the attitudes towards the Black female victims of Cosby and R. Kelly is proof of such. Also so few books cover such undiscussed history or pose it as a communal issue, its victims never treated with the same care and sympathy as racist stereotypes and stigmas persist about our sexuality ("jezebel") or lack thereof ("asexual mammy"). Russell, being white and having famous literary connections and access that so few writers of color do does take away some of the urgency for this book, and Ortiz makes a solid point about that. But...as much as Oritz is right, I don't negate the work Russell put into her debut novel. 

Compiling such a dissection about a young girl descending into an abusive relationship with a sickening individual was no simple task. Also, with the book's veiled opening disclaimer, it posits Russell may have written this in honest as she culled from her own ordeal and no doubt this frothed up some of her own personal memories, thus making this book an almost personal bloodletting, as much as its a bloodletting for the countless women (and men) who have fallen into such a conflicted state --- is it love or is it abuse? 

Sensationalist Vanessa may be, but it does get the message across, and keeps the conversation going. Fiction succeeds when we allow it to enlighten, rather than deceive, and this book is more the former, than the latter. We can --- and always should --- have more than one conversation, more than one story, one side, and one story should not out-weigh, or out-speak another. Oritz's fact and Russel fiction can and should co-exist in the same conversation, even as difficult as they may be.