In this post we will tell you about the debut novel of the American writer Kate Elizabeth Russell "My Dark Vanessa". The main character Vanessa is 32 years old. At 15, she became involved with an adult teacher at a prestigious boarding school, and this greatly influenced her life. All these years, she recalls this situation over and over again, trying to understand what happened then - and whether there are anyone to blame for this story.
Kate Elizabeth Russell was born and raised in eastern Maine. She holds an MFA from Indiana University and a PhD from the University of Kansas. My Dark Vanessa is her debut novel.
From a formal perspective, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel will surely end up on the same shelf as the so-called "trauma books" that have recently become the world's literary mainstream. Genuine, partially genuine or completely fictional stories of all kinds of mental and physical breakdowns, one way or another arising from the actions of other people, today confidently squeeze almost all other plots and cause recognition, compassion, indignation, irritation and a dozen more emotions in readers. “Emotions” is not an accidental word in this context - most of the books on trauma are primarily designed specifically to awaken empathy in a person, to a powerful and immediate empathic response.
In this sense, the literary debut of American Kate Elizabeth Russell "My Dark Vanessa" stands apart as a text designed not so much for emotional as for intellectual living and experience. Perhaps it can be viewed as a kind of encyclopedia of trauma - not because of the variety of objects represented (there is just one and only trauma), but solely because of its encyclopedically detailed, stereoscopic and time-extended representation.
Fifteen-year-old Vanessa, who enrolled in an expensive private boarding school on a scholarship, feels infinitely unhappy after breaking up with her best (and only) friend. It is this - lonely, divorced from parents and peers, immersed in her own dreams, writing poetry, melancholic - Vanessa becomes the object of keen interest on the part of forty-year-old literature teacher Jacob Strain. From admiration for her poetic opuses, he smoothly moves on to book recommendations - at first neutral and even useful, but gradually more and more risky: he sometimes gives Vanessa Nabokov's "Lolita", then quotes "Pale Flame", then mentions letters from the elderly Swift to his a young sweetheart who is a surprise! - was also called Vanessa. From recommendations, he slowly moves to touching, from touching to kissing, and then to forbidden, disastrously dangerous sex. Well, and of course, retribution is not long in coming: Vanessa will face a shameful and humiliating expulsion from school and years of despair, Strain - a stain on his reputation and sidelong glances from colleagues.
This bond between a grown man and a teenage girl, seemingly short-lived by definition, turns out to be surprisingly strong. Even seventeen years after the events described, Vanessa continues to live in her shadow - she endlessly replays the events of those months in her memory, she continues to meet with Strain from time to time, she feels his power over herself, over her future, over all who she has become (or didn't). Vanessa drinks and uses drugs, all her brilliant abilities have gone into the sand, she did not become either a writer or a teacher. She does not have good relationships with men, she has no friends, and eternal impassable chaos reigns in the house. In fact, in her thirty-two years she is still the same girl, frozen at her fifteenth birthday, like a fly in amber - not alive, not dead, with an eternally postponed life.
This situation - hopeless but stable in its own way - spirals out of control when another ex-schoolgirl, whom he harassed a few years after Vanessa, appears in the wake of the #MeToo campaign to expose Strain. And at this moment, all the memories, locked inside the cranium, begin to break out, all complex agreements with oneself collapse, and all shaky concepts designed to somehow reconcile what happened with universal ethical norms are cracked and crumble into dust, thereby giving the heroine hope for spiritual rebirth and liberation from the ghosts of the past.
However, no matter how unambiguous (and, to be honest, heartbreaking) the story of Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell gives us the opportunity to consider her from all sides - and see in her many shocking nuances that are usually not talked about.
The heroine is only fifteen, but she is very smart and developed for her age, and she is physically quite formed: her body is the body of a young woman, not a child, and the author speaks it out delicately, but quite definitely. Yes, Strain takes advantage of Vanessa's loneliness and obvious weakness, but he really loves her - and for this love he risks a lot. Yes, he is attracted to teenage girls, but with none of them he does not go as far as with Vanessa, therefore, by accusing him, others seem to usurp her right to decide whether Strain is worthy of leniency or punishment. He honestly tries to break up with his young lover after being exposed, gives her a chance to adapt to adulthood and does not cling to the bonds that bind them. No, he does not at any moment use brute force, does not insist or persuade - he asks her consent for every little thing, be it a kiss or a frank touch, and in many cases Vanessa herself forces events. Yes, Strain lies and manipulates. No, Vanessa does not want to admit that she is a victim - she is convinced that she acted deliberately, and is not ready to admit her consent to a relationship with a teacher as a mere formality. Yes, her life is ruined, but no, she does not want to turn inside out on this basis in front of journalists, dumping the intimate and intimate on the public.
At the same time showing us the situation from the inside and outside, from the point of view of the heroine and from the standpoint of our usual morality, Kate Elizabeth Russell forms a complex double optics inside the novel, affecting primarily the mind, and not the feelings of the reader. At each point we try to choose a side, find the optimal strategy, understand all the participants and work out an ethical convention that would minimize the damage, but we constantly come to a dead end.
Would it be better if we deprive the teenager of the right to subjectivity and declare him incapable of making decisions and taking responsibility for them? Or shall we leave a fifteen-year-old girl, almost a child, to the mercy of a bad and immoral adult? Is admitting someone a victim a rejection of guilt or a devaluation of someone else's experience? What should an adult who has witnessed this do - and are there any reliable rules to avoid mistakes? Will retribution help someone who has already suffered, and if so, how long does it make sense to wait for this revenge? The author puts before the reader dozens of similar questions - and none of them gives a clear answer. As a result, trauma in Russell's interpretation appears not as one global monolithic event, but as a series of events of small and local, bad or half-hearted decisions, social prejudices, fatal accidents, stable behavioral patterns that work in the wrong place and in the wrong way.
It is relatively easy to make ethical judgments about large objects - and with this view, of course, it is easy for us to decide who is right and who is wrong. Kate Elizabeth Russell deprives us of this comfortable certainty, endlessly crushing the trauma experienced by Vanessa, and forcing us not to a relatively simple empathic reaction in the spirit of "what a pity for the poor thing", but to the intense work of thought, to the painful sifting of event sand, to analysis and search those forks where something went wrong. By depriving the reader of the opportunity to experience the desired catharsis and burst into sweet tears of compassion, Russell achieves a paradoxical and at the same time very useful effect: she allows us to see the trauma in all its ugliness and at the same time complexity, thereby calling not for simple sympathy, but directed comprehension , understanding - and opposition.
This article was sponsored by Nikolay Ivanov.
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