Memory and Reality: Trauma Exploration of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Trauma as a strong emotional reaction to a tragic event has been discussed in the paper to show the different ways how people alter their memories and their sense of reality. Sexual trauma tends to alter the way memories are formed and remembered. In this paper, a close textual analysis of Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel, My Dark Vanessa, has been done in order to dissect and see how sexual trauma constructs memory and reality adapting Alan McKee’s method of textual analysis. To identify the intersections that contribute to the development of memory and reality in relation to sexual trauma, Vanessa’s character has been analyzed with a focus on her relationship with her English teacher, Jacob Strane. The analysis has been done while keeping Cathy Caruth’s books Trauma: Explorations in memory, and Unclaimed Experience Trauma, Narrative History as the theoretical lens to support the argument that sexual assault victims tend to recreate memories and deceiving realities. The paper concluded that manipulative and coercive language, whether spoken or body language, plays a vivid role in how victims empathize with their perpetrators and reconstruct their reality to project a different narrative and memory of their abuse rather than reality.