Haunted by You: Engaging with the MeToo Scandal through Second-Person Narration

In 2017, the MeToo movement generated a shock of recognition and sparked high-profile media scandals when exposing both individual misconduct and systemic sexism. The movement also took on a literary form as many authors wrote about issues of sexual violence and engaged readers through innovative narrative strategies. In this paper, we investigate, specifically, the use of second-person narration as a narrative strategy in the MeToo novel The Rose Rule (original title: Rosenreglen, 2019) by Danish author Liv Nimand Duvå. We ask: How does the use of second-person narration demonstrate the haunted temporalities of survivor experiences, thus becoming a means of generating reader response and reflection? In doing so, we argue that the MeToo novel undoes linear temporalities and traditional narrative functions to probe the collective and previously silenced nature of systemic sexism. Drawing on narrative theory (e.g., Herman. 1994. Textual you and double deixis in Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place. Style 28(3). 378–410) and hauntology (Derrida. 2006. Specters of marx. New York & London: Routledge), we examine how the ghost stories of the MeToo movement inform us that what has been buried and silenced returns to haunt the present (Gordon. 2008. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: xvi) and how Duvå, through the combination of two types of second-person narration (Meyer. 2024. Dufortællinger i dansk litteratur [second-person narratives in Danish literature]. Aarhus: Aarhus University dissertation), addresses the reader by stating not only MeToo, but asking YouToo?