Before she knew: unreliable narration and the long arc of victimhood in <i>My Dark Vanessa</i>

Abstract Kate Elizabeth Russell’s controversial novel My Dark Vanessa (2020) explores grooming, consent, and the delayed recognition of abuse through its protagonist’s first-person narration. Through close reading, the study traces how Vanessa Wye’s internal voice reframes coercion as love, rendering the abuse emotionally and cognitively inaccessible for much of her life. The central focus lies in analyzing how My Dark Vanessa uses normalization, romanticization, and the reversal of power dynamics to blur the protagonist’s years-long experiences with her teacher, delaying and complicating the slow and painful recognition of abuse. Combining scandal theory with theories of unreliable narration, this article argues that Vanessa’s unreliability stems not from deception but from the depth of her internalized grooming. Her narration – shaped by denial, affective bias, and distorted memory – functions to draw the reader into the same confusion that prolongs her silence. The novel’s temporal shifts between 2000 and 2017 thereby mirror a changing cultural landscape shaped by the #MeToo movement, ultimately addressing ideas of agency, complicity, and power.