Sex and Power

In deconstructing the expectations of a cliché May-December relationship, My Dark Vanessa explores the power of the sexual attraction. The expectation of such narratives of seduction that involve a young girl and a much older man is that the dynamic is controlled by the man, that the girl is helpless, naïve, entirely in the control of the predator. That certainly is a reading of the narrative, but in allowing Vanessa to recollect the experience, in entrusting the narrative to the girl, the novel resists the simplest definition of the criminal act of sex with a minor with its assumption that the minor is the pawn, the victim. Fifteen years after the intensity of her schoolgirl experience with the forty-something Strane and despite the cultural environment of the #MeToo Generation, Vanessa refuses to embrace entirely and simply the “siren call of victimhood” (6). Her narrative...