44 pages • 1 hour read
Claire DedererMonsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Anti-Monster”
In this chapter, Dederer analyzes Lolita, and its author, Vladimir Nabokov, who is often conflated in popular culture with the book’s predatory narrator, Humbert Humbert. Recounting her first time reading Lolita as a young teen, Dederer remembers how disgusted she was by the absence of the titular character, Humbert’s 12-year-old victim, from the content of the novel. At the time, she assumed that the novel’s myopic focus on Humbert’s predatory thoughts and experiences was a self-report on Nabokov’s part, an admission of his own monstrosity. This interpretation by multitudes of readers has cast a shadow over the book since its publication, and stained Nabokov in the court of public opinion, despite there being no evidence that he ever engaged in predatory behavior in his personal life.
Revisiting Lolita as an adult, Dederer finds herself wondering why Nabokov wrote the novel in this way. She finds that the erasure of Lolita through Humbert’s perspective renders the book “not (or not just) a portrait of a monster, but a portrait of a girl’s annihilation” (146). She concludes that Nabokov sacrificed his public reputation to shed light on the story of ordinary victims everywhere, and in doing so, made himself into an anti-monster.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Silencer and the Silenced”
Having explored the phenomenon of erased victims in the literary world of Lolita, Dederer visits a real-life case study of victim erasure: the death of Ana Mendieta. Mendieta was an up-and-coming visual artist in the 1970s and 80s whose works were highly experimental and unapologetically feminist. In 1985, Mendieta fell from her 34th-floor apartment in New York City and died. Her husband, minimalist artist Carl Andre, was accused of pushing her out the window and charged with her murder before eventually being acquitted. Mendieta’s violent death, allegedly at the hands of her powerful husband, cut her artistic career short.
Dederer recounts how during the trial of Andre, the defense used racial stereotypes to call into question Mendieta’s character. In this sense, her erasure was emblematic of the erasure of women of color everywhere in the world of art. Since 1992, a series of protests organized by the Women’s Action Coalition have drawn attention to Mendieta’s absence from art galleries. In 2015, one protest took the form of women wandering the halls of a Carl Andre retrospective at the Dia Beacon Gallery, sobbing. Dederer argues that “the protesters were writing their own kind of criticism: a criticism made of feeling” (160).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Am I a Monster?”
Dederer turns her gaze inward, wondering if she is a monster. At the same time that she worries her writing has caused her to de-prioritize her loved ones, she also worries that she hasn’t been “monstrous enough” to be a great writer. She explains that the demands of motherhood and artistry compete with one another, such that mother-artists almost never have time for both. While male artists have, historically, been able to rely on wives to manage the logistics of their lives, women are expected to do everything themselves. Other mother-artists, she asserts, have expressed the same frustrations to her. As one friend told her, “I wish I had a wife” (167). Dederer is certain that her drive to finish all artistic pursuits has hampered her ability to be a fully present mother.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Abandoning Mothers”
Delving into the lives of Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, two artistic heroes of Dederer’s who abandoned their children, the author finds herself morbidly admiring their female monstrosity. Keeping in mind the logistical impossibilities of being a mother-artist, she writes that these artists’ decisions to reject their responsibilities as mothers were an understandable sacrifice made in service to their art. She pays particular attention to Lessing’s book, The Golden Notebook, which critiques how society demands the fragmentation of women’s lives into a series of conflicting responsibilities. Dederer wonders if she is brave enough to declare her artistic work equally important to her children. She uses a writer’s retreat to Marfa, Texas, as the backdrop for this exploration, recalling the guilt she felt about leaving her son to go write for five weeks, far away from home and free of parental responsibility.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
In the second half of Monsters, Dederer works to subvert and challenge the premises of monstrosity that she established in the first half of the book. In these chapters, the monster becomes the anti-monster, the male monster becomes the female monster, and the othered monster becomes the author herself. If the “monsters” presented in the first half of the book were easy to spot (at least in Dederer’s eyes), the monsters in this latter half are camouflaged. Sometimes, Dederer does not think that they are monsters at all.
Dederer’s treatment of Nabokov marks the first instance in which she challenges the popular conception of a figure as “monstrous,” arguing that he is, instead an “anti-monster.” Her feminist (re)reading of Lolita absolves Nabokov of the stain and paints him in a heroic light of self-sacrifice. She writes, “He was willing to have the world think the worst of him…by telling the worst story, and letting himself be implicated in that story—he created a way for us to understand…the enormity of what it is to steal a childhood” (151). This conclusion defies the authority of the popular audience (including her younger self) and reminds readers of the fallibility of moral judgment. In the tension between Objectivity and Subjectivity in Art Consumption, Dederer ultimately posits that objectivity is impossible, while still maintaining a belief in misinterpretation.
Having dipped her toes into the process of challenging widely accepted understandings of monstrosity, Dederer turns her exploratory lens on herself, grappling with her own Biography as “Stain.” The first paragraph of Chapter 9 is dense with self-doubt. She enumerates, “Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster?” (161). This chapter, perhaps more than any other in the book, lays Dederer’s insecurities and personal concerns bare—rather than centering an exalted artist from history, she herself is the subject of this chapter. By leveling an accusation of monstrosity against herself, she places herself amongst the ranks of the influential artists she has previously accused. Where Nabokov was an anti-monster disguised as a monster, Dederer reveals herself to have been an invisible monster whose presence saturates the book.
Since Dederer is a woman, questions about her own monstrosity necessarily raise questions about whether women can be monsters in the same ways as men. Up until this point in the book, the “monsters” she has addressed have primarily been men who commit crimes against women. Her image of the female monster takes an entirely different shape than that of the male monster: “If the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture. The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do” (176). This differentiation highlights the different expectations placed on men and women by society, with women’s relationships to children exalted as their most important duty. Dederer assumes the voice of society in condemning child-abandoners as the ultimate female monster, highlighting Misogynistic Structures in the Art World and in society at large. At the same time, she identifies with this form of monstrosity. “You start to see how abandonment could become an option for a mother-artist, even one who passionately loves her children,” she asserts, “Perhaps—radical thought—especially one who passionately loves her children” (196). In moments like this one, Dederer inches toward the answer to her own question, “Am I a monster?” reframing it to reflect a more nuanced and complex question: Am I a monster or not monstrous enough?
As a whole, these chapters deconstruct the framework for understanding monstrosity that Dederer established in the first half of the book. By examining nuanced examples of “monster artists”, she challenges herself and readers to approach how they consume art with more careful consideration. Instead of accepting the dichotomy between a moral consumer and an immoral artist, which places her in a position to judge, she begins to undermine her own self-image. Now, instead of a critic with authority over the art, she is simply a monster approaching the work of other monsters. It is left to readers to decide whether Dederer’s decision to label herself as such is warranted.
