Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Raymond Roman Thierry Polanski (b. 1933), is a French-Polish filmmaker whose most notable works include Knife in the Water (1962), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Chinatown (1974). Polanski’s sex crimes are the focus of Monsters, serving as an introduction for Dederer of how to approach impactful art made by controversial people. In 1977, Polanski was arrested and charged with the rape of Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old girl. The crime took place in the Los Angeles home of Jack Nicholson, the star of Chinatown, and Polanski was tried under the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. After agreeing to a plea deal that would dismiss five of the six charges he faced, Polanski pleaded guilty to having “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.” When it was suggested that the judge presiding over the case might ignore the deal and sentence him to decades in prison, Polanski fled the United States for his native France. He has been protected from extradition ever since. Other allegations of rape have been made against Polanski by actor Renate Langer and artist Marianne Barnard, who claim to have been 15 and 10, respectively, at the time of Polanski’s attacks. In 2024, a civil case was brought against Polanski in Los Angeles for the 1973 rape of an anonymous woman, also thought to be a minor at the time of the alleged crime (at the time of writing, this case is ongoing).

Born in Paris, Polanski is the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother of Jewish descent. In 1937, the family moved from France to his father’s homeland, Poland. When World War II erupted, the Polanskis were forced to live in the Kraków Ghetto, along with the rest of the city’s persecuted Jewish population. Both his mother and father were forcibly removed from the ghetto and sent to Nazi concentration camps (Auschwitz and Mauthausen, respectively). His mother was killed in Auschwitz. Having escaped from the Kraków Ghetto with the help of Catholic community members, Polanski was reunited with his father after the war.

By the mid-1960s, Polanski was a globally recognized filmmaker, making movies in the United Kingdom and the United States. He met actor Sharon Tate on the set of his 1967 film, The Fearless Vampire Killers. The couple was married the following year. In 1969, Tate and their unborn son were brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home by members of the Manson Family Cult. The crime remains one of the most infamous murders in US history. As Dederer writes, “There’s no denying the horror of Polanski’s backstory—after all, two of the terrors of the twentieth century happened to him, personally” (11-12).

Heywood Allen (b. 1935), known popularly as Woody, is an American comedian and filmmaker whose works are frequently cited as some of the most influential comedic movies in all of film history—most notably, Take the Money and Run (1969), Annie Hall (1977), and Manhattan (1979). Dederer characterizes Allen’s filmmaking style and on-screen presence as “fascinated with moral shading, except when it comes to this particular issue—the issue of middle-aged men having sex with teenage girls” (32). As this quote indicates, Allen is one of the more controversial artists of the modern era because of his history with and portrayals of underage women. This controversy qualifies Allen as a “monster” under Dederer’s definition.

In 1980, Allen began a serious relationship with actor Mia Farrow, who had seven children at the time, including 10-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, whom she adopted from South Korea. In 1985, Farrow adopted an infant daughter, Dylan, and Allen stepped in as the child’s informal father figure. In 1992, when Dylan was 12, Farrow alleged that she discovered Allen sexually abusing Dylan. Allen denied the allegation, and a New York judge eventually had it dismissed after an investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale New-Haven Hospital concluded that Dylan “was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”

In 1991, Allen (then 56) began a sexual relationship with Soon-Yi, who was thought to be 21 at the time (there is some dispute regarding her exact age). Farrow discovered pornographic images of Soon-Yi in Allen’s possession, and Allen admitted to having sex with Soon-Yi. He would later claim that Farrow’s discovery of his relationship with Soon-Yi motivated her to allege the sexual abuse against Dylan. Soon-Yi has insisted that Allen was never a father figure to her, since he never officially adopted her. Allen and Soon-Yi married in 1997.

J. K. Rowling (b. 1965) is a British author best known for the best-selling Harry Potter series, which has been expanded into a global media franchise. Rowling was born and raised in Gloucestershire, in the southwest of England. She received a Bachelor of Arts in French from the University of Exeter. Following her graduation, she began working as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. During this time, she conceived and began writing the first Harry Potter book. She continued working on the book for the next five years, during which time her mother passed away, she was married and then divorced after her husband physically abused her, and she gave birth to a daughter. In 1997, after multiple rejections from other publishers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published by Bloomsbury.

For the next two decades, the Harry Potter series and franchise became a global phenomenon, making Rowling one of the most prominent authors of the contemporary era and she has used her platform to support several philanthropic causes. In 2018, Rowling began making statements about gender on social media that have been widely received as anti-transgender rhetoric. The first instance of this behavior occurred when she liked a tweet that described transgender women as “men in dresses.” Though Rowling later claimed that she liked that tweet accidentally, her comments have escalated in frequency and intensity in the years since, and have sparked widespread anger, especially from the Harry Potter fanbase which included a large number of LGBTQ+ children.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish visual artist recognized as a founder of the Cubist movement. The son of a painter, Picasso was an artistic prodigy from a very young age, and in 1900 he was emerging as one of Europe’s most promising painters. Two of his most famous pieces are Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)—which Dederer references in Monsters—and Guernica (1937).

Outside of his artistic legacy, Picasso’s name is unavoidably associated with his extensive track record of misogyny and violence against women. His granddaughter, Marina Picasso, was one of the first people to speak openly about this aspect of his personal life, saying, “He tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them” (Delistraty, Cody. “How Picasso Bled the Women in His Life for Art,” The Paris Review, 9 Nov. 2017). As Dederer explains, Picasso immortalized his abuse of women in paintings such as Femme au collier jaune (1946), which depicts his lover, Françoise Gilot, with her cheek burned by his cigarette. The unabashed violence of Picasso’s masculine image, the author argues, qualifies him as a “monster” according to her definition.

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American fiction writer and journalist whose novels and short stories are recognized as some of the most influential works of American literature. His work is characterized by its sparse prose and simple sentence structure, explorations of masculinity in the first half of the 20th century, and articulation of American wartime identity. He was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature for these contributions. Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway worked there briefly as a journalist before enlisting in the US military as an ambulance driver during World War I.

After the war, Hemingway returned to his career in journalism, serving as a foreign correspondent while living in Paris. In Paris, he became involved in the vibrant community of expatriate artists living there, including Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ezra Pound. It was during this time that he began writing The Sun Also Rises, the novel widely recognized as his masterpiece. Dederer pays particular attention to this period of Hemingway’s life, writing that alongside Picasso, he was forging a new image of the male artist that would be adopted by rockstars in the second half of the century.

Dederer characterizes Hemingway as a “monster” for the violence against women that this masculine ideal entailed:

Hemingway’s name is synonymous with brawling and womanizing and glamorous violence: the running of bulls, the catching of really big fish, the stalking of lions, the battering of women and children. Like Picasso, he created a kind of multi-car pileup of women over the decades (99).

Hemingway was married four times and had three children. His abusive tendencies were recorded most extensively by his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, whose personal papers are housed in the archive of Yale University. In Monsters, Dederer quotes both Welsh and Gertrude Stein to illustrate Hemmingway’s “monstrosity.”

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer most famous for his operas. Wagner is known for developing the concept of a gesamtkunstwerk, a “total artwork” that synthesizes multiple forms. He applied this concept in operas such as The Ring of the Nibelung, a four-part cycle loosely based on a combination of German and Nordic mythology, as well as the 12th-century German poem Nibelungenlied. Wagner was a gentile who grew up in the Jewish quarter of Leipzig and, throughout his life, expressed fervently antisemitic sentiments, most notably in his 1869 essay, “Jewishness in Music,” which claimed that Jewish influence had corrupted the essence of European music. Dederer criticizes this essay in detail in Monsters, arguing that the antisemitism expressed in it is enough to condemn Wagner, let alone the subsequent embrace of his music by Adolf Hitler.

Though he died decades before the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, Wagner’s music was appropriated by Adolf Hitler as emblematic of his antisemitic and racist vision of a “pure” German people. Hitler promoted Wagner’s music throughout the Nazi Regime, tying works such as the Nibelungenlied and Parsifal to his projects of genocide and ethnic cleansing. This legacy has made Wagner one of the most controversial composers in the history of music.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) is the only figure in the book categorized by Dederer as an anti-monster. The Russian American writer is best known for his 1955 novel Lolita, which tells the story of a pedophile, Humbert Humbert, who targets the daughter of his wife, a 12-year-old whom he nicknames Lolita. Told from Humbert’s perspective, public reception of the novel has frequently resulted in the conflation of Nabokov with Humbert and his predatory behavior. No evidence has ever been found that Nabokov engaged in pedophilic or sexually predatory behavior.

Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, to a noble family, Nabokov had a self-described “cosmopolitan” childhood. When the October Revolution swept over the city in 1917, his family was forced to flee to Crimea due to their social status. He spent the rest of his life in exile, living and working in various places, including England, Germany, France, and the United States. He wrote Lolita while traveling in the western United States, on breaks from a job teaching Russian and English literature at Cornell University. Nabokov recorded the events of his life in the memoir Speak, Memory (1967).

Doris May Lessing (1919-2013), was a British author and Nobel Laureate. She was born in Iran, the daughter of British expatriates. In 1925, her family moved to Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe), where Lessing grew up. She began writing and publishing stories as a teenager. In 1939, while working as a telephone operator, Lessing married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children. In 1943, the couple divorced, and Doris left her two children with her father before moving to London. In Monsters, Dederer focuses on this abandonment of the children in her analysis of Lessing as a “monster.”

Dederer also features Lessing’s third novel, The Golden Notebook (1962) in her analysis. The book follows Anna Wulf, whom Dederer treats as a Lessing stand-in, a writer who records different aspects of her life in four differently colored notebooks. The titular “golden notebook” is Wulf’s attempt to compile all of the notebooks into one document, after she realizes that the fragmentation of her life (both inside and outside of the notebooks) is unsustainable. The notebooks are widely regarded as an allegory for how society overwhelms women with conflicting priorities. Thus, when Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, the committee referred to her as an “epicist of the female experience” (“The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007.” NobelPrize.org, 21 Sep 2024)

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet and writer, recognized as one of the pioneers of the field of confessionalist poetry. Plath was born and raised in Massachusetts. She attended Smith College for her undergraduate degree, where she studied under Robert Lowell, the first poet to be described as a confessionalist. Plath’s poems deal intimately with her inner life and struggles with mental health. She dealt with depression throughout her life and recorded her suffering in the semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963).

In February of 1963, Plath was found dead by suicide in her London home by a live-in nurse, having used her oven to give herself carbon monoxide poisoning. Before her death, Plath had sealed her children in the rooms where they slept in order to prevent the carbon monoxide from poisoning them. Dederer writes that “[t]he female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand” (172).