56 pages • 1 hour read
Eliza and Her Monsters
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Self-Invention and Authenticity in the Digital World
Eliza and Her Monsters demonstrates how digital technology can provide multiple outlets for self-invention and relationships, particularly for someone like Eliza herself. Although her parents insist on the division between “online” and “real” life, that distinction doesn’t really make sense to Eliza. Her social anxiety makes face-to-face interactions difficult in ways that her more outgoing family doesn’t understand. Eliza and her parents argue many times about her use of technology. Her parents minimize her friendships with Max and Emmy because Eliza has never met them in person; the Mirks don’t understand how a friendship could develop in other ways. Eliza complains, “If I have my phone out talking to you or my online friends, [my parents] think I’m ignoring them, or being disrespectful, or whatever. And it’s like, no, I’m in the middle of a conversation” (185). She can open up to Max and Emmy precisely because the messaging tool lets her focus on their words: “[T]alking is easier when there’s a screen or even a piece of paper between you and the person you’re talking to” (128). In these situations, Eliza feels less pressure and can think about her responses, allowing her to interact with more confidence.
Her parents are thrilled when she starts hanging out with Wallace in person, relieved that she finally has a friend in the “real” world. However, Wallace and Eliza’s relationship incorporates a number of forms of on- and offline communication, blurring the boundaries between the two. Because Wallace’s family trauma makes it easier for him to stay silent at school, they first communicate by passing notes in homeroom and at lunch. Later, they start trading messages through the Monstrous Sea platform, where they interact under their usernames. Among his friends at the bookstore, Wallace communicates through a group text, while others answer him out loud in person or via video chat. Part of the way that they show care for each other is respecting each person’s preferred mode of communication and not pressing them to change—or classifying some modes as less authentic than others. Indeed, even after they start speaking to each other out loud, Eliza and Wallace continue to pass notes and exchange digital messages; technology gives them more ways to explore their relationship, not fewer.
What is true for Eliza’s friendships is also true for Eliza herself. Online, Eliza can experiment with emphasizing different aspects of her personality, appearing as both the shy MirkerLurker and the confident, artistic LadyConstellation. These identities are no less “real” to Eliza than who she is in school or with her family, though they sometimes appear contradictory even to her. Being LadyConstellation allows Eliza to bring Monstrous Sea to a large audience without drawing attention to her “awkward” offline self. The point is not that she is someone pretending to be someone else. Rather, Eliza is all of these people. If she cannot fully pour herself into LadyConstellation and leave Eliza and MirkerLurker behind, she is also not as entirely invisible and misunderstood as she thinks. If nothing else, her brothers know she is the creator behind Monstrous Sea and admire her work without prying too much into it.
Nevertheless, at a certain point LadyConstellation does start to emerge as a secret identity, while also, of course, being the most “famous” dimension of Eliza’s personality. Allowing her parents to keep thinking of Monstrous Sea as a hobby makes LadyConstellation a secret almost by default; her parents underestimate her while believing that they are being good parents by letting her have privacy. The reaction, both online and in person, to Eliza’s unmasking briefly makes Eliza seem more sinister and calculating than she is.
Even Wallace initially condemns Eliza for dishonesty when he finds out that she is also LadyConstellation. Eliza’s crime has been one of omission—she was already aware that there was a certain asymmetry in her relationship with Wallace and that it had become especially acute after he revealed his own past and family tragedies. The more physically involved they become, the more Eliza begins to experience herself as an embodied person rather than the free-floating artistic sensibility she sometimes wants to dissolve into. This transformation provokes a certain underlying crisis: Eliza has always seen LadyConstellation and MirkerLurker as polar opposites, but now she wants to be the best parts of them both. Unfortunately, the timing of her unmasking means that Eliza doesn’t have the chance to manage her revelations as elegantly as she unveils new pages for Monstrous Sea each week.
Eventually, Eliza’s therapist helps her articulate a hybrid identity that brings on- and offline worlds together. Importantly, the therapist validates Eliza’s preference for online communication in many circumstances and agrees with her on the value of her online relationships; at the same time, she also encourages Eliza to explore the value of being present with other people in less mediated ways.
Learning to Manage Anxiety
Eliza’s social anxiety predates the events of the novel. There isn’t much emphasis on where it came from or why she feels that way. Instead, the novel focuses on the way that it shapes her personality in the present and on the ways that Eliza is already working to manage that anxiety even before she enters therapy. Allowing herself to experiment with different online identities is one way she does this, as is drawing Monstrous Sea in the first place. Her creativity allows her to see her anxiety as something that is both inside her and not the same as her—she can objectify it as a force that unleashes doubt whenever she starts to feel too comfortable. She has developed breathing exercises and other strategies to allow her to function in public. All of this suggests Eliza’s underlying resilience and even ingenuity in taking charge of her mental health as much as she can.
Wallace, like Eliza, experiences anxiety, but his has a more identifiable cause: the death of his father by suicide. Wallace never directly articulates his father’s final intentions, but he knows what his actions meant, as he writes to Eliza: “He was going too fast for Wellhouse Turn, even without the ice on the road. […] I know that car went straight as an arrow until the moment it disappeared over the hill” (231). Afterwards, Wallace tells her he simply stopped talking without really meaning to. What he did instead was write—not just the notes and texts he uses to communicate with friends but also creative stories, many of them set in the Monstrous Sea universe.
Wallace’s coping strategies are often difficult for him to maintain, especially since his stepfather disapproves of his pursuing creative writing as a profession. Eliza’s anxiety also becomes more than she can handle on her own once her authorship of Monstrous Sea is revealed. The vast majority of people who want to talk to her about it are positive and well-meaning, but the attention itself is difficult for Eliza to take. That plus the emotional pain of Wallace’s anger and feelings of betrayal eventually manifest themselves physically, causing Eliza to faint and end up in the emergency room. The pressure of linking her worth to her ability to keep producing pages for Monstrous Sea leads her briefly to contemplate suicide, not knowing why she should be around if she isn’t drawing.
Both Wallace and Eliza are in therapy by the end of the novel. Wallace offers few details, but the novel implies that he is in a form of grief counseling. Eliza’s therapist helps her examine some of the beliefs about her lack of self-worth that generate much of her unease. By the end, Eliza has begun to learn to put boundaries around her work and herself: “I think I will also love myself and what I’ve made, and I’ll know without doubt that those two things are separate” (382). Instead of viewing herself as pointless without her art, Eliza shifts to recognizing her self-worth beyond her creativity and others’ expectations for her.
The Creative Process and the Demands of Fandom
At one level, Eliza’s creative process is intensely personal. Early in the novel, she describes having created Monstrous Sea because it was the kind of story she wanted to see in the world. Her commitment to it is absolute, as she reflects when she and Wallace first start talking about it:
Do you like Monstrous Sea? Yes, I do. Monstrous Sea is my favorite thing in the whole entire world. I like it more than any person. I like it more than I like myself. I like it more than food, and sleep, and hot showers. I like it more than I like being alone. It is everything to me. I write Yes (53).
Even after the webcomic becomes an online phenomenon, she makes a point of not reading the comments—good or bad—demonstrating that she does not create in order to receive validation from other people. Her desire to let her art do the talking for her is one of the main reasons why she is able to conceal her identity from her parents and people at school without much effort—she isn’t the type to brag about her accomplishments.
Eliza’s passion for her work and her commitment to the creative process is evident through the whole novel. At Christmas. Eliza gets so lost in her work that everything except her imaginary world falls away. Even before he knows that Eliza is Monstrous Sea’s creator—and not just a committed fan—Wallace observes that she “zone[s] out” when she is drawing, and cautions her that “It’s not good to get so intense” (267). At the time, Eliza takes this concern as an insult, but by the end of the novel, she realizes it may be a contributing factor to her anxiety.
Indeed, Eliza’s biggest accomplishment is not just Monstrous Sea itself but the fandom that has developed around it. The perfection and reliability she expects from herself, along with a story and set of characters that resonate with people of many different ages and backgrounds, has given her millions of readers, many of whom are just as invested in Monstrous Sea as she is. They deeply identify with the characters to the point of engaging in cosplay, they purchase MS merchandise, and they argue about worldbuilding details and what constitutes the MS canon. Some of them, like Wallace, use MS as the basis of their own creative work. In one way or another, the members of the Monstrous Sea fandom depend on Eliza.
As much as she tries to avoid engaging with them beyond a select few devotees such as Max and Emmy, Eliza always feels responsible to her fans. After all, they are the ones who have given her financial stability and artistic acclaim. She shares their passion for characters such as Amity, Faren, and Dallas and enjoys having the chance to overhear conversations about her work among people who don’t know who she is. Increasingly, however, Eliza worries about letting her fans down. The consternation that arises on the forums when she fails to schedule her Friday night pages foreshadows the larger controversy generated by her unmasking. She feels obligated to finish the story even when she doesn’t want to and it isn’t supporting her mental health—if not for her fans as a whole, then at least for Wallace, the most important person in her life.
Olivia Kane, author of the Children of Hypnos series, serves as a cautionary example of what happens when a creator lets her fandom down. Fans of the popular series devoured the first four books only to be disappointed when it became clear that the fifth and final installment would never be published. Unable to handle the pressure and anxiety of having such a devoted—and demanding—fandom, Olivia Kane essentially disappeared, leaving salacious rumors in her wake. Yet, it is Olivia’s words that help Eliza at a crucial moment in her creative life. She writes to Eliza that even though Olivia couldn’t finish Children of Hypnos, that doesn’t mean Eliza can’t finish Monstrous Sea on her own terms: “We create art for many reasons—wealth, fame, love, admiration—but I find the one thing that produces the best results is desire. When you want the thing you’re creating, the beauty of it will shine through” (358). Olivia’s advice helps Eliza comprehend that art and the creative process need to please and fulfill her over anyone else; she is not responsible for pleasing everyone in her fandom all the time—not even those who choose to have her words tattooed on their bodies.
Unlock all 56 pages of this Study Guide
Plus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: