Rachel Yoder
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper meets Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis in Rachel Yoder’s riveting tale, Nightbitch.
The story is of a nameless middle-class woman, known as ‘the mother,’ married to a nameless engineer, known as ‘the husband,’ and their two-year-old toddler, known as ‘the boy.’ The three characters remain nameless throughout the novel to reinforce their anonymity and perhaps to suggest some of their generic qualities. The novel opens with the mother as a stay-at-home mom. After juggling work with breast pumps, a day care where the staff neglected her baby, exhaustion, guilt, guilt, and more guilt, she abandons her career to take care of her child. Her struggle begins. The husband, traveling during the week for his job, is blissfully clueless of his wife’s struggles and condition.
The mother spends all her weekdays with the boy who consumes every second of her every day and most of her nights with his persistent demands. She is lonely, desperate, resentful, exhausted, self-deprecating, and suffering from sleep-deprivation. The drudgery and monotony of catering to the needs of a demanding toddler eat away at her. She questions herself, questions her choices, questions her identity, and questions her future. She tries to bury her anger and resentment only to have it surface in an extraordinary way. She turns feral, experiencing a gradual transformation into a dog, complete with canines, fur, claws, a tail, and an insatiable appetite for raw meat. Her transformation takes place at night. She becomes the Nightbitch, prowling around at night on the hunt for little, furry creatures to clamp between her teeth.
The mother loves her son and is fiercely protective of him. But his all-consuming demands on her time and energy exhaust her. She has no time for herself. And on those rare occasions when she snatches a few minutes of quiet, she either sits in a semi-catatonic state or she cries. The only time she feels fully alive, fully herself, is in her doggy manifestation. Whether she actually metamorphoses into a dog or just imagines herself as one is never made clear. But what is clear is that her ostensible transformation into a wild beast enables her to release the frustration, loneliness, tedium, resentment, and suppressed anger she feels as a stay-at-home mother of a demanding toddler.
The novel is not for everyone because of the graphic descriptions, replete with blood and gore, of violence toward little, furry creatures. But the mother’s interiority is fascinating and will no doubt resonate with many stay-at-home mothers. The prose draws the reader in as we watch the mother question her sanity, struggle with her mothering role, embrace her canine persona, and follow her as she stalks the parks and streets at night.
A highly original, and, at times, hilarious story that articulates the feral side of motherhood. It will resonate with modern stay-at-home mothers who experience de-selfing, internal conflicts, guilt, isolation, a stifling of their creativity, and society’s erroneous assumptions about their lives. It does all this with penetrating insight and honesty.
Very highly recommended.