Mother is a beast

on reading Nightbitch

Jan 31, 2025

A friend of mine (male, single) asked me as I was holding a copy of Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch and probably because of recent conversations about Miranda July’s novel All Fours ‘why are women blowing up their lives?’

Why are women blowing up their lives? is an interesting query from someone who is not a woman and lives outside the realm of childcare, parental responsibilities and domesticity. I wanted to bite his head off.

There has indeed been recently a lot of cultural manifestations in movies and books in which female protagonists are setting their own carefully constructed worlds on fire: All Fours is an unusual road novel in which the main character goes on a quest to find herself outside the confines of her life as a married mother. It has been hailed as the first novel about menopause. It is also a novel about the toll of motherhood and the inescapable shadow of a traumatic birth. It is a story of an artist who finds herself again after experiencing the obliterating force of motherhood. The movie Babygirl, in which Nicole Kidman plays a woman who on the outside seems to have it all, contends that she is is ready to burn down her carefully built world, her meticulous marriage and glowing career for the sake of finding herself through submissive sex and kinks (and yes she likes that he can tame a wild dog in the street). I found the movie incredibly mediocre and misogynistic. I was more taken with Catherine Breillat’ Last Summer in which a mother and lawyer (who defends teenagers against sexual predators) falls for her 18 year old stepson and then monstrously fights to save whatever remains of her marriage and career. Or with the French writer Emma Becker’s new novel Le Mal Joli in which a writer and mother embarks on a passionate affair as a way to find herself again after losing herself in the demands of early motherhood and domestic life and desperate to live with intensity and excitement again.

I think what these books and films have in common is that in all of them characters are seeking an illusion of happiness elsewhere because they have been crushed by patriarchal motherhood.

I was blown away by Nightbitch, a novel by Rachel Yoder. The metaphor running through the book is that a white suburban mother who lives alone with her son from Monday to Friday while her husband works in another city and comes back on weekends, turns into a dog. Women turning into animals (it reminded me of Sarah Hall’s dark and erotic story Mrs Fox), is a trope in literature since Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Transformation and escape is often the only way out women protagonists have against male domination. Daphne turns into a laurel tree to avoid Apollo’s concupiscence. Zeus turns Io into a cow to hide her away from the wrath of his wife.

Io wearing bovine horns watched over by Argos on Hera's orders, Pompeii

In Nightbith, the metamorphosis is an act of empowerment, a way to channel the maternal rage into a creative force. I found it cathartic. I read it as a metaphor indebted to Adrienne Rich’s essential distinction of motherhood as institution versus experience, by which she means motherhood as it is prescribed, codified and penalized by society versus motherhood as it is lived and made deeply personal by each singular mother-child diad. In the eyes of the institution of motherhood, the mother turns into a wild beast, her natural instinct to run free from the strictures of the institution are judged, mocked and criminalized. In the eyes not of motherhood but of mothering, the mother’s ability to play, to pretend to be a dog with her toddler, to run wild in the grass and gorge on raw food and get dirty sounds to me like the epitome of unadulterated freedom and joy. The metaphor works beautifully throughout the novel. In the end of the novel, the mother finds her artistic self again, she is free to create. The novel may ask a lot of the reader to believe in this act of self transformation and reinvention. I gladly indulged. I pictured her final performance piece like a painting by Juanita McNeely or Tala Madani. Juanita McNeely is a feminist painter who challenged patriarchy through her large scale paintings that address head on the searing pain that flows through a female body that is being pathologized, regulated over and sickened by men (doctors and lawmakers) presiding over it. Her work is profoundly urgent and important in this day and age when RFK Jr in his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this week announced a massive U-turn on abortion rights in this country. Tala Madani’s work shatters the image of the good mother that patriarchal motherhood wants to impose. Instead these paintings and novels ask how do you mother outside the patriarchy?