Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder review – very wild at heart
A stay-at-home mother gives in to her animal instincts in this skilful and imaginative debut novel
Lara Feigel
Sunday 4 July 2021
Giving birth is the closest many of us come to being an outright animal. We crouch on all fours, dripping and howling, and, if it goes well, we are aided by instincts we didn’t know we had to push a snuffling, bloody creature into the world. Yet immediately, we are expected to give up on this new animality and return to society, whether it comes in the guise of work and childcare or maternity leave and baby massage classes. What if we refuse to do so?
This is the question asked with energetic, often joyful urgency in Nightbitch, the first novel by American writer Rachel Yoder. The protagonist known with Kafka-inspired blankness as “the mother” is the discontented, though “ungripy, un-grumpy” stay-at-home mother of a two-year-old, who spends her weekdays cleaning up after her child and her weekends “abiding” her otherwise absent husband. Previously, she was a conceptual artist who ran a community gallery, but after a few months of breast-pumping while her son lay crying at nursery, she gave up her job. She is bored and sleep-deprived, and resents the husband who claims to be too tired from his paid work to help with her unpaid labour. Then, suddenly, she begins to change. One day she discovers a small patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck; she develops sharp canines and a taste for raw meat. Her husband dismisses her fears – “you always think something’s wrong with you” – as he disregards her feelings more generally (“feelings were just unreal things that moved through a person”). But then she develops the beginning of a tail and allows herself one good wag a day.
There’s a moment of choice here. Does she repress her doggy instincts and attempt to find happiness in an oppressively ordered version of family life, or does she give in to them? She embraces her dogginess, first hesitantly, then with great verve and creativity. In the process, she becomes a more fulfilled mother. Her son (who joins in with her animal antics) starts sleeping easily, licked by his mother and put to sleep in a kennel; they have fun barking and wrestling and feasting on raw meat together. She also allows herself an outlet for the violence she has long repressed. She sees now that “society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood” have been designed “to put a woman in her place and keep her there” and that the fire that’s raged in her since girlhood needs to flame into being.
The ideas in Nightbitch may not be new but they’re given renewed urgency by the story. As with Kafka’s Metamorphosis or the gorier feminist tales of women becoming animals in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, this is an archetypal character, seen in close-up but with a distance between her and the narrator. Yoder’s voice is precise and funny, pitch-perfect as it modulates between wry social observation and ecstatic accounts of the mother’s nights of gnashing rabbits in her neighbours’ gardens. There is astonishing skill and dexterity here; the story retains the graceful distance of the fable but has far more stream of consciousness and social observation than we expect in a fairytale.
The situation builds to a crisis, with the mother’s violent urges becoming more dangerous. Something has to change and the answer comes through art. I wondered if too much was made of it as a solution to life – the sense that she has a vocation to fulfil feels a little over-weighted. As a solution, becoming an artist who plays at being a dog felt in some ways less satisfying than just being a dog. Some of the book’s vision of nature loses its charge when it’s put back into the gallery. But as a vision of womanhood and of motherhood, this remains a terrifically alive and imaginative tale of “a wild, complicated woman with strange yearnings” – an important contribution to the engagement with motherhood that rightly dominates contemporary feminism.
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