By Loïs van Albada
“I want to be an artist and a woman and a mother I mean a monster I want to be a monster.” ~Yoder 178; emphasis in original
Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch details the life of an unnamed 37-year-old stay-at-home mother and her son. The protagonist, who is referred to simply as ‘the mother’ for the first 150 pages of the book, is an artist who used to manage a gallery but now looks after her child, ‘the son,’ full-time instead. Her husband, also nameless, often works away from home, so much so that The Mother notes: “Yes, it had been June, and, yes, her husband had been gone the entire week. In fact, it was his twenty-second weeklong absence that year, a year in which only twenty-four weeks in total had passed, not that anyone was counting” ( 6). The Mother finds herself disillusioned with the liminal hours of ‘mommy time’ that consist of playing with toy trains and trying to persuade her son to go to sleep. Amid this disillusionment, the novel opens with The Mother believing herself to be turning into a dog. The Mother gathers most information on her monstrous becoming through a 1978 ethnographic catalog called A Field Guide to Magical Women. The guide is written by fictional author Wanda White, whose existence is questioned even within the novel: “[No] one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White” (238). White writes about “the ways in which womanhood manifests on a mythical level” and about the identities women turn to, like The Mother turns to the identity of Nightbitch, “when those available to them fail” (Yoder 40).
Noteworthy is the fact that The Mother names herself ‘Nightbitch.’ The Night is the Other of the day and a time typically associated with monstrosity; the vampire goes out at night, the werewolf runs wild under the moon, and The Mother transforms into a dog—an Other—for the first time at night, too. The word bitch is similarly interesting as Joreen Freeman emphasizes that there are many definitions of the word bitch, the most complimentary of which is that of the female dog. The definitions of human bitches “are rarely as objective. […] However, everyone agrees that a bitch is always female, dog or otherwise. It is also agreed that a Bitch is aggressive, and therefore unfeminine” (226).
The Mother is called a bitch by her husband after she acts aggressively towards him and their child—“You were kind of … He paused, thinking, then continued: … a bitch last night. He chuckled to show it wasn’t meant meanly, just as observation. Night bitch, she said, without pause. I am Nightbitch” (9; emphasis added). Her aggressive behavior is perceived as unfeminine by her husband, given the patriarchal gendered ideology of women as natural caretakers (Chen et al. 765), therefore marking her as a bitch in the husband’s eyes. The reclaiming of the word bitch by The Mother is noteworthy, too, as The Mother is, in fact, turning into a female dog/wolf. The word bitch thus comes to represent both an aggressive woman and a dog in the hybrid body of The Mother.
Nightbitch opens with the line: “When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke […] but in the days following this naming, she found the patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck,” (3) suggesting the name ‘Nightbitch’ was coined prior to her believed transformation. Despite stating she is Nightbitch, The Mother simultaneously rejects the naming: “She didn’t want to be Nightbitch, wouldn’t have chosen it if she felt she did indeed have such a choice” (18). It is not until The Mother starts accepting, even embracing, the transformation that she fully adopts the name Nightbitch and sheds the identity of ‘The Mother.’
This paper discusses Nightbitch in relation to theories surrounding female werewolves and monstrous mothers, paying attention to the motifs of the monstrous-maternal, the Bad Mother, the woman as a possessed body, and the femme animale. These motifs will be embedded in feminist theories and connected to patriarchal gender ideologies to investigate the slippery terms of the mother/other and woman/monster and the possible hybridity of all. By highlighting The Mother’s desires, this research will argue that The Mother is indeed monstrous and, more importantly, that the novel reframes monstrosity related to motherhood not as something fearsome but rather as something magical and inherent to mothers, once more foregrounding the possible hybridity of the mother/other. In this reframing, the female werewolf and the monstrous mother become positively configured, moving beyond earlier interpretations of the motifs as commonly presented in horror media. Moreover, this paper will explore the werewolf motif and its relation to the notion of monstrous motherhood through Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection. Through the notion of the abject, Nightbitch’s interpretation of the werewolf motif expands beyond existing depictions of the werewolf into the domestic.
The Mother as Dog/Wolf
Stypczynski defines the werewolf as “a figure that can assume the shape of a human and a wolf, yet is never truly either one” (10). The assuming of the wolf shape is rather fundamental to being a werewolf. Here, an interesting point of contention arises: The Mother believes herself to be turning into a dog, not a wolf, after all. The novel continuously casts doubt on whether she is turning, and if it is, in fact, a dog she is turning into:
You need to consult with a medical professional her husband said kindly. I can’t believe you cut into the cyst. It’s unsafe. Okay, but can we please address the fact that I have a tail? He laughed. He was always laughing at things she said. I’d hardly call it a tail. Cysts in that region are known for their hair. (Yoder 31)
The husband’s dismissive attitude regarding The Mother’s concerns is repeatedly noted throughout the narrative, and he is framed as having “overly rational tendencies” (18). This dismissiveness is in line with the patriarchal dichotomies of man/woman and reason/emotion. The rational man is perceived as “a potent symbol of the modern age,” yet how one defines the “‘rational man’ has depended upon ‘emotional, that is, irrational, woman’ as an inferior counterpoint” (Prokhovnik 20). The Mother thus fulfills the role of the emotional woman, or so the husband believes. This belief is grounded in patriarchal gender ideologies, a common theme in Nightbitch. The fact that The Mother continues to believe that she is turning into a dog shows defiance of patriarchal notions of submissiveness to her husband (Chen et al. 766). Furthermore, given the narrative’s framing of her concerns as valid, it arguably recasts The Mother as the rational one in the relationship.
After The Mother turns into a ‘dog’ for the first time, the story shifts to the husband’s perspective, who, upon coming home from another business trip, finds his son next to: “[A] dog who was stretched out on the clean rug. The dog was enormous and reminded the husband of a wolf, with a thick coat of silver-and-black fur” (86). The Mother’s physical characteristics as a ‘dog’ are described only once more, toward the end of the novel: “It was then the creature appeared, what some would describe as a dog-type thing or kind of a small bear or a werewolf?” (228; emphasis in original). The ambiguity regarding the classification of The Mother’s transformed state suggests an awareness on the part of the novel of the werewolf motif. The fact that The Mother’s transition into her canine self follows the tradition of becoming-werewolf as depicted by most popular media—the growth of excess body hair (Yoder 3), the emergence of canine teeth (4), the appearance of a tail (30), the sudden craving for raw meat (51)—and the awareness The Mother herself has of werewolves suggests that The Mother may, in fact, be actively choosing to believe she is turning into a dog rather than a wolf.
Hannah Priest points out that certain gentler wolves were domesticated when they proved amenable to companionship, becoming the ancestors of the dog (1). By rejecting the notion of turning into a wolf in favor of turning into a dog, The Mother in Nightbitch demonstrates her own domesticated nature, a nature she never comes to deny as she never stops caring for or loving her child. Even when she wishes for a purpose and an escape from the mundanity of her current life, The Mother does not wish to leave her child behind, as made evident by her incorporation of him in her performance piece at the end of the novel. Her domestic role as a mother is thus still foregrounding, even as the performance piece highlights her nature as Other. She becomes a hybrid between mother and other, or at the very least, confuses the boundaries between the two.
Lycanthropy, both in its origins and its portrayal in fiction, is commonly presented as an exclusively male condition (Priest 4). The gendered nature of the werewolf motif has been established extensively within academic work on lycanthropy; Brian Frost refers to a suspected common ancestry between “man and wolves” (4); Dr. Franklin R. Ruehl speaks of “a man morphing into a wolf” (qtd. in Steiger xii); and, as detailed by Stypczynski, the word werewolf stems from “the Anglo-Saxon were-wulf, literally ‘man wolf’” (10). The aggression and savagery underlying the origin myth of werewolves further align the motif with what are commonly deemed masculine traits in European cultural history (Priest 3). However, the supposed masculine nature of the werewolf motif does not fully exclude the female werewolf. Priest further argues that where the predatory aggressive nature of the wolf is highlighted in male werewolves, female werewolves are typically defined through “idealised feminine characteristics of communication and negotiation” (11).
Hence, Priest proposes that an understanding of the cultural history of the werewolf can be formed through a comparison to the history of property ownership, and, by extension, that of domestication: “While male werewolves (like wolves) are often figured as an external threat to male property, female werewolves (like women) are more likely to be imagined as trapped within this economic and social structuring” (11). Lycanthropy has become an “alternative to the patriarchal control of both the home and the contemporary workplace” (12). An alternative to a type of control that the female werewolf is trying to break out of. This rendering of female werewolves is in line with the image presented in Nightbitch as The Mother finds herself similarly trapped in the property she shares with her breadwinning husband, stuck at home with her son whilst the husband is absent.
However, once The Mother accepts her canine side, she does not feel trapped to the same extent anymore. She experiences the act of turning into a monster as liberating and desirable: “I want to be an artist and a woman and a mother I mean a monster I want to be a monster” (Yoder 178; emphasis in original); “She thought about animals and escape, about freedom and desire, about wanting to be a monster” (182). It is in The Mother’s monstrous becoming that her attempts to break out of the patriarchal structure of the familial unit become both clear and fruitful.
Joyce Salisbury suggests that one of the reasons shapeshifters like the werewolf have been popularized is because “[animals] do not abide by social expectations that bind humans. They do what they want, go where they want” (5). This does not apply to Priest’s female werewolf, as the contemporary female werewolf wishes to abide by the social expectations placed upon humans, as exemplified by Priest through the Kitty Norville (Vaughn) series; perhaps she even wishes to be human. Here, the female werewolf, as commonly depicted in literature and The Mother in Nightbitch, becomes misaligned; toward the end of the novel, The Mother does not desire to abide by social expectations. Rather, The Mother desires to be free, even if it means being monstrous: “Was being free to do what you needed and be who you wanted—truly free—monstrous? If so, it was not the wrong kind of monstrous, but a beautiful one. A way of being to celebrate rather than run from” (179).
The Mother dedicates all her time to her child and being a mother, and she is rather resentful of this fact at the beginning of the novel. It must be noted here that The Mother never expresses regret for having a child. Instead, she is frustrated with “the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology” (Yoder 15)—the social structuring she is trapped within. Importantly, The Mother does not deny her domesticity even when fully embracing her monstrosity. She simply wishes to care for her child in a way she finds fruitful. She succeeds at this, as shown in the final chapter of the novel, as she is able to be an artist who performs her Otherness on stage while also being a mother, a fact also performed on stage: “these folks bear witness to the very end of the show, Nightbitch there onstage, with a small boy—her son—to whom she delivers the limp body of a bunny, for him to sniff and caress” (238). This again highlights the hybridity of the mother/other category in this novel and the strengthened connections born from this confusion.
The enactment of motherhood as The Mother feels she is told it should be, leads to the destruction of her bond to her son, her husband, her career, and her own identity. For example, The Mother attempts to write down ten things she wants to explore, including her own desires, but fails to write down anything: “Did she really have no desires anymore? No deep passions? Where had the vitriolic emotions and sweeping gestures of her twenties disappeared to? Oh god, what did she want to do? There had to be something” until she lands on wanting to be “a mother I mean a monster” (178; emphasis in original). The werewolf motif is thus employed as a tool that shows the flaws in the patriarchal system The Mother feels trapped in whilst showing that the patriarchal motherhood societally foregrounded as ‘good’ is an unsuccessful way to flourish domestically. The Mother does not choose to shed her domesticity—she believes herself to be a dog rather than a wolf, after all. Rather than shedding it, she embraces her transformation in a way she believes to be worthwhile, in a way that is monstrous, in a way that is Other.
The Mother as the Monstrous-Feminine
The female monster, or the monstrous-feminine as dubbed by Barbara Creed, wears many faces: “the amoral primeval mother”; ”vampire”; “witch”; “woman as monstrous womb”; “woman as bleeding wound”; “woman as possessed body”; “the castrating mother”; “woman as beautiful but deadly killer”; “aged psychopath”; “the monstrous girl-boy”; “woman as non-human animal”; “woman as life-in-death”; and “woman as the deadly femme castratrice” (The Monstrous-Feminine 1). The faces relevant to this research are those of the ‘woman as possessed body’ and ‘the woman as non-human animal,’ as these images are linked to the werewolf.
The ‘woman as possessed body’ is exemplified by Creed’s analysis of the horror film The Exorcist (1973). Regan, the young female protagonist of the film, becomes possessed and, in her possessed state, becomes monstrous. Creed argues that “as a possessed figure, Regan belongs to that lineage of dual personality horror figures such as the split personality […], werewolf […], and invaded subject” (The Monstrous-Feminine 32). What makes the possessed figure abject is the same thing that makes the werewolf abject. “The werewolf, whose body signifies a collapse of the boundaries between human and animal” (Creed, “Imaginary Abjection” 48) is abject, as abjection is “the place where meaning collapses,” (Kristeva 2) the place where the ‘I’ is not.
Regan, when possessed, murders two people, castrates a priest, and attempts to have sex with her mother. The Mother’s actions are not quite so severe, but she does kill a large variety of animals, including her own cat. The Mother expresses wanting to kill her cat in a joking manner—“I would love to punt her like a football” (Yoder 124)—and yet, after actually doing so, she feels remorseful and worries she will harm her son in a similar fit of rage:
Poor kitty, she said, stroking the animal, now a pile on the floor. […] She was scared now, really really scared […]. She needed to Change. […] she could not go on like this, with the unhappiness and this now uncontrollable rage, especially not around her son, her poor sweet little angel of a son, whom she would never harm, not ever, but, still, look what she had done to the cat. (168-169; emphasis in original)
The fact that her cat becomes ‘the cat’ and her son is indicated as being hers still implies a certain level of detachment from her cat and emphasizes the importance her son still holds. Her need to ‘Change’, her concern regarding her own actions, and her inability to control the rage she experiences exemplify the dual personality Creed attributes to the body possessed and the werewolf.
Despite fearing her transformed side at times, The Mother does come to embrace her monster, as shown through her repeated desire to be monstrous, likening her experience to Cohen’s notion that, as quoted in the thesis introduction, “fear of the monster is really a kind of desire” (16). Here, the notion of the ‘woman as non-human animal’ and the similar figure of the femme animale (Creed, “Femme Animale” 1) become relevant. The ‘woman as non-human animal’ is linked to her ability to give birth, as it is through this ability that the woman is connected to the “great cycle of birth, decay, and death” (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 47). Through this connection, the woman is placed in the animal world, transforming her into a “human/animal figure” (47).
Creed highlights how the mother is “essentially an ambiguous figure,” (The Monstrous-Feminine 165) a contradictory figure as positioned by Sarah Arnold, given that: “She teaches the child through its toilet training to separate itself from all signs of its animal origins, yet she is also associated with the world of nature – and consequently denigrated – because of her reproductive and mothering functions” (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 165). The mother essentially teaches the child to reject and abhor that which she herself represents. The specific example Creed gives of toilet training is one that returns in Nightbitch: “Poop in the potty, she suggested when the boy’s tummy hurt. He was now well beyond his second birthday and should be pooping in the potty” (Yoder 43). Despite The Mother’s encouragement, the son does not wish to poop in the potty, instead doing so in his diaper as he crouches behind the living room couch: “Go poop, he said. He grunted and pushed, making eye contact with her as he shat, the way he liked” (44). Following Creed’s line of argumentation, this instance represents The Mother’s attempt, and consequent failure, to have her son separate himself from his animal origins. It is not until The Mother accepts her animal side and her Otherness and has her son partake in what he calls ‘doggy games,’ that their relationship improves.
The figure of the femme animale similarly posits the woman as tied to the natural and animal world through her connection to birth, as like many female animals, the woman can be “impregnated, change shape, and give birth” (Creed, “Femme Animale” 183). This connection has been made monstrous through the Western patriarchal discourse that connects the abject to these natural practices (183), constructing the hybrid phenomenon of the woman/monster. It is through the horror film, Creed argues, that patriarchal forms of representation are critiqued, opening possibilities for discussions on women’s identities through the lens of the femme animale, which “unsettles the traditional binaries of Western thinking in favor of more flexible discursive ways of thinking about the so-called human/animal and culture/nature divide” (186). The monstrous-feminine similarly highlights the “‘frailty of the symbolic order’ through her evocation of the natural, animal order and its terrifying associations with the passage […] from birth through life to death” (Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 83). Nightbitch, in The Mother’s monstrous becoming, unsettles ideas of what motherhood ought to look like. The Mother does not wish to be a mother in the manner she is told she should be; she wishes to be a mother connected to nature. The Mother does not deny being an animal, once more hybridizing the mother/other. Rather she figures herself to be a femme animale even before her first transformation: “One thought came and then left as quickly: you are an animal” (Yoder 74; emphasis in original).
The Mother as Monstrous
Given the prevalent theme of both motherhood and the monstrous in this novel, it is necessary to discuss what Erin Harrington calls the ‘monstrous-maternal.’ Harrington argues that horror films concerning motherhood and maternal relationships suggest “insidiously, that there is something utterly and inescapably horrific about the psychological, emotional and cultural demands of motherhood that compel women in these narratives towards monstrosity and acts of evil” (184). Harrington suggests that it is through the horror genre and its portrayal of the relationship between motherhood and monstrosity that complex ideas of motherhood can be interrogated. Harrington’s suggestion that mothers’ attempts to fulfill ever-shifting ideas of ideal motherhood are “doomed to fail,” (184) also applies to Nightbitch. The investigation of what anxieties underlie motherhood engages with the beliefs of both essential motherhood and this notion of ideal motherhood. Essential motherhood centers on “motherhood as an innate, desirable and inevitable part of a woman’s life and experience,” (Harrington 182) perceiving motherhood as both a biological and a cultural imperative. Ideal motherhood functions as a social imperative that urges women to become the ideal mother: “the fictional, aspirational figure of the self-sacrificing ‘good’ mother who performs her role in an ideologically-complicit fashion, whatever that might be” (182). This ideal motherhood is, Harrington argues, unobtainable and aligns closely with what The Mother in Nightbitch calls ‘the working mother.’
Especially in the first part of the novel, The Mother feels she is failing this perceived ideal motherhood. She is unhappy as a stay-at-home mother, feeling no affinity with a group of mothers she calls the Book mommies (Yoder 36). Nor does she feel satisfied as the working mother she attempted to be when her son was a baby:
So how do you like being a working mother? the other working mother asked, and the mother—the tired, unhappy working mother, working her dream job and not holding her baby—that mother stared stupidly and wanted to present her theories about how this was all a trick, a trick to get them to do everything, a trick they could not escape. (15)
It is, after all, the rage The Mother feels regarding her circumstances that creates Nightbitch and leads to her monstrous transformation. The fact that The Mother introduces her shifted form to several intoxicated ‘Book mommies’ later in the narrative, some of whom stay transformed, reveals them not to have been as happy as earlier depicted, or at least sympathetic to The Mother’s plight for monstrous motherhood: “They stayed because they understood, understood the movement of Nightbitch […] One mother tipped her head back and howled at the moon. Another curled next to a rotting stump and slept” (Yoder 228-229). The monstrous-maternal is thus an apt term to use when discussing Nightbitch. However, unlike the mothers presented in horror films as being monstrous—e.g., the mothers from movies like Psycho (1960), Carrie (1976 and 2013), and Burnt Offerings (1976)—The Mother never harms or wishes to harm her child, nor is she an overbearing mother figure.
So, is The Mother monstrous? The answer to this question is twofold; different dimensions of monstrosity need to be considered, namely the mother as monstrous and the werewolf as a monstrous figure. The mother as monstrous has been specifically considered to relate to “infantile anxieties of corruption, defilement and possession,” (Arnold 69) and is connected closely to Kristeva’s work on abjection.
Kristeva defines abjection as that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules”, that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (4). In tracing the abject, Kristeva aims to create a means of separating the non-human from the human, the fully constituted subject from the partially formed one. One of the key figures in Kristeva’s tracing of abjection is the mother, as she argues that abjection is “rooted historically (in the history of religions) and subjectively (in the structuration of the subject’s identity), in the cathexis of the maternal function—mother, woman, reproduction” (9). Creed argues that it is through the horror film, once more, that Kristeva’s argument regarding the maternal figure as abject becomes clearly illustrated. Kristeva perceives “the mother-child relation as one marked by conflict: the child struggles to break free but the mother is reluctant to release it,” (Creed, Imaginary Abjection” 49) a struggle depicted in films like Psycho, Carrie, and The Birds. Hence, it is through the attempt of the child to break free from the mother that this maternal figure becomes abject (Kristeva 13). The Mother in Nightbitch, however, does not struggle to set free her child, nor does the child wish to be free. Instead, The Mother struggles with her own freedom within the patriarchal motherhood role, made evident through her continuously expressed desire to become a monster.
The Mother still transforms (or believes herself to transform) into a werewolf, however—a creature that is monstrous by its very nature. Additionally, as earlier stated, the werewolf is also an abject figure. The desire for The Mother to be monstrous and her successful attempt to include other mothers as aforementioned, in her monstrosity arguably furthers her monstrosity.
Referring back to Cohen’s claim that fear of the monster is, in fact, a kind of desire, we see that The Mother fears becoming Nightbitch yet desires the freedom this transformation represents, leaning on the transformation to combat her insecurities about her career and marriage (Yoder 102). Moreover, The Mother inspires others to join her in her (m)otherhood. While The Mother is not a monstrous mother, nor an abject one, she is a werewolf, and it is her acceptance of this fact that makes her monstrous.
The Mother as a Bad Mother
There are further matters to consider regarding motherhood in Nightbitch; the monstrous mother, as posited by Creed, is not the only monstrous mother figure. Arnold illustrates that the abject reading of the maternal figure fails to account for the often melodramatic nature of horror films—a setting that provides a “background for and a context to the family drama that unfolds in these films” (69). As an alternative, Arnold posits the notion of the “Bad Mother” is rooted in contradiction. The Bad Mother is punished for rejecting “her traditional function of self-sacrifice and devotion,” (68) yet can still be monstrous through her strict conformity to those same traditional functions. The Bad Mother is both overpowering and prohibitive as well as neglectful and selfish; she is malevolent, violent, and emotionally abusive, yet also monstrous in her absence. This elusiveness of Harrington’s ‘ideal motherhood’, like the transgressions of the Bad Mother, “indicate the slipperiness of the patriarchy” (69).
Given that The Mother in Nightbitch feels she was set up to fail in a system that creates what she perceives to be impossible motherhood standards, the transgressions of the Bad Mother, at least in their representative function, are her own. The fact that the trope of the Bad Mother can “point to dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the psychosocial structures of the family,” (Arnold 69) further cements the reading of The Mother as a Bad Mother, as dissatisfaction and disillusionment with her day-to-day life are the reason The Mother starts transforming.
Harrington proposes that the “dominant normative discourses of motherhood” (183) are articulated through the competing messages represented by cultural objects like horror movies (and novels). This articulation occurs because it is through horror films and monsters at large that (cultural) hopes and anxieties are enforced, challenged, and represented (Harrington 183), as argued by various monster studies scholars (Cohen 4; Levina and Bui 1; Mittman 1; Smith 58; Weinstock 2). Harrington suggests that the implied ‘doomed to fail’ narrative surrounding ideal motherhood implies a tension between two compulsions: “The idea that the specific demands of motherhood make one monstrous” and “the suggestion that somehow monstrosity is there, nascent and deeply embodied, stitched firmly into the very construction of ‘essential’ motherhood itself” (184). The implication of these compulsions renders “the woman as always-already monstrous,” (184) a framing that highlights the hybridity of the women/monster category. In short, before Nightbitch’s protagonist becomes a mother and monster, she would already have been monstrous, as is every woman.
The Mother as Magical
As aforementioned, it is through the fictional Wanda White A Field Guide to Magical Women that The Mother comes to learn of magical women like the Bird Women (Yoder 40), the Slaythe (46), the Blues (109), Flickering Mothers, and the WereMothers (173). The magical women of interest to The Mother are the Flickering Mothers and the WereMothers.
Flickering mothers are mothers who disappear in the evenings or who transform into different creatures altogether. In the novel’s Field Guide, one mother is thought by her children to become a mongoose, watching over them as they play outside. The mother denies this, saying the mongoose was a pet that had watched over her too when she herself had been a child. When she is questioned about the age of the mongoose, the mother advises White, who is interviewing her, that “knowing [is] not necessary, only experiencing” (113). The Mother does not question if she herself might be a Flickering Mother, though she notes that she finds this particular magical woman interesting.
The WereMother is a magical woman White describes as being heavily furred, pregnant, and surrounded by cubs. The WereMother walks on all fours, has both human and canine (not lupine, notably) features, and can become impregnated spontaneously. The WereMother does not interact with men and is described as a predatory breed that, despite its predatory nature, would never harm its young. Despite not being pregnant and interacting with her husband, The Mother bears similarities to the WereMother.
It is through this ethnography that the representative function, the cultural anxiety, of the monster within Nightbitch is explained; it is in motherhood, in the domestic, White reasons that most women become magical:
[A] woman, when pushed to her limit, will call on all her faculties, all her skills, all the biological tools and tricks at her disposal, not only to survive but, moreover—for those who have reproduced—to care for her young. As such, the mother’s powers supersede that of the un-childed woman, for the mother—especially the mother of infants and very small children—occupies that peculiar space of in between—not fully human or fully animal—and it is in this liminal otherworld where we find many of the most compelling magical women. (84-85; emphasis in original)
White’s argumentation mirrors that of the femme animale, of the woman as a non-human animal, by positioning mothers as being neither fully human nor fully animal. Rather than have this make these mothers monstrous, White argues it makes them magical.
In reframing this perceived monstrosity as something “essential,” (Yoder 65) as something capable of communicating “deeper truths,” (65) the negative connotations associated with the femme animale and the woman as a non-human animal become unsettled. White highlights this magical/monstrous becoming to be a subconscious act:
Perhaps most peculiar: most magical women are not aware of their powers and proceed into the realm of the magical without so much as a parting glance […] whether conscious or not, it marks the beginning of what the Kwolo call her aga, or second life. (85; emphasis in original)
The monstrous-maternal and how it frames women as inherently monstrous once again comes to mind here as White similarly claims that the journey into the monstrous (reframed as the magical) is one that comes naturally to all women. The ‘doomed to fail’ narrative underlying the monstrous-maternal further extends this idea of a natural monstrous becoming of women, given that the ever-changing goal of ‘ideal’ motherhood is impossible to achieve. Nightbitch thus not only questions understandings of hybridity regarding the mother/other but also those regarding the woman/monster. In doing so, the novel reframes this hybridization as a positive thing, given that the answer to issues of motherhood is Otherness and the natural (and positive) trajectory of womanhood that of achieving monsterhood.
Conclusion
The monstrous-maternal, Harrington argues, “explores and articulates anxieties about what it is to mother appropriately” (184). Through the competing narratives presented in cultural objects like novels “dominant normative discourses of motherhood” (Harrington 183) are articulated. The women who become monstrous through their motherhood in horror films and novels thus function as a warning, a how-not-to, a show of what inappropriate mothering looks like and how dire the consequences of this failure are. For instance, both Carrie’s main character, Carrie and Psycho’s Norman, kill their mothers. Likewise, the Bad Mother motif points towards anxieties regarding “corruption, defilement and possession” (69). It is a motif through which “misogynist fears of the deadly woman/mother are played out,” (69) like the feared decline of the patriarchy (125). Fears that are mounting due to the rising popularity of the female empowerment movement (124). The Bad Mother illustrates the slipperiness of the patriarchy; it depicts the anxieties of women escaping this system, an escape mirrored by female werewolves.
As aforementioned, Priest argues that the female werewolf represents the desire to break free of patriarchal society as a being trapped within it. This desire to break free does co-exist with a desire to fit in, an act that, like ‘ideal’ motherhood, is doomed to fail. The anxieties represented by the female werewolf are thus contradictory; they contain both the fear of women breaking free from patriarchal modes of control and the fear of women not ever living a ‘normal’ life within this same system due to their inherent monstrosity. The anxiety regarding the break from patriarchal control often centers on “sex-positive post feminism,” with the portrayal of the sexuality of the female werewolf linking to “transhistorical notion of feral and animalistic femininity” (Priest 15).
Non-gendered anxieties regarding werewolves revolve largely around abjection; the werewolf is inherently an abject figure as by being neither fully human nor fully animal, boundaries, systems, and order are disrupted. As with the ‘woman as possessed body,’ the werewolf appears human first before becoming something Other. The boundaries between the Self and Other collapse and therein become frightening. A rather familiar rendering is given in Nightbitch: “One day the mother was a mother, but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else” (Yoder 6).
When speaking of the cultural anxieties represented by The Mother in Nightbitch, The Mother’s belief that she is turning into a dog rather than a wolf cannot be ignored. The dog, an inherently domesticated animal, is made to be monstrous by The Mother, given she herself perceives her becoming canine as becoming monstrous. Herein, The Mother makes the domestic monstrous without ever denying domesticity. She breaks free of patriarchal control, breaks free of the idea of the ‘ideal’ mother, and creates a new type of monstrous motherhood that is made monstrous not through her relationship with her child, as often seen in the motifs of the Bad Mother and the monstrous-maternal, but through her denial of motherhood as she is told it ought to be. Perhaps most unsettling to those who believe in and benefit from the system of patriarchal control, those who wish to reach ideal motherhood, is the fact that The Mother—in her rejection of both these notions—not only becomes abject but is happy to be so. Nightbitch not only makes becoming monstrous desirable, but it also makes it magical.
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