43 pages • 1 hour read
Rachel YoderNightbitch
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Nightbitch
Nightbitch is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. She begins as an archetypal “nice” woman. For example, at the novel’s start, “when she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke—because that’s the sort of lady she was, a good sport” (3).
She faces the challenge of looking after a two-year-old with her husband away most of the week and has given up her career. However, she still strives to put on a brave face and put others before herself.
Nightbitch’s transformation into a dog reveals—and is a response to—her frustration and suppressed rage. The sprouting of hair from her neck and the development of dog-like features subverts her initial, passive forbearance. Her canine features signal the release of animalistic and self-assertive energy. Nightbitch’s transformation is accelerated by her discovery of Wanda White’s A Field Guide to Magical Women and, following shortly afterward, her initiation into the dog world by three dogs who mysteriously show up on her lawn, stripping her and leaving dead animals outside her home.
Wanda White’s book asks how “women might turn to the natural world to express their deepest longings and most primal fantasies” (40). White represents Nightbitch’s role as a mother and motherhood’s connection to deeper and repressed animal instincts.
Through Nightbitch, the novel subverts traditional notions of motherhood, and the stereotype of the joyful, benevolent mother figure. Creating a performance piece from the experiences and frustrations of motherhood, and becoming a dog on stage, Nightbitch articulates “the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood” (237). In this way, Nightbitch becomes the ideal that Wanda White represents. Namely, she has grasped the primal, animal truth underpinning and constituting femininity.
Nightbitch’s Husband
Nightbitch’s husband is not given a name, showing how he is a stand-in for the average husband and represents a type. When Nightbitch first voices her concern that she is turning into a dog, “he laughed and she didn’t” (3). On one hand, this shows his rational nature as an engineer. However, he also doesn’t listen to Nightbitch’s concerns and take them seriously, and is disconnected in their marriage. Though he is not malicious, he is oblivious. For example, one Saturday they argue about getting milk for their son. Nightbitch says, “couldn’t he see how she struggled? […] He made it seem as though she were on an extended holiday” (57). Nightbitch feels overwhelmed, yet her husband doesn’t give emotional or practical support. Away most of the time, he treats his odd phone conversations with her during the week as a chore, “another thing to check off the list” (181).
However, when Nightbitch begins changing into a dog, an understanding and connection rekindle between them. This is in part because a happier, more liberated Nightbitch reconnects with her husband physically, having better and more frequent sex. Nightbitch also rediscovers why she fell in love with her husband in the first place; he had showed her a computer folder with bizarre images he had taken from the Internet. These included one of two Japanese women urinating on an octopus. Nightbitch thought at the time, “how wonderful to find a person who delighted in all the aberrations and quirks of human behavior” (20). She loved him for his tolerance and fascination with the strange and unusual. When she begins turning into a dog, her husband embraces this rather than being disturbed, and she recognizes again the man she loved. He accepts more childcare responsibilities and recognizes that Nightbitch can exist as a “creative force” independent of him, and learns to love her back again in return.
Jen
At the beginning of the novel, Nightbitch feels contempt and loathing for Jen. She refers to Jen as “the Big Blonde” (36), and her description of her is scathing. As Nightbitch says, Jen was “perfected and monumental […] she smiled and laughed and chatted and exchanged and hugged and fed and generally joined in wherever joining in was possible” (36). Jen represents everything Nightbitch dislikes about the suburban mother. In Nightbitch’s eyes, Jen is shallow and mindlessly social. Her whole identity seems to revolve around being a mother; she subsumes herself in the company, expectations, and activities of other mothers and children, with no space for creativity or independent thought. When Jen first asks Nightbitch to get involved in her herb-selling business, Nightbitch regards it as precisely the kind of empty communal activity which she despises.
However, Nightbitch’s attitude toward Jen changes after her encounter with the three dogs. Nightbitch becomes convinced that golden retriever and Jen, “both inexplicably smelling of strawberries,” are “one and the same” (63). Nightbitch wonders if there may be more to Jen than meets the eye. Specifically, she imagines that Jen, like herself, has a double life as a dog and that being a dog is an expression of her anger at being a mother.
In the end, it turns out that Jen is not the golden retriever Nightbitch saw; rather, Jen is stressed over the failure of her herb business. Nevertheless, the vulnerability Jen reveals—that she’s “sometimes […] up all night roaming the neighborhood” (212)—brings her and Nightbitch closer together. It also precipitates Nightbitch giving Jen a job as a publicist for her art project. In this way, Jen becomes an affirmative character and a mother expressing herself creatively.
