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.
Themes
Gender Politics and Parenthood
There are clearly, at the novel’s start, inequalities in the relationship between Nightbitch and her husband. As Nightbitch says—“she had been responsible for putting the boy to sleep nearly every night since he was born” (129). When her husband is home, she still “performed night-nights on Friday, because he was tired” (129).
This power imbalance extends beyond issues of sleep and childcare. While her husband gives himself free time to play videos games and relax when he gets home, Nightbitch does not have the same privilege. At times “she would have liked to leave the house altogether and go to the coffee shop” or “shut herself in the guest room” (55). She bows to her husband’s assessment that this would be “inconvenient” for the family, so stays put. As Nightbitch says, “they deferred to his judgment” on nearly everything (5). This includes not only who puts the child to sleep but what to watch on TV and Nightbitch’s own physical state, in terms of what the growth on her back means.
Nightbitch suggests that inequity is not peculiar to her own marriage. It is also not the product of unfortunate circumstances, namely that her husband is away working most of the week. Rather, such inequalities reflect deeper societal forces and values. In society, women and girls are encouraged to be passive and submissive and to defer to the authority and opinions of men. According to Nightbitch, this process starts in childhood. As she says, “you light a fire early in your girlhood” but “you don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl” (7). Instead, girls are encouraged to suppress their anger and views in the interests of others.
Parents facilitate this. Nightbitch’s mother gave up her dream of becoming an opera singer to look after her, which normalized sacrificing female ambition for the sake of family. Passivity and its dire effects are represented by Nightbitch’s dream, where her mother is “set upon by foxes and racoons and wolves” (159), but petted each one of these animals lovingly “as it pulled her apart” (159). In other words, women cleave to what destroys them.
Socialized values of meekness and subordination mean that women end up doing most of the childcare in relationships. They are more likely than men to sacrifice their careers for the sake of looking after children. Because of socialization, women are inclined to accept that they ought to do more, having given up careers for family. As Nightbitch says, “she had felt, ever since she had stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything […] because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her […] it’s not that hard” (206). Women are apt to accept the societal devaluing of work in the home, and thus not demand their rights.
Toward the novel’s end, this begins to change. Recognizing the true strength and challenge of motherhood, Nightbitch demands, and gets, her husband to “attend to night-night each night he was home” (204). Her performance piece also challenges norms of female passivity and propriety. By highlighting the essential wildness and power of femininity and motherhood, Nightbitch’s piece empowers women to “demand more and do less” (217), especially when it comes to childcare.
Communal Notions of Motherhood and Femininity
Nightbitch thinks, while first observing the “Book Babies” group, that “she did not enjoy the company of moms” and that “she found being in a room full of mothers and their wards most dispiriting” (35). She finds the idea of being friends with someone because they are a mother, and shared motherhood itself, “repugnant.” In part, these attitudes reflect Nightbitch’s own prejudices. Determined to be independent and viewing herself as an artist with alternative perspectives, Nightbitch looks down on what she perceives to be the banality and conformity of other ordinary mothers. Her disdain also comes at a time when she is still deeply frustrated with being a mother; she wants to identify herself less, not more, with motherly activities and motherhood.
At the same time, the novel shows how Nightbitch’s skepticism about groups of mothers is often justified. The Book Babies group is, on one level, superficial and cliquey, with mothers gossiping about their husbands and exchanging recipes, while viewing the non-conformist Nightbitch with disdain. The Book Babies group also serves as a front for Jen’s efforts to recruit other mothers into her dubious herb-selling business.
Nightbitch’s art college friends are similarly shallow. Nightbitch goes into her meal with them hoping that, despite their different choices, “they would break bread and work toward building a supportive community of women” (136). In reality, the meal becomes an opportunity for the other women to boast about their individual success, each “swapping the names of gallery curators and art-world agents […] screeching with joy as one announced a new show, the other a new grant” (143). The friends don’t consider Nightbitch’s feelings as someone who gave up her career.
Even positive moments are problematic. Nightbitch attends Jen’s herb-selling party admitting that “she needed this […] needed other mothers” (191). The women and the event are, in many ways, well-intentioned and joyful. Nonetheless, Jen mars the party with her exploitation, and the party descends into collective stupor. As Nightbitch observes, at the party’s end the floor is “littered with mommies in all states of consciousness” (194). Alcohol and the herbs allow for a sense of togetherness, but this is to some extent illusory and transient.
It is perhaps only in the domain of fantasy and animalism that a true community of mothers can exist. Nightbitch frolics with the three dogs on her lawn, whom she imagines to be other mothers from Book Babies trying to initiate her. Likewise, WereMothers and the bird women discussed in White’s book exemplify nonproblematic collectives and the ideal of a harmonious female community, one united by the common struggle to protect their young. As Nightbitch imagines, in such groups “we pile inside the warm cave becoming one creature to save our warmth” (230). Whether such groups can be realized by modern humans is unclear. They represent a possibility to which Nightbitch aspires.
Challenging Modern and Traditional Conceptions of Art
As she builds up to her finished performance piece, Nightbitch writes to Wanda White to say that she has been meditating on “what art itself possibly could be” (199). The question of what art is runs throughout Nightbitch, both in relation to the art that inspires Nightbitch and that which she produces herself. For example, during graduate school, she created an “outdoor nighttime installation that involved transforming a local playground into a sort of wonderful nightmare […] the climbing dome covered with an enormous, many-layered skirt” (21-22). More extremely, she becomes interested in “real time artistic experimentation” (23). Such experiments include a married couple getting plastic surgery to look like one another, a woman having “her face operated on so as to approximate that of the Madonna in a famous renaissance painting” (201), a man shooting himself and “a woman giving birth in a storefront” (201). Nightbitch fantasizes about re-enacting the last experiment herself if she has a second child. Finally, there are Nightbitch’s climatic performances. In these she becomes a dog on stage, smelling, stalking, and pouncing on the audience, then killing live rabbits before presenting one to her son.
These examples deviate from traditional notions of art. First, they do not occur in an accepted artistic “space,” namely a gallery. Instead, they take place in storefronts, parks, and on a stage, subverting or blurring the neat distinctions between art and the “ordinary” world, and between visual art and theater. These artforms can’t be enshrined as timeless artifacts of contemplation. Rather, they are often live events or “happenings,” experienced in the spontaneity of the moment before disappearing. They resist capture by either a cultural establishment or a world of rational concepts and thought. Lastly, there is the content of the art itself. Instead of being concerned with objects of traditional aesthetic beauty and coherence, such as great events or noble people, they explore that which is chaotic, indecent, or grotesque.
The novel challenges those who maintain a rigid, conservative ideal of art, as satirized in the critic’s response to Nightbitch’s performance. However, the novel also takes aim at modern conceptions of art as well, such as with Nightbitch’s two artist friends. These two women, who represent the modern art world, talk about “the interplay between seer and seen” and “our relationship with information and power/Power” (141), implying that their art is radical and transformative. Yet the substance of their art is passive and conservative. One project merely reflects the world of social media in printing out Instagram posts, while the other passively reflects the artist’s own life on video. Both fetishize modern technology while risking nothing of themselves, and avoid “getting their hands dirty” either literally or figuratively. Neither live up to Nightbitch’s call “to shape sensory experience and in doing so communicate” (200). The novel suggests that modern art is not so different from the traditional art it claims to be opposing.
