Motherhood and Womanhood

Throughout the novel, the author uses Nightbitch’s gradual transformation from a stay-at-home mom into a dog in order to explore the complexities of motherhood and womanhood. On the night that Nightbitch becomes “quite suddenly something else,” she feels a “single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do” (7). The third person narrator, who is limited to Nightbitch’s psyche, goes on to explain that though every woman possesses this light and source of energy and creation, she is taught in her girlhood not to “let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl” (7). Therefore, Nightbitch’s growing anxiety, angst, and anger is not simply inspired by her restrictive maternal, marital, and domestic life. Rather, it is fundamental...