1980s

In Nightbitch, the 1980s operate as a double register: the remembered decade of a 1980s girlhood whose innocent fantasies now read as a cruel premonition, and a sonic wallpaper of eighties hits that plays over the adult protagonist's most disorienting scenes. The decade is never merely decorative. It is the era that shaped the mother's earliest ideas of what a woman, an animal, and a savior could be, and it returns, in her transformed life, as a mocking soundtrack to her dissolution into something the 1980s girl could never have imagined.

The 1980s Girlhood and Its Dog Fantasies

The mother's childhood in the 1980s is the origin point of her relationship to dogs. As a girl in that decade, she loved the breeds that 1980s girls loved—a golden retriever, a collie, a basset hound—and fantasized about brushing their hair with a pink hairbrush, decorating them with lavender bows, and naming them Lisa or Gem or Mr. Belvedere. In these fantasies the dogs were not pets but protectors: they would save her if she ever accidentally tripped into the street in front of an oncoming car or fell into a very deep hole. The fantasy is tender, girlish, and utterly conventional, the stuff of 1980s childhood innocence. Yet the novel plants this memory precisely so that it can be shattered. When the mother later steps onto her lawn to find three dogs—a golden retriever, a collie, and a basset hound—waiting in the shade of the silver maple, the exact breeds of her childhood fantasy have arrived in her present. The boy points and says, "Dog." The mother's response is not wonder but exasperation: "Oh, come on." The childhood saviors have become the agents of her undoing, the vehicles of her transformation into Nightbitch. The 1980s girl who wanted to be rescued by dogs has become a woman who will be torn apart and remade by them.

The Eighties as Sonic Backdrop to Transformation

The decade also persists as an auditory presence. At Jen's herb party, the scene of the mother's reluctant assimilation into the multi-Jen universe, the background is filled with "the boppy notes of eighties hits wafting in the background." One of the multiple Jens yells, "Let's have five!" and her words are swallowed up by laughter and chatter and that eighties soundtrack. The music is the sound of a social world the mother finds both fascinating and alienating—a world of women performing ease and conviviality while she stands apart, a bit reluctant to be fully assimilated. The eighties hits are the muzak of normalized motherhood, the cheerful noise that plays while the protagonist quietly contemplates her own monstrous divergence from it. The decade's pop music thus becomes an ironic counterpoint: the bright, synthetic sound of a culture that has no vocabulary for what she is becoming.

The Decade's Ideals Versus the Mother's Reality

The 1980s also stand, implicitly, for the promises the mother was sold and the myths she internalized. She had bought into the popular societal myth that a young woman who secured a top-notch education could free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood, that a career would let her return to work after having a baby and sidestep the drudgery of previous generations. The novel's critique of this myth is scathing: having a baby does not represent a departure from work but an immersion in it, an unimaginable weight of work, exponential in scope, staggering both physically and psychically. The 1980s, the decade of the mother's formation, is the era that produced this promise of the superwoman who could have it all. The novel's present-tense unraveling is the bill coming due for that decade's optimism. The mother's sense that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood were "masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there" takes on new heft after she quits her job, as her body struggles to regain its equilibrium. Stripped of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seems not only plausible but nearly inevitable. The 1980s girl who believed education and career would set her free has become the mother who sees the whole system as a trap.

The Decade's Legacy in the Mother's Body and Memory

The 1980s also surface in the mother's remembered Appalachian upbringing, the skills she gathered as a girl that now seem to belong to another species of woman. She knew how to keep bees, dip candles, brush wool, use a spinning wheel and make yarn, dry onions and garlic, develop photographs with vegetable juices, bake absolutely anything, make every single sort of braid, sing every single sort of song, track an animal through the woods. She knew her cardinal directions, how to tell a fast pony from a slow one just from the look of its face. This is a catalog of pre-industrial, almost feral competence—the knowledge of a woman who could make a world and then make a person to live in that world. Yet her husband, with his electronics skills and his engineering, is the one who makes all the money. The 1980s girl's inheritance of practical, bodily knowledge has been devalued by the very world the decade built. The mother's transformation into a dog is, in part, a return to this older, bodily way of knowing—a reclamation of the skills and instincts her 1980s education taught her to supersede.

The Decade as Measure of Transformation

The 1980s ultimately function as the measure of how far the mother has traveled from her origins. The girl who fantasized about naming dogs Lisa or Gem or Mr. Belvedere becomes the woman who sinks her teeth into something living and bloody and feels its essence drain away. The girl who wanted to be saved by dogs becomes the animal who saves herself by becoming one. The decade's innocent fantasies, its cheerful pop soundtrack, and its promises of careerist liberation all stand in ironic contrast to the novel's central claim: that what the mother needed all along was not medical attention or psychotherapy, not choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude, but one night of violence, one night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to be only a body in motion in the dark. The 1980s gave her the dream of the pink hairbrush and the lavender bows; the novel's present gives her the reality of fur, blood, and instinct. The decade is the before-image against which the after-image of Nightbitch is drawn.