Blues

The Blues appear in the pages of A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, the mythical ethnography by Wanda White that Nightbitch reads obsessively as she undergoes her transformation. They are one of the book's "Domestic Varietals," a category that has become Nightbitch's favorite section, for she finds in its pages "women she used to know or could imagine one day befriending." The Blues are thus not merely a catalog entry but a mirror held up to the novel's central question: to what identities do women turn when those available to them fail?

Identity and Description

According to White's field guide, the Blues are "born close to water," whether on a coast or the shores of an inland sea, and are known for their "striking and vivid eye color ranging from silvering indigo to a deep and meditative navy." They are prone to song, apt to take up the mandolin or ukulele—"really, any small, whimsical stringed instrument will do." The Blue, "without exception," is deeply spiritual, drawn to rituals of the solstice, herbology, and volunteerism, yet not eager to join standard organized religion. Instead, she draws to herself "an eclectic and accomplished circle of artists, musicians, recovering addicts, fallen capitalists, the elderly, the poor, the romantics, seekers of all sorts." Her defining trait is her fecundity, among the strongest on the planet, which manifests as an ability to sync all other women around her to her own monthly cycle, though "you will almost never find her the wife of any man." Her houseplants are the healthiest in any home, and the surest sign of a true Blue is catching her feeding them with the water used to rinse clean her cloth menstrual pads.

Nightbitch's Encounter and Longing

The Blues enter Nightbitch's life during a period of intense personal upheaval. She has quit her job, her body is struggling to regain its equilibrium, and she is consumed by the sense that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood are "masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there." She has begun to sprout coarse black hair from the base of her neck, and her husband has laughed off her confession that she thinks she is turning into a dog. In this state, the Field Guide becomes her refuge, and the Blues her imagined companions. Reading about them, she is reminded of a friend who moved away long ago and whom she now, inspired by the passage, misses immensely. The description of the Blues—their spirituality, their artistic circles, their freedom from marriage—offers a vision of womanhood utterly unlike the one she is trapped in, one where her own skills and instincts, honed during her quiet Appalachian upbringing, might be valued rather than suppressed.

The Dream and Its Significance

Nightbitch falls asleep reading the passage about the Blues and dreams of "cauldrons full of sweet-smelling brews, blood-red rain, footprints of soot leading down a sun-dappled wooded path, the sound of female voices singing an old song somewhere far ahead." This dream is a direct extension of the Blues' world, a realm of female magic and community that stands in stark contrast to her waking life of pumping breast milk, responding to e-mails, and navigating the grocery store as a "locus of oppression." The dream foreshadows the communal, animal togetherness she will later find with the dog pack and, ultimately, with the mothers who come to her performances. The Blues, in this sense, are an early intimation of the "unbroken lineage of togetherness" that Nightbitch discovers at the novel's end, a promise of a world where women keep each other alive through shared ritual and mutual recognition.

The Blues and the Novel's Themes

The Blues are a crucial piece of the novel's feminist critique. They represent an alternative to the "popular societal myth" that a young woman can free herself from the historical constraints of motherhood through education and career alone. Where Nightbitch's own mother was "good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head," the Blues are present, spiritual, and connected to the earth. Where Nightbitch's husband, with his electronics skills and engineering, makes all the money even though she "could make a world," the Blues are never the wife of any man. The Blues embody the possibility of a life where a woman's fecundity, her spirituality, and her artistic inclinations are not liabilities but sources of power. They are a fictional answer to the real question of what women might become when the available identities of mother, wife, and worker all fail them, and they pave the way for Nightbitch's own final embrace of her monstrous, animal self.