Colonial America

In Rachel Yoder's Nightbitch, Colonial America appears not as a setting but as a recurring historical touchstone, a compressed symbol of everything the protagonist believes has been done to women like her. It is the era she reaches for when she tries to articulate her own project of reclaiming power, and the era she implicitly contrasts with the sanitized, commercialized versions of female fulfillment offered to her in the present. Colonial America is where the novel locates the original crime against powerful women, and it is the ghost that haunts every contemporary demand that a mother be happy, thin, and agreeable.