Happiness is a choice

Happiness is a choice is the Husband's hollow self-help mantra, a phrase that becomes the novel's central target of critique. It is the ideological weapon used to dismiss Nightbitch's rage, her physical transformation, and her despair, insisting that her suffering is a matter of personal attitude rather than a systemic failure. The phrase's failure to account for her reality—her exhaustion, her isolation, her growing fur and tail—marks the precise point where the novel's feminist critique sharpens, and its eventual rejection clears the way for Nightbitch's embrace of her monstrous, animal self.