Mythical ethnography

Mythical ethnography is the invented scholarly discipline that structures the intellectual and spiritual journey of Nightbitch, the unnamed mother at the center of Rachel Yoder's novel. It is the field of study practiced by Wanda White, author of the 1978 book A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, which the mother discovers in a stack of library books and which becomes her guide to the strange bodily changes overtaking her. The discipline treats mythical women not as folklore or metaphor but as real, observable creatures with habits, diets, and patterns that can be studied and encountered in the wild. For Nightbitch, mythical ethnography offers a framework for understanding her own transformation—a way of knowing that stands in direct opposition to the rational, scientific worldview of her engineer husband and the medical establishment.

The Discipline and Its Founder

Wanda White, the mythical ethnographer who created the field, describes her work in the foreword to A Field Guide to Magical Women as a research expedition that took her to all seven continents and spanned her entire professional career. She writes that while colleagues have claimed mythical ethnography "isn't a viable field of study," she presents "irrevocable data that counter their claims." White explains that she is "interested in the ways in which womanhood manifests on a mythical level" and is particularly drawn to "the experience of motherhood and how this complicates, deepens, or denies womanhood." The book's cover features fantastical creatures rendered in a style the mother associates with the 1970s, Nancy Drew, and B-movies—lots of shadows and inky drawings with blurred edges. Though the mother initially assumes the book is a compendium of cheesy middle-grade stories about feminine monsters of yore, she quickly realizes it is more a field guide than anything, a practical manual for recognizing and understanding magical women in the wild.

The Taxonomy of Magical Women

Within the pages of the Field Guide, Nightbitch encounters a taxonomy of mythical female creatures, each with its own defining traits. She finds the Slaythe, "a type of modern creature drawn to and focused on all things related to her career, success, financial earning, and power," a figure found in the highest echelons of any chosen field who can incapacitate a business opponent with a slicing look or inspire profound doubt with a sharp word. White speculates that the Slaythe may "ever so slightly edge into sharpness, with her actual corporeal body taking on a new pointedness," though she admits this might be magic or might simply be aging. Later, in a moment of desperate need, Nightbitch turns to the Field Guide to find Wanda discussing predatory women, those "truly rare breeds" who, though terrifying, "would never injure their own young, even to their own detriment." White offers the example of the highly poisonous Apothecarian tribe, who, on the brink of starvation in the mid-seventeenth century, ensured their young were fed and fattened while all the matured adults died off one by one. She also describes the WereMothers of Siberia, a regal and evasive species that appears to be self-fertilizing, with no empirical confirmation of males existing at all.

A Counter-Logic for a Mother's Crisis

Mythical ethnography becomes Nightbitch's alternative to the "land of logic, the land of doctors and prescriptions, the land of peer-reviewed journals, the land of the goddamn sun rising in the east and setting in the west." After killing the family cat in a gruesome fit, she lies awake unable to sleep and opens her Field Guide, finding in Wanda's words a reassurance that predatory mothers never harm their own young. She asks herself what else she is going to do under these circumstances, concluding that her answers reside in "the land of the backward sun, the land of counterclockwise rotation, in the land populated only by artists and fortune-tellers and people on stilts." She decides that Wanda White, mythical ethnographer, is a native of such a land, on a similar journey to her own, and so she will read Magical Women and take it to heart, because there is very little else her heart can realistically handle. This embrace of mythical ethnography represents a deliberate rejection of the rational explanations her husband's worldview would demand—the same husband who, upon seeing a dog in their nearly empty house, never attempts to get to the bottom of its presence, a detail that remains largely uninterrogated despite his being a man of science and reasonable explanations.

The Discipline's Revelation and Transformation

Mythical ethnography ultimately reveals itself to be something far stranger than a scholarly field. When Nightbitch spots a lone figure at the farthest reach of the dog park, standing quite still with a notebook in hand, she recognizes her as Wanda White—slim and lithe, with a cloak of silver hair, wearing a smart shirtdress and sensible shoes and a straw hat. She runs toward the woman, arms outstretched, overcome with pure jubilation, certain it is her. But the novel's final revelation transforms the discipline entirely: "WANDA WHITE IS NOT a person. Wanda White is a place at which a person finally arrives." Nightbitch stands behind the heavy velvet curtain of a stage, in darkness, smelling her own rosy musk, in anticipatory ecstasy just before she ascends to whatever lies beyond—invincibility or air, something. The discipline of mythical ethnography, it turns out, was never about studying magical women from a distance; it was about becoming one, about arriving at the place where the student and the subject of study are one and the same. The Field Guide's taxonomy of creatures—the Slaythe, the Apothecarian tribe, the WereMothers of Siberia—was always a map of the territory Nightbitch was destined to enter, and Wanda White was not its cartographer but its destination.