To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail

To what identities do women turn when those available to them fail? is the question that Wanda White poses in the foreword to her 1978 book A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and it is the question that governs Nightbitch's entire transformation. The question appears in the book's opening pages, where White declares herself "interested in the ways in which womanhood manifests on a mythical level" and particularly drawn to "the experience of motherhood and how this complicates, deepens, or denies womanhood." It is followed by two companion questions: "How do women expand their identities to encompass all parts of their beings?" and "How might women turn to the natural world to express their deepest longings and most primal fantasies?" Together these questions frame the novel's central inquiry: when the available identities of wife, mother, and former career woman fail, what remains?

The Question as the Novel's Governing Framework

The question arrives at a moment of profound crisis for Nightbitch. She has quit her job, her body is struggling to regain its equilibrium, and she has been stripped of "her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones." In this stripped state, she reads White's question and recognizes herself in it. The question speaks directly to her condition: she has been called Nightbitch as a good-natured self-deprecating joke, but the joke has curdled into reality as she discovers a patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck. The question gives her a framework for understanding what is happening to her—not as pathology but as a legitimate response to the failure of available identities.

The Failure of Available Identities

The question presupposes that the identities available to women do fail, and Nightbitch's experience confirms this presupposition at every turn. She has bought into the societal myth that a top-notch education and a career would free her from the historical constraints of motherhood, only to discover that having a baby "marked an immersion in work, an unimaginable weight of work, a multiplication of work exponential in its scope." The identity of mother proves to be a trap: she feels that society, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood are "masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there." The identity of the good sport—the woman who can "poke fun at herself, definitely not uptight"—fails her when the joke becomes literal. Even the identity of the hot mother fails, because her vision for herself "had not been of a mother, but now that she was one, she felt strongly that she needed to be a hot one." Each available identity proves inadequate, and the question of what comes next becomes urgent.

The Answer in the Natural World

White's question suggests that the answer lies in the natural world, and Nightbitch's transformation confirms this. The question's third clause—"How might women turn to the natural world to express their deepest longings and most primal fantasies?"—is answered by Nightbitch's literal turn toward doghood. Her transformation is not a departure from her humanity but an expansion of it, a way of encompassing parts of her being that motherhood had suppressed. The question's framing of the natural world as a site of expression rather than regression is crucial: Nightbitch does not become less than human but more than the limited identities available to her. The question thus legitimizes her transformation as a form of self-expansion rather than a breakdown.

The Question as Personal Correspondence

The question becomes the basis of Nightbitch's one-sided correspondence with White. She writes letters addressed "WW—" that read like prayers, each one circling back to the question's concerns. In one letter she asks whether White's research is "true" in a scientific and rational sense or whether she is "performing scholarship so as to make larger points about, say, the limits of knowing and the failure of science to fully describe the world." In another she writes of longing "so deep it threatens to splinter a person apart" and asks, "What is that longing? How could we possibly long for something beyond our offspring?" The letters become a religious practice: Nightbitch rises each morning to check for a response and sits down each night at her cluttered desk to write another missive to "a person whom she believed in yet had no evidence of, save for the tattered book on her nightstand and single contact page on a university website." The question, posed by a stranger in a book, becomes the organizing principle of her inner life.

The Question's Deeper Resonance

The question resonates beyond Nightbitch's immediate crisis to encompass the generations of women who came before her. Reflecting on her own mother, Nightbitch realizes that her mother's pushing her away was "her mother's best love"—a way of protecting her from the fate of women who "had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely." The question of what identities women turn to when available ones fail applies to her mother, who was "good and responsible and holy and always somewhere far away in her own head," and to her grandmother, whose wood-and-bone projects and sewing skills Nightbitch has inherited. The question thus spans generations, connecting Nightbitch's transformation to a longer history of women whose available identities failed them and who had no answer to White's question—or whose answers were extinguished by time.

The Question as the Novel's Thesis

The question functions as the novel's thesis statement, the lens through which all of Nightbitch's experiences are understood. It explains why her transformation is not a descent into madness but an answer to a legitimate inquiry. It explains why the Field Guide feels magical, as if it were "in conversation with her thoughts," because the question it poses is so precisely her own. And it explains the novel's ending, in which Nightbitch's transformation is not reversed but embraced. The question's answer—that women turn to the natural world, to their own animal selves, to the primal fantasies that motherhood suppresses—is the novel's argument about female identity. White's question, posed in a 1978 field guide, turns out to be the key that unlocks Nightbitch's entire story, and its answer is the story itself.