“Of all bitches dead or alive, a scribbling woman is the most canine.” This quote by Byron, repopularised in the conclusion of Bridgerton’s third season, encapsulates a historical tendency to compare women to animals, particularly dogs, in order to demean and control them. The form of gendered zoomorphism—assigning animal-like characteristics to non-animal subjects, in this case, humans—expressed in this one sentence has long been prevalent in literature, and Byron’s quote highlights the contempt with which women writers, or ‘scribbling women,’ were widely regarded, likening them to canines in a bid to undermine their intellectual contributions. These parallels have been used as justification for barring women from the workforce and scholarly pursuits, upholding patriarchal norms that saw women as fundamentally inferior.
(Mad)woman as monster
Up to 90 percent of women were thought to be illiterate until the time of Shakespeare, as many of them had never been taught to read or write; in fact, women were writing and getting published by the 18th century, but few of them were using their own identities. This was mostly in part due to women’s writing being seen as an immodest or dangerous hobby that went against the gendered expectation that women adhere to a standard of quiet and modesty, according to feminist researcher Jennie Batchelor, and this deviance had its own repercussions.
The 1854 poem by Coventry Patmore about his wife, Emily, is notably infamous for its description of “The Angel in the House“: a woman who serves the ideal feminine role of a subservient, meek, and child-rearing wife. Any woman who disobeyed these strict social expectations was labelled as insane or animalistic, with people going so far as to institutionalise her. There are countless examples of ‘wild,‘ and ‘uncontrollable,’ women characters that are either then ‘tamed,’ or feared and ostracised, as depicted in this era’s literature.
Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one that immediately comes to mind, termed the ‘madwoman in the attic.’ This Victorian imagination of women as either angels or monsters reinforces a patriarchal system in which women are marginalised or kept in servitude. The animal image was especially effective, then, since it dehumanised women and made it appear as though asserting control over them was not only justified but absolutely necessary. While the blatant sexism and misogynistic overtones of earlier novels by men, with their reductionist caricatures of women, have taken on subtler undertones in their reactions to complex women characters now, what has persevered is the symbolism: a woman’s ‘canine ancestry.’
Of woman-dogs and dog-women
In contemporary literature, the metaphor of the woman-dog has been reappropriated to critique societal constraints. K-Ming Chang’s Organ Meats opens with a seemingly innocent question posed to Rainie by Anita, imploring her to ‘become dogs together,’ with a red thread around their throats knotting them to each other. To be more precise, their canine ancestry—descending from dog-like beings—is what ties them together and what forms the basis of a lot of the themes discussed in the book.
Through stream-of-consciousness storytelling in a queer, fantastical setting, the book explores how women have been deliberately raised and socialised to behave like dogs for many generations and how that collective memory affects the two female characters, who are deeply intertwined even when separated. As Rainie’s journey takes her away from the roots of the mystical sycamore tree that the two of them inhabited as children, Anita instead sinks back into the mythical world they created.
Visceral and sometimes violent imagery, which reflects the severity of the characters’ psychological conflicts and desires, is used to represent their battle to express their identities and regain their autonomy in a world—even one made of their own imagination—dominated by men. This battle is not just a personal but also a collective one, reflecting the experiences and memories of innumerable women who have been socialised to repress their own selves, or ‘widowed‘ from their own bodies, in search of belonging.
Chang writes, in recollections of a daughter’s cultural duties, “Being bred means you are expected to serve a purpose, a specific usage… You were bred to prioritise other lives.” For the role of a woman is to comply or otherwise be tamed, offer up her body for procreation, and be domesticated, as will the daughters who come after her.
The themes addressed in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch strongly relate to this issue of being socialised to put others—typically, the men—before oneself. We meet the unnamed protagonist, desperately scouring the depths of the internet, searching for a name to her sudden but slow canine transformation complete with heightened senses, landing—after nary a result on the aptly-phrased ‘human with dog teeth‘—in the same place as the protagonist of yet another tormented woman protagonist with a ‘rest cure‘ prescribed for her hysteria (shoutout to The Yellow Wallpaper). Practically forced into being a stay-at-home mother, with her art dreams quashed and a conventional, traditional husband who rarely stays at home, Nightbitch undergoes this Kafkaesque change every time she challenges the assigned gender roles that are subsumed by everyone around her.
The ambiguity in Nightbitch—whether the protagonist is truly transforming or merely hallucinating—adds layers to its critique of societal limitations placed on women. Regardless of interpretation, one thing remains undeniable, and that is, as the quote from the book puts it, “We are, at base, animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence.” Her metamorphosis functions as a critique of the limitations imposed on mothers, who are supposed to sacrifice and sanitise their own identities in order to comply with societal norms, with an unending focus on family.
The balance between being a mother and being a career woman is precarious, to say the least. Two prominent strands of maternal commentary in the twenty-first century can be summarised as “mothers cannot do all that is asked of them” and “mothers are capable of anything and everything they put their minds to.” Yoder has both and none of these beliefs—a fact she has been very vocal about through numerous interviews—and her book contentedly lives in the space that exists between them. Rather, the book seems to contend that a more true and powerful life might result from accepting the whole range of their personalities, including the untamed and wild parts. The protagonist goes on a journey of self-discovery and reclamation, with the violence of a woman’s life front and centre, representing the raw feelings and impulses that mothers frequently feel but are socially conditioned to repress.
Raging against societal constraints
In an article for The Cut, Rebecca Traister poignantly observes, “Part of it is the decades we’ve spent being pressured to underreact, our objections to the small stuff (and also to the big stuff!) bantered away, ignored, or attributed to our own lily-livered inability to cut it in the real world. Resentments accrete, mature into rage.” This captures the simmering strain that many women experience, a pressure that both these books, and many more in a similar vein, clearly depict. The transformations of Anita, Rainie, and Nightbitch speak to the broader theme of reclamation of autonomy—both narratives employ the metaphor of being animalistic to represent a recovery of agency and desires rather than a loss of humanity. By channelling their rage outwards, these characters resist the attempts of society to domesticate and diminish them.
These stories, which show the female experience in all its raw, bleeding splendour and ignore the tenderness and softness typically associated with it, just so happen to be so captivating and even cathartic. The literary resurrection of the canine-female analogy is a reflection of a larger movement towards more complex representations of women. There is a growing trend in films, TV shows, and even music to portray women as intricate, diverse entities that resist easy classification.
Violence and rage make for the perfectly primal medium to reclaim that, since these attributes have long been used against women, under the purview of male fantasy. But angry women aren’t simply angry because they’re women, but because they are people who feel wronged, oppressed, or sidelined somehow. In embracing their fury, they howl back at a world that persistently tries to muzzle them.
References:
- Batchelor, Jennie. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.7358688.
- Moore, Natasha. “The Realism of ‘The Angel in the House’: Coventry Patmore’s Poem Reconsidered.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 41–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24577269.
- Freiwald, Bina. “Of Selfsame Desire: Patmore’s The Angel in the House.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 30, no. 4, 1988, pp. 538–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40754874.
