Don’t clear the table. The cannibals haven’t finished. Yes, they’ve been here for hours, and they’re all the way down to the bone now – but can’t you see it’s done them a world of good, gnawing on their children and husbands? The other metaphors are starting to look impatient. “We want to appear in a midmarket horror novel, too,” they mouth through the window. But there are important issues to hash out here, parenthood and body image and a special sort of anger that only women can have, so they must wait their turn.
People who eat people are the luckiest people in the world. They stand the highest chance in history of winding up in a novel about cannibals, which will undoubtedly get a citation in the pitch package for another novel about cannibals. The newest in the genre is Saratoga Schaefer’s Trad Wife. Schaefer calls it “a book about femme rage, gender roles and brutalistic hunger”. The standard woman-eats-child metaphor is mostly reversed, which doesn’t make the concept any more subtle or surprising. “Isn’t motherhood all about sacrifice anyway?” asks Camille, its protagonist, after cutting a bit of her stomach off to feed her baby.
Twenty-something Camille moves with her C-suite husband Graham to a house by a mysterious forest somewhere in the American Midwest, which is where these things usually seem to happen. He prefers to keep her at home; she’s trying to set herself up as a linen-draped tradwife influencer like her idol, ex-actress Mara Shoemaker. (Mara is clearly supposed to stand in for Nara Smith, a model-turned-tradwife-influencer who does things like make Coca-Cola from scratch). Camille knows a baby will boost her online following, but the two can’t make it work – so she sleeps with a menacing, oddly proportioned angel, who at least performs cunnilingus on her beforehand. The resultant pregnancy makes Camille crave raw steak and throw up mud. She hallucinates about the other worshippers at her new church. Eyes appear on the ceiling. The baby bites off two of her toes. Camille will do anything to satisfy her child’s cravings.
The industry blurbs make Trad Wife seem revolutionary, as books of its ilk are supposed to be. There have been comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby. Another horror writer says the book “dismantles the aesthetics of submission”, which have already been dismantled to the point of extinction. Very few modern works of fiction cast the 1950s-style housewife as anything but a victim of crippling expectations. Betty Draper is one of the most memorable characters on contemporary television; the Stepford Wife archetype has existed for half a century. The most successful online tradwives are provocateurs; they understand that the Happy Housewife idea exists contrary to the mainstream, that their lives and beliefs are self-evidently frightening. Taking their cultlike TikTok videos and subverting them in a horror novel is a bit like subverting the received idea of spiders, asylums or clowns.
Trad Wife doesn’t lead us far enough into the internet to support an original conclusion about real tradwives. Its protagonist is half-in, half-out – she furnishes her house in shades of beige, stays at home and networks with the tradwife community. But Schaefer never allows her to fall all the way down the rabbit hole. She spells out the problems with mass-tradwifery at every turn, just in case we don’t get it. “The wariness of medications and vaccines in my online community is at odds with what I believe to be true,” she says; she questions the idea that you can feed a baby without folic acid. Unlike many women with no immersion in politics, she’s hyper-aware of the difference between a personal desire and a societal expectation. “A baby is also expected,” goes her inner monologue, when asked to justify her desire to conceive. “I have a husband. A home. The natural progression is a child.”
Schaefer is probably pre-empting the possibility that some readers might misconstrue a portrayal of anti-vax tradwifery as an endorsement. But a logical, right-thinking heroine handicaps a scary novel. The horror of Rosemary’s Baby is that Rosemary has no idea what’s happening to her; vital dramatic tension builds as her husband and neighbours plot behind her back. Camille is never in the dark. She knows her husband is cheating on her; she knows about her strange night of monster sex, and that the resulting pregnancy isn’t quite right. While a well-plotted horror novel might place childhood revelations in its final act, we know almost straight away that Camille is a tradwife because of her difficult upbringing. When dramatic irony pops up, she lets the reader know right away. “This is not ideal. I didn’t plan for this,” she tells us, when something comes up that she didn’t plan for. “But the truth is,” she says to herself in a mic-drop moment, after spending several chapters totally aware that she is lying to her husband and neighbour, “this pregnancy is full of lies.”
Other details make Camille sound less like a tradwife than a horror author guessing how a tradwife might think and speak. People who hang around in specific internet circles tend to learn new language. Here, some wires have been crossed. If there’s any external influence on Camille’s inner monologue, it’s not the tradwife sphere – it’s the notoriously left-leaning world of online fanfiction. Camille thinks in a slow drip of fronted adverbials and em-dashes. Bad fanfiction writers are infamous for calling eyes “orbs” when they can’t find another synonym; the one on Camille’s ceiling is alternately an “eye” and an “oculus”, which might even be worse. “Embers pulse inside me,” she says, as she gets angry. When the bepenised angel appears in her bedroom, her first thought is that she “can’t seem to attach the correct pronouns to it”. We briefly cross over to the petrified forest of romantasy. The angel’s “manhood” is “erect and eager”. His ejaculate is “a burning-hot liquid… the heat is a pain that ripples with pleasure”.
The book climaxes in the same way as almost every other lady-cannibal novel: Camille gets to eat her husband. As in every other lady-cannibal novel, it’s sexy eating, the kind Nigella does on TV. “I lose myself in the feast,” says Camille, “disappearing into the rampant flavors that decorate my mouth, traveling down to my patient stomach.” Schaefer spells out the irony on two counts. “What a beautiful bonding moment for this family,” says Camille, “a fabulous feast, provided by the husband.” Then, in a bit of satire so obvious it might not be satire at all, she puts the evidence on Instagram, accompanied by the hashtag #tradwife.
This subgenre of middle-market women’s horror is built on a split between the oppressor and the oppressed. The male oppressor metaphorically chews on the oppressed woman, and she literally bites back. For readers who relate to the oppressed, these bursts of destruction provide therapeutic catharsis. But the sensation only lasts in the moment. It cannot substitute for hundreds of pages of character and plot development, or for dramatic tension. Without this setup, and without any original criticism of internet culture, it is hard to see the tradwife theme as anything other than a flimsy moral pretext for Set Piece One, Ecstatic Sex With Monster, and Set Piece Two, Ecstatic Sexy Cannibalism.
This charade only proves a feminist point. Literary men from Humbert Humbert to Alexander Portnoy can be self-centred, disgusting, criminal and depraved simply because they are; literary women are only allowed their fun if it’s on behalf of all women, everywhere. The personal cannot be anything but political, and so the female cannibals are locked within a moral framework that diminishes their capacity for evil and cunning. Perhaps it’s finally time to let them out.
[Further reading: “Lord of the Flies” is not for children]
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