Probably the most divisive book I’ve read, at least while it was still the hot title of the summer, was Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. All I knew when I added it to my library wait list was the hook: a tradwife influencer wakes up in the 1800s and has to actually survive the life she pretended to live on social media. Obviously I was going to read this book. It may as well have been made for me.
 |
While I tried not to think too much about the book before I read it, I didn’t think there would be actual time travel. But if there was, I wanted to keep an open mind and see how someone navigates living the reality of their fantasy. I also hoped that the religious tradwife lifestyle wouldn’t be glorified. But I didn’t expect how her religion would be portrayed.
Yesteryear synopsis
Natalie grows up in an extremely religious family. Her dad left after cheating. Her mom and sister don’t talk about it and most people believe he died. Natalie is an outcast and briefly believes she will find her smart, bookish people in college, but remains an outcast after realizing her roommates enjoy the typical college freshman lifestyle. She develops a hatred for “college women” which she carries with her the rest of her life. Her freshman year she meets her husband: handsome, wealthy, politically connected Caleb. They marry almost right away and Natalie drops out, finally starting to feel like she’s doing what she was made for. It didn’t matter to her that Caleb, as it turned out, isn’t all that intelligent or all that masculine. Or that sex isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. [Actually, the sex is terrible. Caleb can’t get or keep it up. There are almost no orgasms. It’s beyond awkward.]
They don’t get pregnant for a long time. Long enough that her father in law, a prominent senator with presidential ambitions, pressures her uphold the family values. Natalie makes Caleb ejaculate into a turkey baster. And she thinks that this is right and righteous. But Natalie hates being a mom. And she hates that Caleb is shockingly great at being a dad. That’s not the traditional marriage she wanted. Natalie makes a deal with her father in law: buy us a ranch and I’ll pump out more babies. The house is a glorious McMansion Ranch that they deck out with the best in modern appliances (hidden behind custom cabinetry, of course). She impulse starts an Instagram account that blows up and her tradwife life is born.
Cue the hard-learned ranch lessons, the back to back to back to back pregnancies, and the boom in fame. Natalie and Caleb’s relationship is still awful. She thought the ranch would give Caleb masculine purpose but he sucks at it and she still hates being a mom. But everything looks perfect on Instagram because they’ve hired nannies, ranch hands, and a social media producer. They have wealth. Despite her feelings of superiority over every other woman, Natalie always seems a moment away from unraveling, constantly spending time reading negative comments from The Angry Women (the feminists who hate follow her but are supposedly secretly jealous that Natalie is living the ideal life) and creating comment specifically to rile them up. She has a merch shop. She makes a killing and hides her money. She curates a traditional life and hides her help.
Then everything unravels. Natalie becomes more and more estranged from her mom and sister, who become less and less religious. She learns that it’s her mom who had the affair and left her dad, not the other way around, and that her mom and sister are attending a progressive church and (gasp) therapy. Caleb goes deep down the manosphere rabbit hole and has an affair with the extremely liberal social media producer. Natalie confronts and then sexually assaults the producer. The producer sues and goes public, Natalie loses her following.
And then one morning she wakes up freezing, under scratchy cotton blankets, and it’s as if it’s actually 1855. All her appliances are gone. She has to poop in an outhouse. Her clothes are bland and worn and only somewhat clean. Her only method of cooking is an open fire, her only method of washing is a bucket and lye. And there are children in her house that she doesn’t recognize, though one of them has the same name, Mary, as the baby she was most recently pregnant with. Caleb is still there but he’s different, like he’s actually a hardened rancher (though it becomes clear that he still sucks at it).
Natalie tries to figure out what happened. Time travel? Secret reality show? A test from God? She suffers through the life while she figures out either how to escape or be rescued or win. The big twist in the end: after the fallout from the assault news, she had a psychotic break and basically blacked out for almost two decades. In that time she had several more kids (Mary was the baby she was pregnant with, now almost an adult), she reverted their house to an actual ranch without any modernity, her first daughter moved away and her oldest sons moved just far enough away that they could keep an eye on the ranch and help when needed. They are cut off from the world almost entirely. There’s more that comes after, including jail time and a true crime style interview, which I didn’t find particularly satisfying.
You can see why this is so divisive
I freaking loved it. I loved how angry Natalie was while dragging The Angry Women, feminists who are, apparently, delusional to think that careers and independence are better than a traditional marriage. I loved how righteous and devout she was while swearing and judging and cheating and deceiving. I loved how inauthentic her deeply held beliefs felt even in her own private thoughts (and I loved that I got to see some of the feelings I’ve expressed only to husband in a book that probably millions of people have read). I loved how hard she struggled in 1855. I loved how patriarchy so obviously hurt both Natalie and Caleb. I loved how their oldest daughter rejected social media and influencing and religion and tradition. I loved how the book thoroughly mocked traditional gender roles.
But my favorite thing: I looooooved how unreliable Natalie was as our sole narrator. It’s up to you to decipher what’s really going on as best you can. I had so many questions: was Natalie purposefully misremembering details because they didn’t fit the narrative she wanted? Was she actually intelligent or just believed it because it was a way to explain away her (un)likability? Did she ignore these supposed red flags about other people, especially Caleb? Why would she hire a producer who was so clearly liberal when she had so many secrets?
Natalie being an unreliable narrator was apparently lost on some readers. Or they were so off put by the author openly mocking restrictive religion that they couldn’t see the message. Or perhaps, ironically, we’re so accustomed to short form content that it’s easier to miss the significance, especially with such an unreliable narrator. Very likely, the hype and subject attracted people who don’t regularly read, and therefore have less of a critical eye, potentially skewing the reception. They hype itself could even have contributed to disappointment: when I hear a movie is the best movie ever made, I try to lower my expectations before watching it because I otherwise end up a little let down.
Disappointingly, professional literature critics seemed to have also missed the point, or been put off by the take on Christianity, or simply used a negative critique to get more engagement with their review of an extremely popular book (criticizing a book on social media influencing with nonsense arguments designed to get clicks is *chef’s kiss*.)
Some of the criticisms I’ve read:
- The analysis of feminism fell flat
- The shallow dive into motherhood and postpartum depression could have been deeper
- The “uncompelling” critique of social media influence culture
- The “either or” of options available to women (traditional marriage or lonely career)
But Yesteryear wasn’t about feminism. Or religion. Or motherhood. Or politics. Or whether life in the 1850s was better than it is today.
The message was not that the only choices available to women are being in a traditional marriage or a lonely career. I found that purposeful misunderstanding on a conservative website with links to stories about California’s failure to protect female sports, empathy gone wild (really), and the perils of socialism. This review claims that the book, which is tagged as satire, “devolves into parody”. Yes, Jessica, it is parody. It also says that Natalie is unbelievable. Quite true! But that’s a feature, not a bug. Folks who are offended that the author isn’t a fan of Christianity are going to be disappointed.
Nor was it a critique on social media influencer culture. A review from a Catholic website, whose author doesn’t seem to understand the point of influencing and forgets that Natalie has a whole team of help, claims that Natalie actually thought that life in the 1850s was better and had wished to live then. But that never happens. And that’s not what real life tradwives believe or promote. The reviewer reminds us that if the followers go off-grid the influencers would lose their livelihoods. No shit, and that’s not what they’re doing at all. When I was a teen, my uncle claimed that industries that cut down forests for wood replant them, otherwise they’d lose their livelihood (teen me was gobsmacked that an adult would believe that). This reviewer claims that tradwives are simply asking “what if women really could do it all?” But if all women are influencers, who are they influencing?
An IndieWire article about how audiences might perceive the upcoming movie adaptation claims Natalie “is forced to live within the [1850s] rigid domestic constraints, which she once pushed to her millions of followers as a more ideal way to live”. But Natalie never really believes this. She performs an expectation for her family and her followers. She pimps out her house in the best, most luxurious appliances, she hires so much help, and she buys her bread from a baker. She’s under no delusion that she actually lives this way, she just pretends to. My understanding is that the lifestyle Natalie promotes is more about homemade dinners, homeschooled children, and simplicity, not a genuine wish to live without indoor plumbing. (Though this same article accurately notes that “the loudest reactions seem to be responding to the idea of the book, not the arc it actually follows”).
So, what is Yesteryear actually about?
What is this arc, if it’s not about feminism or influencing or motherhood or social media?
It’s about how we all, as individuals, curate our lives and the lives of those around us for social media. How we’ve changed the way we travel, eat, dance, engage in hobbies, love, dress, and interact with the world. We take photos not to remember them or appreciate the beauty or to create art but to post on social media. We get pets because of how they’ll look on Instagram. We change our skincare because of how we appear on TikTok. We become micro influencers.
And it’s about performing and living up to expectations, even independently of social media. The protagonist is Christian and so fucking judgey. She judges her mother and sister for not being good enough Christians because they aren’t living the exact life she is. She judges her husband for having “womanly” interests and skills. She judges non-Christians for doing the secular things she expects them to do and then hates them for it. She judges her husband’s family and her followers and her employees and even her children. She hates everyone. No one understands her. No one lives up to her expectations. She can never live up to her expectations.
Can anyone? Expectations based on your age and sex and gender and race and religion and sexuality and nationality and ability and every other identity that makes up a human have always existed, but social media has emphasized them. We feel forced to perform our identities in ways that others expect, and in ways that we expect, rather than genuinely live our lives. The protagonist performs motherhood while outsourcing most of her caregiving responsibilities and performs being a good Christian wife while negotiating around and undermining her husband.
The book also brings up children in social media and I can agree that I’d have liked more about this. The tradwife image depends on children (multiple, of course) who appear happy, healthy, and thriving on social media. That means they must appear on social media. In Yesteryear, the oldest child, who has a much bigger age gap than any of the other children, starts to object to being in posts in her tween years. (The parents I follow on social media do everything from post every little detail of their kids lives to only posting images of their children from behind or with emojied faces… what happens when these kids are at consenting age?) She eventually rejects everything her parents represent and leaves the moment she is able. The next oldest kids, boys about a year apart, remove themselves but stay only a mile or so away. They interact with their parents on occasion, helping on the farm or joining for dinner.
The twist at the end, which perhaps some saw coming and many criticized, felt perfect to me. She didn’t actually wake up in the 1850s. She just blacked out for a couple decades. She remodeled her house to remove all the modern comforts she’d had installed when she bought it, replaced all her clothes, and fired their staff. She went legitimately crazy. Her husband, too: he fully bought into this way of life and embraced his role. He kind of had to when his affair went public and his political family forced him to isolate (but he also loved performing his role of expert rancher because that was how he saw himself, even though he was terrible at it). Was going crazy a cheap trick? In almost all cases, the “it was all a dream” ending is insta-hate for me. But for this premise to work, the alternative was she and her husband actually time traveled to the 1850s. A reality TV show might have been interesting, too, but I’d have liked to see that be obvious from the beginning.
Could the author have made these points without totally dragging Christianity? Yes, but not with a tradwife influencer as the main character. For her Instagram fame to be believable, she had to be conservative, had to have several children, had to live in a rural area. To be all those things and not Christian would be a big leap (are there any agnostic tradwives?).
And the author wanted to make a statement about tradwife influencers and the men behind them: “The tradwife, like the 1950s housewife, is not a real person. She is not a trend, or a cultural obsession. She is an advertisement, a curated performance of womanhood with a link in bio for purchases, who has show up, like a 1950s advertisement, to remind women of their true purpose: serve, smile, procreate, and purchase.”
No comments:
Post a Comment