When I first came across one of this summer’s hottest novels, I literally rolled my eyes. A novel about a tradwife influencer who suddenly wakes up in the 19th-century world she pretends to live in felt, honestly, a bit cliché. But I was so wrong. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is a captivating and brilliant satire.
Yesteryear centers on Natalie Heller Mills, an influencer who lives with her husband, Caleb, and their five children on a farm in Idaho. Her account, @Yesteryearfarm, has gone viral. and Natalie spends her days creating content of herself supposedly making sourdough and doing farm chores. Behind the scenes is a team of nannies and hired farm hands actually doing most of the work. Her Shaker-style kitchen cabinets hide her modern appliances, and her husband’s failing cattle farm and “organic” vegetable garden hardly produce enough food to feed one family.
With Natalie as our narrator, multiple timelines overlap: the supposed present where she is losing control of the online empire; her strict upbringing; Harvard (where she discovers all the “angry women” and vows to live a life different from her peers); and her engagement and marriage to Caleb, the youngest son of a GOP career politician. Backed by her father-in-law’s enormous fortune, the Millses cosplay homesteading in Idaho. Natalie is driven by keeping up appearances, by avoiding suffering, by finding acceptance from an online following—by anything that keeps her from actually settling into the reality of herself and her own life.
The plot thickens when Natalie wakes up to find herself living in the same Idaho farmhouse, but in 1855. She is disoriented and desperate to find her way back to the present. The facade of appearances she has built becomes a labyrinth she can’t escape.
In Yesteryear, Burke pulls the psychological and physical curtain back to reveal where this promise of a simpler life falls short.
Yesteryear currently sits at the top of the New York Times bestseller list and has caused a serious stir. It has been criticized for its portrayal of women and religion, but I think this portrayal is actually its greatest strength. As Burke said recently in an interview, “We were all sold a bill of false goods, and that’s true for conservative women and it’s true for liberal women. …The point of the book is that no one wins.” (Emphasis mine.) Every cultural script described in this story falls short. Natalie is a cautionary tale for us all.
The Game of Pretend
Two competing cultural scripts emerge early on in Yesteryear. Natalie is confronted with the world of girlboss-inspired, ambitious peers during her time at Harvard. She hates these women but is also obsessed with them. Driven by her hate, she decides to take a hard right turn for herself. Happiness, she decides, is to build a kingdom of motherhood. She strives just as hard as her liberal feminist peers. Keeping up the performance has more in common with her corporate climbing former roommate than she cares to admit, but she does it as a wife and mother.
Tradwife content and liberal feminism seem to be on opposite ends of a spectrum. But the alleged return to God’s plan for women by being a traditional wife and mother (while capturing it as content and making money) is only possible because of the contributions of second and third wave feminism. Tradwife content poses as an escape from the rat race and encourages women to live a simpler life. But it turns out, the influencers making the content are usually pretending, or are backed by enormous fortunes, or both.
Some of the magic has worn off in tradwife culture as scandals have emerged. Last year, a disorienting interview with Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, one of the most successful tradwife influencers to date, showed that all may not be as effortless and shiny as it seems in the tradwife world. In Yesteryear, Burke pulls the psychological and physical curtain back to reveal where this promise of a simpler life falls short.
Natalie’s entire life is pretend. Her marriage is a sham, she doesn’t really like being a mother, and as she discovers, the thing that kept her own mom going was “pretending someone was watching.” So Natalie embarks on her own version of this game of pretend—she lives for her online following. She is aware of this and also knows that her online audience only needs the appearance of authenticity to be satisfied:
These women wanted their content to be every bit as mindless and pleasurable as their lives were not. These women wanted—no, they needed—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.
The life of effortless simplicity Online Natalie presents is in fact a mirage. The product of Offline Natalie’s intense performance looks simple but is just the result of her tireless efforts. She hasn’t escaped the girlboss grind, she has brought it home.
The Authentic Self and Religious Realism
Some reviewers have criticized the shallowness of Natalie’s character in the book. I don’t think this is a mistake by Burke. Natalie doesn’t feel realistic because she never truly learned how to be a person. This is most evident in her relationships. One minute she is praising God for “the Inheritance” that funds her lifestyle, the next she is cursing out some woman in Target. She doesn’t have real friendships and can’t connect with her children or husband. Her mother is constantly reminding her to exhibit basic human traits, like kindness. Natalie’s personality shifts and changes on a whim because she is whoever others want her to be.
Some readers are understandably frustrated by this. But I think, as Serena Sigilitto argues in her recent review, Natalie is not an integrated person who knows herself, so she fails to see others as persons. She exemplifies our culture of narcissism, in which we often see only ourselves and live for ourselves. Natalie is a commodity who commodifies others. Her inner emptiness leads her to objectify others and see the world as a place where her only worth is in her own performance, self-objectification, and self-love.
This artificial self-construction extends to faith as well. Natalie feels like a satire of a woman raised in fundamentalism because she is. And I will admit, at first, I found the descriptions of religion off-putting. It all felt generic and ambiguous. Bits and pieces of the brand of Christianity Natalie practices are familiar to most of us. It is conservative, yes, but beyond this, it is a tightly controlled Gospel of hierarchy. Everyone in this system knows their place and their roles and doesn’t stray from them. This is God and Country faith at its finest. And as the novel goes on, we find this religion is ultimately interchangeable with one thing: power.
In a recent interview with The Rumpus, Burke said that “whether it’s Mormonism or evangelicalism or Jehovah’s Witness, it’s really all the same in terms of how women are treated and what the expectations are for them.”
I don’t think the point of Yesteryear was to accurately portray the complex inner workings of a woman in a high-control faith environment. The strength of a generic Christianity in the novel is that it shows an apparently striking contrast to secular feminist culture. Natalie feels like a paper doll version of a good Christian wife because that’s what is expected—she is to play house. Across the spectrum of Christianity, women are often told that their worth and value lie in God’s plan for them as wives and mothers, and this supposedly stands in direct opposition to what “the culture” expects of them.
The Maze
The ultimate brilliance of Yesteryear is that it shows how these two seemingly rival cultural scripts for women actually have much more in common than we have been led to believe. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. What the cult of biblical womanhood and the secular girlboss script have in common is that they both place immense burdens on women and make promises they can’t keep.
In one revealing scene, Natalie interviews Shannon, a 19-year-old East Coast elite college dropout who applies to work as Natalie’s producer and is a huge fan of her account.
“Everyone at my school loves you, you know. They think you’re a feminist icon.”
For a moment my guard dropped. I leaned back and snorted. “Really?” …
Shannon pointed a finger at my chest, dead-on, like a pistol. “Exactly. What they want is what you have, Natalie.”
“Which is what?”
She smiled and said softly, “Freedom, of course.” …
“So I’m—what?” I said. “Some kind of catharsis for girls your age?”
“It’s not catharsis,” Shannon said. “It’s more like a road map. … What you’re doing on your farm, with the homesteading and the farm-to-table and the keeping your kids away from technology? Building a business with your husband, and owning all the means of production, and running it from the comfort of your house? That’s the future, Natalie. That’s the way out.”
“The way out of what?”
“Oh,” she said, like it was obvious. “The maze.”
Shannon is disillusioned with her available options, and Natalie shows a way out of the maze: freedom in a self-made life. The only problem is, Natalie’s life is actually all pretend (except for the very real Inheritance funding her pursuits). There is no cultural script that offers a way out of the maze. Natalie has just created a new variation of the maze, one still based on striving and performing.
The Way Out is the Way Back
How boring. How deeply and utterly unfair. I did everything I was supposed to. I had the children and married the man and created a universe for all of us to live in, and what was I going to get for it?
In the end, it’s too late for Natalie. She loses herself and everything she has tried to build. But there is one character who gets out and pulls others out along with her.
Natalie’s oldest daughter, Clementine, has spent her life in the internet’s spotlight, an image carefully crafted by her mother. At 16 she leaves home to find herself, then returns to bring her younger siblings out of the chaos her mother has constructed.
Whether she is driven by justice, love, or spite, she does what her mother could never do: she sees others as full persons in need of love and care.
Many of us just want a script; we want to be told what to do. If we can do it well enough, maybe then we can secure for ourselves the kind of real stability, acceptance, and rest from the constant striving we truly desire.
But real acceptance and rest isn’t something we can manufacture for ourselves. It has to come from outside us. Apart from grace breaking in and re-orienting us, we will never be free to take our gaze off ourselves and give ourselves as a gift to others. The way out of the maze isn’t disappearing or running as fast or as hard as we can. It’s in finding our true selves rooted in love and surrendering to the grace of God already at work in us.
True freedom comes in being rooted in this love and grace, and having nothing to lose in giving ourselves up for others. This is why we don’t have to run anymore.
