I read Caro Claire Burke’s highly anticipated novel Yesteryear when it was released in April. When my book club chose it as our August pick, I decided to listen to the audio version because I was so captivated by the book the first time around.
This entire piece is a spoiler alert, so if Yesteryear is still on your TBR list, set this aside until you’ve finished.
The premise of Yesteryear is literary catnip. I went in expecting an Outlander-style time travel tale. Yesteryear is not that. It’s ostensibly about a tradwife influencer named Natalie who makes her living off selling old-fashioned values (think @BallerinaFarm, or read my last piece about Trad Wives here if you’re unfamiliar with the term).
Then Natalie wakes up in the 1800s — no ring light, no production assistant — and is forced to confront the realities of a pioneer life.
Yesteryear is, among other things, a revenge fantasy. Not the kind in which a woman escapes a bad marriage or brings down a corrupt corporation, but the far more satisfying kind in which an influencer who has spent years selling women a fantasy of domestic perfection is suddenly forced to live inside it.
Natalie has built an empire around the aesthetics of traditional womanhood. She has eight million followers, six children, a handsome cowboy husband, a farmhouse that appears to embody rustic authenticity, and an Instagram feed full of homemade jam, wholesome meals, beautiful children, and carefully staged domestic labor.
“Natalie’s online life depends on the very modernity she claims to reject. She wants sourdough without the endless labor. She wants submissive femininity without the legal and economic vulnerability that has historically kept women dependent on men.”
Erin Skinner Smith
The joke is that none of it is what it appears to be. The farmhouse is supported by nannies, farmhands, producers, and hidden industrial appliances. The “effortless” life is an elaborate production. The authenticity is a brand.
When Natalie wakes up in 1855, the woman who has made millions romanticizing the past has to actually live there. The kitchen is no longer a photogenic backdrop for a sponsored recipe, but a place warmed by a sputtering fire that must be stoked (Burke spends a lot of page-time describing the brutalities of chopping, hauling, and stacking firewood). The children are no longer adorable accessories, but dirty, difficult, and strange. Chores are no longer aesthetic rituals, but actual work.
This is where Yesteryear most effectively eviscerates tradwife culture. It understands that the movement’s central deception is not necessarily that women want to cook, garden, raise children, or stay home. The deception is the insistence that these choices exist outside systems of labor, money, technology, and power. The lie is that modern women can choose a traditional life without acknowledging that choice is made possible by the feminists who came before them.
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Natalie’s online life depends on the very modernity she claims to reject. She wants sourdough without the endless labor. She wants submissive femininity without the legal and economic vulnerability that has historically kept women dependent on men.
Yesteryear asks what happens when children stop being symbols and become actual people with needs, resentment, illnesses, messes, and opinions.
The gap between the children Natalie displays and the children she comes to know is one of the novel’s darkest indictments of influencer culture. It seems Natalie likes the idea of children more than her actual kids themselves. The book asks real questions about the morality of turning motherhood into content. Not only is Natalie miserable, but we get the sense the kids will all grow up needing lots of therapy.
Natalie’s tragedy is that she has never permitted herself to distinguish between a real life and an image of one. She has mistaken the performance for reality. And once the filters disappear, the fantasy looks a lot like history. It’s hard, exhausting, and dangerous.
