One of the year’s bestselling books contains a pivotal sex scene in which a time-traveling tradwife finds her impotent husband transformed into a domineering patriarch. She is terrified and unwilling and, wouldn’t you know it, satisfied for the first time in her life. In Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke presents antifeminist gender norms for our condemnation and titillation. You could say she pioneers the genre of tradsploitation. Our tradwife gets what she asked for, good and hard. She must pay for her betrayal of her sex, and of the future. The future, of course, is female.
The plot turns on a nifty conceit. Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer, a “good Christian woman” who runs a nostalgic hobby farm in Idaho with her husband, the scion of a political dynasty. The aesthetic is prairie dresses and sourdough starter. They have chickens and cows and scads of kids. A gigantic pantry hides the modern conveniences. Natalie’s whole life is a performance—for her TikTok, for herself. She despises her husband, resents her kids, and urges herself, “Don’t forget to smile!” One day she wakes up on the same farm but apparently in 1855, and the past she cosplayed gets real.
Yesteryear is being hailed as a sharp satire of the hypocrisies of tradwives, the manosphere, and Christian nationalism. But it’s hard to square the critics’ sense of cathartic critique with the staleness of the ironies. Did you know that tradwife influencers are also businesswomen? That social-media accounts can have producers behind the scenes? That wealthy families employ nannies? That the most redpilled men are the biggest losers? That sometimes, within a Christian marriage, the woman wears the pants?
Burke regards this last revelation as especially significant. In their twenty-first-century guises, Natalie is the stern ambitious spouse, her husband Caleb the nurturer. “I should’ve been born a man,” Natalie concludes in exasperation. The shock of her Lady Macbeth moment is lessened by the fact that Natalie isn’t a terribly persuasive portrait of a woman. The Guardian is right to object to the vagueness of her physical motherhood. The reader is told that breastfeeding is a drag, but “there is no latch, no letdown, no description of any kind.” Instead, there’s this:
Sleep, breastfeed.
Breastfeed, sleep.
Sleep, sleep, sleep.
Breastfeed. Cry.
Breastfeed. Sleep.
Kill yourself.
The stereotyped nature of Natalie’s physical life is a problem for Yesteryear’s polemic, which is staked on the idea that trad women merely pretend to be fulfilled by motherhood: “It’s the long, golden string of insincerity,” Burke writes. “Your mother lies to you, and then you lie to your children, and then your children lie to their children, and then you are an old woman, looking back at your life, lying to yourself.”
The charge of conspiracy would be more compelling if Burke demonstrated some understanding of what it’s actually like to have kids, especially several kids. When the first child arrives, much is made of the fact that Natalie’s “softest and most private patch of skin [tears] a full inch.” This outrage is compounded when, naturally, she goes for a run and the stitches rip. It’s the kind of calamity a childless writer might seize on to evoke the process of (in Shulamith Firestone’s lively phrase) “shitting a pumpkin.” Mundane realities such as pelvic floor weakness, a far more serious curse upon mothers of multiple children, never enter Natalie’s list of physical complaints, even as her roster of children lengthens.
“Natalie exists to get slapped around.”
The descriptions of Natalie’s pain are more consistent with revenge fantasy than with social critique. In 1855, Natalie exists to get slapped around. Caleb the patriarch gives her a black eye and a blackout. While attempting to flee her abusive homestead, she steps in an animal trap and sustains a deep wound to an ankle. The wound is sewn up gruesomely by her young daughter. While the foot is still hanging on by a thread and she is hoping again to escape, Natalie walks far from the farmhouse with no support but a cane—and no consequences to her recovery or the stitches. Trauma to Natalie’s body is significant, except when it gets in the way of the plot. It is unclear how readers are to take Natalie’s body seriously when the author doesn’t.
Something else Burke doesn’t take seriously is Natalie’s religion. Natalie’s classmates at twenty-first-century Harvard casually call her Amish, Baptist, evangelical, Catholic—a running joke that makes them sound shallow and dismissive, even as it contains Burke’s admission that she has kept an important character trait out of focus. At her childhood church, grape juice was distributed at communion, and yet wine was served at the Christmas Eve church mixer. Her Romneyesque father-in-law launches an election campaign in Salt Lake City, serves alcohol at his son’s wedding, and drinks pinot grigio in his kitchen. In a moment of distress, the generally low-church Natalie recites the verbal formula for the Sign of the Cross. When she considers having an abortion, she imagines her family’s shock: “How modern of me.” Yes: The problem patriarchal Christians have with abortion, a practice they have condemned since Apostolic times, is its modernity.
Burke has explained to The New York Times that Natalie might be any kind of Christian, since “fundamentalism” exists in so many churches. But as written, Natalie is no kind of Christian at all, since the details of her faith are not reconcilable. Burke says the inconsistency is consistent with the lack of “intelligence … Natalie has about her own religion.” But what sense does that make? Natalie is intensely self-regarding as well as very “clever.” Her “good Christian woman” identity is central to her self-conception. Does she really have no clear idea what sort of Christian she is? “A specific thread of Christianity would really just be more distracting,” Burke says, as though making the specific signify beyond itself were not the task of an artist. The real consideration is surely coalitional: You can see in Natalie’s faith whatever Christian tradition you most despise, or all of them if your distaste is ecumenical.
About Natalie’s cleverness. The clearest proof of it is that she was called up by Harvard from the hinterlands—though a Harvard strangely located in Boston rather than Cambridge, and populated by designer-obsessed coeds who would be more at home in a state-school sorority. The prose that renders Natalie’s thoughts does not invite the attribution of cleverness. But she is subject to her creator’s limits. Burke can’t write, at least not in English. When Natalie rejects minimalism, she defines it as “a house absent of stuff.” She worries that her hopeful visions “sniffed of greed.” She lies in bed, “shoring up energy.” During that rapey sex scene, “the whites of [her] eyes travel around the room.” Elsewhere, a nanny is described as “looking up at us with a cool, unblinking stare, like a cat blinking lazily out from their sunlit perch.” Unblinking, like a cat blinking.
In the novel’s most widely quoted line, Natalie declares herself “the manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies.” Three clichés—“manic pixie dream girl,” “American dream,” “girl of our dreams”—are synthesized here. To what end? Look closely and you’ll find that Natalie is calling herself the American dream girl of America’s dreams.
Reviews in major publications contain much approbation of Burke’s “biting prose.” As the Granta scandal reminds us, our literary tastemakers either don’t know bad prose when they see it, or don’t have anything against it. The politics are what matter. This novel sniffs of fear. Its plot presumes that traditional styles of femininity lack contemporary validity, and yet the very fact that tradwives are on-trend refutes the notion that they represent anything so simple as a return to the past. Yesteryear and its overwarm reception bespeak a knowledge that progressivism is losing the future. In the book’s rather hysterical conclusion, Natalie’s grown daughters rhapsodize about “this future you prayed we would never get the chance to see”: “The people were so much nicer. The cities were so much cleaner.” (Been to New York lately?) The girls have converted from patriarchal to liberal Christianity, musing that “church might just be another word for people.” This is a retro rhetoric for a quaint future, a vision more Boomer than Zoomer.
“The fertile will inherit the earth.”
Turning from fiction to social science, the math is obvious: The fertile will inherit the earth. To the extent that “fundamentalism” correlates with high fertility, the future is fundamentalist. More than that, the ethos of progressivism has become backward-looking. Tight control of reproduction, once an optimistic practice, now correlates with social and environmental pessimism. High fertility, a curse in 1855, is a choice in this era of IUDs and climate doomerism—a choice that presumes a future worth living in.
Confidence is charismatic. Fertility is a flex, and not just for homeschooling, homesteading Christians. In America’s cities, the numbers of children are dropping fast, due to suburbanization and falling birthrates; the only exceptions are the wealthiest neighborhoods. In those precincts, tradwife-level fertility rates are a form of conspicuous consumption, signalling a change in what the professional class thinks it means to have it all. Tradwives are a trend, and a threat, because women who have seen the future can look at a photo of a big family on a windswept hill and say, “I want that.”