I mentioned to my colleagues that I had just finished reading Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear and one of them asked whether I’d liked it because it was ‘divisive.’
And I can see it. The book follows Natalie, Caleb and their children as they farm in the backwoods of Idaho in the 2020s. (It’s tempting to put caveats around much of that sentence: the farm was purchased at great expense by Caleb’s father, Natalie and Caleb do not of the farming – this work is outsourced to Mexican labourers, it may be the backwoods but for the adults, at least, there is plenty of contact with the wider world). Natalie is a Tradwife – a “traditional wife,” that is one most interested in exercising ‘traditional female values and behaviours’ (here I can’t resist the scare quotes) of submission and cornbread imagined to exist in earlier times in a Good Christian Household (TM).
In the first chapters I thought ‘there is not enough plot here to sustain a whole novel,’ but the introduction of a parallel timeline of the 1850s when Natalie wakes up in the same house, but it is not her house, with the same husband who is not her husband, same children who are not her children. And so in back and forth chapters we time travel with Natalie as she tries to figure out how she’s in this time period (and how to get out of it?)(I suppose there’s something of a ‘mystery’ in this plot structure, too. Another reader might be more captivated by trying to figure out the mechanics – is it time travel? kidnapping? – but for this reader I accepted two timelines and moved on) with the present day chapters actually the very recent past as the reader comes to understand how Natalie’s tradwife life operated.
Operated is a deliberate word choice as the book is interest in the economics of influencers with Natalie sustaining the business of the farm by live broadcasting through photos and reels all of her tradwife activities from posed scenes of maternal bliss with her children through to making soap and biscuits. There’s one scene where she attends a webinar on how to make money as an influencer that is telling in that the entire audience are women looking to make money from home (one cannot help but see the echos of the multi-level marketing schemes of tupperwear and makeup); and, as Natalie hides pockets of her influencer money away for herself, we are reminded of the economic dependence tradwives, or wives, often have on their male counterparts and the long, long, long history of women trying to find ways to make money for themselves while also maintaining home and hearth.
That is, of course, the crux of the book: how do women do it all? The book’s assessment – like most of feminist theory – is they cannot. And while most feminist theory has moved beyond assigning this pressure to maintain ideals of femininity, or fulfilling careers amid expert parenting, to individual women and instead considers structural conditions (up to and including The! Patriarchy!) this book does very little to imagine anything beyond specific Men Who Are Mean or Stupid and Natalie, individual woman up against the world.
Oh and up against other women who are all positioned as against her (again another feminist reading might be curious why the villains in the novel are all women tearing down women, here imaginatively-not-so-imaginatively called the “Angry Women,” but also specific characters – the daughter, the domestic helper, the college roommate, villains one and all.
And so here’s where I suppose the book is divisive. It’s not a particularly nuanced take on being a woman in the world, despite having enormous thematic, formal (as in the structure), and character-driven attention to questions of maternity and femininity in its social, political, economic, religious and personal deployment. You could for sure host many book club or undergraduate seminars on different scenes of the book and ask questions about how women are represented, how women represent themselves, nevermind debating the ending.
But for me (and this may be its own divisive claim) I didn’t particularly care if the book was on the ‘right’ side of the political debate about independent women or if it did enough to expose the vacuous heart of social media (as if we didn’t know) or the hypocrisy of Good Christian Women (as if we didn’t know). It was enjoyable to read – I read the entire thing in a weekend, a rarity these days – it gave me the illusion I was thinking about bigger questions than what to make for lunch – a rarity these days.
So if nothing else, if you find yourself a woman in a book club (and of course you do, because you’re a woman in the world and you need a book club even if you, like me, are in a book club that does not read a book but instead holds one another through it all because *spoiler: this was never meant to be a solo trip) then go, go, get Yesteryear and let me know all the ways I’ve fallen short in writing this review. (I’d expect nothing less from Angry Women tearing down Smart Women etc.)
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