A woman in hand-stitched clothing says a morning prayer while her husband kneels on the barn floor, milking a cow. There’s a ring light on the door: higher production quality is a key to virality. This juxtaposition isn’t a product of time travel, but of an internet phenomenon: women who call themselves “tradwives.”
Building virality
The portmanteau “tradwife” began gaining traction online in the early 2020s. Women identify with the label as a representation of their commitment to traditional values, namely delicate domestic submission. The tradwife lifestyle encourages strict gender boundaries, akin to the 1800s idea of “separate spheres.” While tradwife influencers are the face of their family’s online presence, they practice deliberate capitulation to their husband’s total authority over the home.
Influencers such as Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith have become synonymous with the tradwife world, whether they appreciate the label or not — Smith publicly rejected the label on the podcast Call Her Daddy, and Neeleman seems to express hesitance about it as well. But however they feel about the term “tradwife,” Neeleman, Smith, and their contemporaries are undoubtedly the face of the movement. Producing content focused around organic home-cooking, farm life, and motherhood, Neeleman has upwards of 10 million followers, and Smith almost 5 million; tradwife content is a viral sensation. Perhaps it was this virality that introduced author Caro Claire Burke to the world of tradwives, and drove her to write Yesteryear, her debut novel.
Yesteryear follows a (fictional) tradwife influencer who somehow wakes up in the 1850s, and is forced to live the historical reality she glamorizes on her social platforms. A biting and intriguing premise: Amazon MGM Studios certainly thought so, as they optioned the film rights to the novel two years before it was even published. Yesteryear, with its monetary faith from Amazon and the actress Anne Hathway, was a designated sensation before it even hit the shelves.
The intense conversation and attention surrounding tradwives seem to come from two camps: one side that believes these women are pioneering a valiant return to traditional American-Christian values, and another that abhors the movement as a complete regression of feminism that women are somehow choosing. But whether netizens are watching with love or disgust, they are undeniably watching. And now, Burke’s novel has introduced a whole new center of discourse.
The perfect surface
I came across Yesteryear the same way many readers seem to: by having the novel relentlessly inhabit my social media feeds. I’ve known of influencers like Neeleman and Smith for a while, but I’m not particularly interested in the brand of femininity they’re marketing. And while I think the discourse surrounding tradwives brings up interesting questions about modern American feminism, it’s also plagued by some of the worst opinions you’ll ever read, making it genuinely exhausting to parse through. But I needed a read, and Yesteryear does have a great elevator pitch, so I gave it a shot.
From the first chapter of Yesteryear, I was already impressed that the novel is Burke’s debut. It’s no wonder the author has her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars; she has an incredible command of voice in the first person, narrating as her main character, Natalie Heller Mills. Although I have qualms with the novel, there’s much praise that Burke deserves as well.
The first half of Yesteryear is undeniably its strongest section. Mills is a nasty, grating voice, and her inner monologue is just incredibly diabolical, and yet, so hilarious and grabbing. Although Mills is quickly identified as subservient to her husband, her thoughts strike brutally with clear intelligence and ambition; her character is a study in dissonance. Raised in a hyper-Catholic home and community, Mills presents a perfect surface of traditional values, but underneath she detests her idiotic husband, manages her ambitious social presence with cunning manipulation, and couldn’t care less about her hoards of children. Burke has created an intriguing question: What happens when a woman’s pathology is too ambitious (and maybe too sociopathic) for the role she has been groomed to play? Mills is great at performing the devout, unambitious wife, but absolutely awful at curtailing her mind to fit within those boundaries.
The great success of Mills’ narration comes from the pathological destruction she mentally wages on the women who hate her tradwife social media presence. Together, Mills and her husband have deemed them the “angry women,” who resent their own sad lives in the rat-race of capitalism, and secretly envy that Mills doesn’t have to “carry the burden” of aligning with feminist values. Mills describes herself as garnering their attention by being utterly perfect, thus making her all the more satisfying to pick apart. Burke has woven an interesting point about the tradwife trend into Mills’ psychology: the fact that it often appears reactionary to the so-called girl-boss feminism of the mid-2010s. By depicting how these movements clash, Burke opens questions about how contemporary white feminism often cuts off its own legs by re-defining the image of an “ideal woman,” thus playing back into rigid gender roles.
The flaws underneath
Yesteryear, despite its many successes and intrigues, is not a perfect novel. Much of what made the novel great in the first half is overshadowed or discarded by the end — many readers suspect that the weaker second half is a product of the pressure placed on Burke by Amazon MGM’s early investment in the novel. I think that the novel’s marketing also worked against its reception, namely, the choice to market the novel as a biting satire.
Yesteryear‘s main contradiction, to me, is the novel’s grasp on reality. When I view Mills as a psychological study in the clash of ambition and subservience, she often reads as realistic. But in the latter half of the novel, the story becomes so ungrounded that we lose our grip on Mills as a character, in equal time as she loses her own relative sanity. The result is a novel too insane to be a realistic analysis, and too grounded to fully work as satire. Just as Mills is about to become a coherent character (albeit a villain), she’s shattered into fragments. Instead of unraveling Mills’ psychology, the novel sort of just unravels, and we lose what could have been a subversive depiction of the inherent awfulness (both self-driven and societally-imposed) of subservient womanhood. Yesteryear could have been a great analysis of how white women who financially benefit from creating alt-right content perpetuate systems of oppression, including their own. But it failed to crawl out of its own self-contained world, and reach for the bigger picture.
Imperfect criticism
Yesteryear currently has 1,026,395 ratings on Goodreads, and 118,060 active readers; the novel is not going anywhere. And while it may have a place in conversations around white feminism and the tradwife world, it doesn’t hold its own among satirical feminist works. I appreciate the novel much more as a snappy psychological romp into the mind of an irredeemable character, much like the fourth Hunger Games novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, another internet darling. In the world of unreliable and nasty narrators, we’re sorely missing evil women. How many more Patrick Batemans or Humbert Humberts are we going to get before a few more Amy Dunnes? Some of the criticism on Yesteryear thus falls flat to me; if we all really hate nefarious protagonists, why did everyone flock to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey adaptation this summer?
Yesteryear is worth the read if you take it for what is it, not what it could have been — especially as people repeatedly try to pitch it as revolutionary. I know I’ll certainly pick up Burke’s sophomore novel, but I’m not sure I’ll be seeing the Amazon film adaptation. With so much discourse surrounding the story, it’s always fun to see what your own reaction will be; clearly Burke’s debut is thought-provoking, however controversial.