I think I hate Natalie. OK. Hate is a strong word. I don’t like Natalie one bit, and don’t let me get started with Caleb, either. This book left me angry. I finished it on Friday. It is Sunday, and I am still fuming.
Natalie, the protagonist in Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, is raised in a conservative Christian home. She drops out of Harvard after marrying Caleb and becoming pregnant with their first child at 20.
From the get-go, she feels better than other people because she doesn’t behave like the other ‘modern girls’ who don’t know what they are doing. When she bumps into her university roommate, Reena, she makes sure Reena knows she has won by being married.
But Natalie realises that her husband is neither as smart as she had hoped nor as ambitious. ‘I’d mistaken a man’s wealth for his intellect,’ she thinks after the birth of their first child, Clementine.
She has to find something that will interest her husband enough to get him working. Her father-in-law, Doug, gives her money to start a farm on one condition: to have more babies with his son. This is where the messiness starts, in my opinion.
Living on a 500-acre farm, Natalie wants to live like the women in the pioneer days. Grow her own food. Cook everything from scratch. And share her daily life on the internet as a ‘tradwife’ (traditional wife). If you are chronically online, you might have some influencers in mind who do exactly what Natalie does.
The author makes us question what we assume to be the reality of these tradwife influencers’ lives. I started questioning some of the influencers I follow online. Of course I know part of it is curation. I do that too, curate my content, but now I wonder if any of it is true at all. To live such a life, you need money and a lot of workers. Natalie intentionally leaves that aspect out of the picture.
Things are not looking good at the Yesteryear ranch. Something happens that makes it impossible for Natalie to continue living her pretend life. One day, she wakes up in 1855, where she has to live the actual life she has been pretending to live for years. Will she like it now that her wish to turn her farm into a time machine has come true?
The book points to how women, especially Christian women, are expected to behave in a marriage. Raise your children, serve your husband and do it with a wide smile on your face. You are never meant to say how hard it is. You need to endure as a woman, a Christian woman.
‘It is lonely, you know. Housework. But it felt a bit less lonely when I pretended I had a little audience sitting on the couch with me,’ Natalie’s mother tells her when she asks how she managed the housework with a smile.
From then on, Natalie goes through life believing there is always someone watching.
In both timelines, Natalie tries to show that she is a good Christian wife to Caleb. Perhaps for many women, these expectations haven’t really changed, and that is worrying. Natalie has internalised what it means to be a good Christian woman. In her eyes, any woman who lives differently is angry and jealous of her marriage and children.
Natalie is aware of how mean and angry she is. Yet she has mastered the art of performing to the point where she can’t tell which Natalie is operating: the online or the offline Natalie. She herself is the angry, jealous woman she imagines those other women to be. She still compares her university roommate’s life to her own while believing she chose a better life.
She is angry that her eldest daughter doesn’t want to be part of her online life, yet continues to include her. Building an online image of a perfect family comes at the expense of her children’s safety and privacy. How can children freely consent to being photographed and posted online when they are dependent on you? Have our laws caught up with the changing world?
In this satire, Burke raises many themes, but some get little room to develop. I wanted more exploration of the contradictions between what Natalie’s mother teaches her daughters about marriage and her own choices. The same goes for how the manosphere affects Caleb’s beliefs and marriage. Even when Caleb cheats and abuses his wife, he faces few consequences. It is a man’s world.
I think my dislike of both characters was the author’s intention, and she succeeded. This anger made me look at them with a critical eye. But throughout the book I was rooting for the children because they never chose that life to begin with.