“Motherhood is Its Own Kind of Curation”: A Review of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear
Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, scrutinizes and satirizes the phenomenon of the tradwife influencer—a married woman who shares her chosen traditional wife lifestyle online. The novel’s popularity is attributed to its fantastic premise: what happens when a tradwife is transported to 1855 and actually has to live the life that she performs online? While the polarizing ending has divided readers who disagree on the extent to which the novel delivers on this premise, Burke effectively delivers a scathing critique of the notion of motherhood as mere performance.
The novel opens with a depiction of motherhood that will seem unrelatable to most readers: Natalie Heller Mills wakes to the sound of someone else taking care of her five children. As she listens to the rhythm orchestrated by invisible nannies, pregnant Natalie’s inner monologue immediately establishes her satisfaction with her own immaculate performance of faithful motherhood: “I was born to be a mother. I never felt more connected with Him than when I was tasked with carrying one of His creations.” The disparity between Natalie’s smug satisfaction with her curated-for-Instagram performance of motherhood and her actual disconnect from her children invites readers to consider the extent of her self-awareness (which is, of course, complicated by her fabulously unreliable narration).
Despite her lack of interest in actual mothering, Natalie has as many children as physically possible, even self-inseminating with a turkey baster as needed. As her Instagram account gains popularity and she showcases herself as the ideal mother, Natalie hires more nannies, rarely spending time with her children unless they’re acting as props during filming. Her five (going on six!) children are not just necessary props to dominate the algorithm, but also literal by-products of a deal with the devil—her father-in-law is a conservative politician who has loaned her money to buy their farm, under the condition that she immediately bear more children with her hapless husband.
Natalie is abruptly jolted from her state of self-satisfaction by the realization that her eldest daughter has grown tired of her role as a subservient prop. Inconveniently intelligent Clementine “had turned twelve over the summer and promptly stopped calling me Mama a few days after. It made my eyes twitch each time I heard her say Mom; I hated the word. It was such an ugly sound, so short and masculine.” Paranoid Natalie suspects that Clementine has gained access to Instagram, since she refuses to submit to Natalie’s filming demands. Unlike Natalie’s hopelessly stupid husband Caleb, Clementine poses a genuine threat to Natalie’s empire.
Natalie goes to sleep determined to solve the Clementine problem and wakes up in 1855, now forced to live the actual version of the curated experience that she shares with her followers. As she explores her new 1855 life (which appears to take place in a simulacrum of her contemporary farm), she seeks possible explanations. Did she have a breakdown? Has she actually time traveled? Did she develop amnesia after agreeing to be on a reality show? Her 1855 husband looks like Caleb, and her 1855 children look similar to her children—but are they her children? Natalie’s search for the truth is complicated by her attempts to explore her strange new home, where she cannot escape the feeling that she’s being surveilled.
The rest of the novel jumps between Natalie’s 1855 life and her origin story: growing up in an insulated Idaho town, watching her mom perform widowhood to escape the stigma of being abandoned by her husband, scornfully looking down on anyone who’s not as intelligent as she is, meeting her husband Caleb at Harvard, leaving before graduation so that she can fulfill Caleb’s family’s dream of immediately marrying and producing children. Unsurprisingly, motherhood is extremely difficult for unmaternal Natalie to navigate. Natalie is at her most relatable when she finds herself in the throes of postpartum depression. Burke’s extremely realistic depiction of this time offers a sobering moment of the narrative: “I was not ready to be a mother. I felt this certainty in the deepest parts of my body, and so it seemed inevitable that He would intervene before this mistake of parenthood developed further.” The nonlinear structure of the novel allows readers to form their own opinions of Natalie and her machinations before seeing her at her most sympathetic.
While 20-year-old Natalie views Caleb as a suitable partner during their short period of dating, the birth of their first child invites a rude awakening about his inadequacy. New father Caleb serves as comic relief and a source of further exasperation. Confused as to why his newly postpartum wife hasn’t lost her lingering 16 pounds, Caleb buys her running shoes and a baby carrier: “This was the moment I realized my husband was an actual, honest-to-God idiot: when he suggested with all the sincerity in the world that I might like to bring our two-week-old newborn with me on a jog.” While much of the narrative is driven by the mystery of Caleb—is he harmlessly stupid, or actually malicious?—the gifting of the jogging accessories represents a key moment of Natalie’s arc. Natalie decides that motherhood is just another space for her to prove her superiority to her husband, and his cluelessness is easy fodder for her machinations. However, his father’s financial control over her means Caleb will always have the upper hand: “An impossible thing to imagine, what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: his wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had. Even the sweetest, stupidest man can grow cruel and cunning when he learns a thing like that.” Natalie encounters the same conundrum as any woman who willingly carries water for patriarchy—the systems that she gleefully exploits to promote herself inevitably lead to her downfall.
Yesteryear sharply satirizes the tradwife phenomenon and the conservative men who encourage “harnessing the power of the Divine Christian Feminine to drive sales online.” Despite their lack of experience, Natalie and Caleb decide to buy a farm, assuming it will be a pleasant diversion that fits into the aesthetic of an aspiring political dynasty. Natalie’s children are also convenient props for the campaigns of her Christian nationalist father-in-law, with whom she has a mutually symbiotic relationship; her Instagram reaffirms his family’s commitment to patriarchy and his inflammatory rhetoric boosts her follower count. She has so little interest in her children that she allows her manosphere-controlled husband to choose their homeschooling curriculum, yet she eagerly procreates for the brand, viewing labor as just another opportunity for commodification: “Another contraction rolled through me. What did the Bible say on childbirth? Something about women needing to suffer. Something about earning your pain. ‘Get the camera,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘Film it.’”
Readers of this much-buzzed-about book passionately debate its virtues in the same platforms that Natalie exploits. Yesteryear’s biting satire is enabled by Natalie’s blatant unreliability. She has a successful, exploitative platform through which she promotes her tradwife brand, yet she has limited knowledge of conventional elements of tradwifery (for instance, the difference between sewing and knitting needles). Burke uses the first scene of Natalie waking to the sound of nannies caregiving to cleverly invoke the paradox of increasingly unrelatable influencers building a brand based on relatability, and she uses similar techniques to toy with the notion of an unreliable narrator. While some readers maintain that the twist does not quite satisfy the expectations established by the tantalizing premise—which is, arguably, due more to contemporary marketing conventions than to Burke’s writing—other readers find fault in the novel’s resolution. No matter your opinion on Natalie, Yesteryear is a crucial text to consider in any conversation confronting the distinctions between likability, relatability, and reliability.
Yesteryear is a fast-paced, thought-provoking examination of the intersection of motherhood and digital culture. Critically inspecting the impact of mommy influencers allows us to consider how twenty-first-century motherhood can be reduced to snapshots designed to appease the algorithm. Why do tradwife mommy influencers hold so much capital on social media, and how do they sell an aesthetically pleasing version of motherhood? What do we gain from following someone whose life appears perfect, and what do we lose when we compare our lowest moments to her highlights? If we agree with Natalie’s sentiment that “motherhood is its own kind of curation,” how can we be responsible curators as we contribute to others’ archives?