In Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear, a modern day tradwife influencer shares her picturesque farm life with 8 million followers. Then one day, she wakes up in the 1800s and has to do it all for real. No running water, no electricity and no way out.
The term tradwife refers to a particular subset of influencers on TikTok and Instagram who embody the role of “traditional wife” for their audiences, devoting themselves to homemaking and a traditional lifestyle.
“This idea of a woman who prioritizes her children, prioritizes her marriage, who is subservient in many ways, has become kind of a fixation in our politics and in our culture,” said Burke on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach.
“So I think that as a result, a lot of accounts that already were kind of emulating this type of ideal began to gain more traction than they maybe would have during another time period.”
Yesteryear’s main character, Natalie Heller Mills, is one of them, and the novel is a twisty, compelling look at what the tradwife trend tells us about fame, tradition and womanhood.
An American author, Burke joined Roach to talk about her surprising tradwife protagonist, performing femininity and the Anne Hathaway film adaptation in the works.
There are people who consider the term tradwife derogatory and demeaning to those women who get described with it, but there’s also this feminist lens that people sometimes apply to tradwives. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that discourse is and what your engagement with it was when you started talking about tradwives?
I think that this whole conversation sits at the intersection of every single pressure point that people feel as it pertains to gender studies and also as it pertains to womanhood. So the idea that this vision of womanhood is somehow feminist, gets into this choice feminism idea that any decision a woman makes is feminist by virtue of the fact that she’s making it, which I think is a flawed perception of feminism.
But I would also say I think that there’s this angle that these women are often breadwinners if they are influencers. Tradwives are often just people living their lives and in subservient roles, and so they might not necessarily have any leverage, but if you’re performing this online, then you’re monetizing it, usually. If you do that well, then you can make a lot of money. And so a lot of these women who are performing this ideal online are making a lot of money, and a lot of people perceive that as a form of power.
I want to ask about your protagonist in more detail, Natalie Heller Mills. She’s an interesting woman. How would you describe her as her creator?
It’s funny because I know that I did create Natalie, but she really feels like something that was fully formed and I just found her. Natalie is deeply ambitious. She’s very intelligent. She is acidic. She’s very bigoted. She has a very, very fundamentalist perception of the world.
She has a very specific moral framework of what is right and what is wrong. She has a very, very high expectation for herself and for others around her, but very low emotional intelligence.
So she has a very hard time understanding what other people are thinking, what they want and she often misunderstands that, usually to kind of a disastrous degree. I think that that also applies to her own relationship with herself. She has a hard time understanding herself.
In the acknowledgements of this book, you thank Anne Hathaway, the actress, for being instrumental in bringing Natalie to life. What was her role in bringing Natalie to the page?
When I wrote Yesteryear as a first draft, the whole story was there, but it was kind of a skeleton draft. It was dialogue and plot. I was really just beginning to do the work of thinking about these greater themes of performance of surveillance, of what it means to be known, of what it means to be a woman. I was lucky enough, when I went through both my book auction and my film auction, to be talking to a number of unbelievably talented and brilliant artists. I spent essentially a month in these conversations just workshopping my ideas.
I ended up obviously selling the rights to Anne Hathaway and her team and the lovely film folks over at Amazon. The reason I did that was because of the conversations I had with them. Anne is brilliant. I’ve joked before that if she wasn’t an actress, I feel like she would be a rocket scientist.
It was me figuring out the monster that I had created and then hearing it back to me and trying to understand what it was I was dealing with.– Caro Claire Burke
We had just a number of conversations that helped me just be like, “Yeah, that works for Natalie.” Her vision for Natalie was so compelling to me. I was talking about it at a time when I had a year and a half ahead of me to really write the book into what you’re reading now. So those conversations with her and with the editors I ended up choosing in the U.S. and the U.K. were huge for me. It was me figuring out the monster that I had created and then hearing it back to me and trying to understand what it was I was dealing with.
The other question I have about the acknowledgements is that at the very end, there’s this line where you say that if you have a daughter, you wrote the ending of the book with her in mind. Why did you want to have this part of the acknowledgement imagining a future daughter perhaps reading this work?
This book is about womanhood, and it’s about how those lessons of womanhood are taught through generations. Natalie learns about what it means to be a woman from her mother, and then she passes on lessons to her children.
There’s so much that makes you feel like you’re moving backwards. So much of the catharsis of writing this book was pushing that to the extreme of being like, “All right, let’s go backwards then; let’s do it in every sense of the word.”
When I think about the novel and also how I think about my own life, I find a lot of comfort with the idea of future generations of women taking the baton and carrying it forward and just thinking about my own life in that way.
I find a lot of comfort with the idea of future generations of women taking the baton and carrying it forward.– Caro Claire Burke
Natalie talks about life as a baton pass. While I don’t agree with the way she squares that, I do think about politics and culture as a baton pass.
So the idea of not feeling obliged to solve it single-handedly, but of being like, “All right, I’m going to do everything I can and then I’m going to pass the baton forward,” was something that helped me write to the end of the book. And it was something — it is something — that gives me a lot of comfort in a time period that I feel like there is a lot to be cynical about.
