Written by Viktoria
Yesteryear is truly a mind-bending book.
A warped spiral into the twisted inner workings of a mind being ripped apart by its own judgment and anger, a magma of hate that occasionally erupts after a long, torturous suppression. What it means to be good and kind and patient, to push the boundaries of your own self into the perfect mould, only to become your own prisoner, bruised and smiling. What it means to pursue a belief with your eyes wide open yet blind, to dig your nails into rock as you claw upwards, carrying the weight of your husband and children, the conscience, the Inheritance, all clinging to your skirts.
While Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel has sparked debate and mixed reviews on Substack, it is certainly an excellent piece of writing.
The main character, Natalie, is a tradwife influencer, a ‘flawless Christian woman’, ‘the manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies’. Natalie Heller Mills is ‘perfect at being alive’. She has five children and is pregnant with her sixth. She spends her days baking sourdough bread and looking out the window to glance at her children playing as the sun falls onto her face just so. She serves God and her husband Caleb, and of course, broadcasts it all to the thousands of Angry Women online. The Angry Women, exemplified by some ‘hateful witch in Manhattan’, who is sitting in a cubicle ‘slouched before a beam of artificial light’, ‘eating some tasteless protein bar, so filled with chemicals it could survive a nuclear holocaust’.
Natalie is under a constant spotlight, and someone is always watching her, be it the Angry Women, or God, or her own conscience, which I would argue are all manifestations of her own self-surveillance. Natalie always aims to be Online Natalie, the woman who is ‘designed to be good at being alive’. Online Natalie serves the Lord, pleases her husband and nurtures her children with ease and grace, and eventually becomes the corset, the laces of which Natalie pulls tighter and tighter, breaking her own ribs and pushing the last breath from her lungs as they crumple under the pressure.
What Burke is describing, I kept thinking as I read, has a name.
“A woman must continually watch herself. […] She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”
John Berger, Way of Seeing
Natalie elevates the role of surveyor to the role of censor, judge and punisher throughout the novel, and her benign Online Natalie personality becomes the focal point of her self-abuse and the neglect towards her children. Natalie builds her own Panopticon and becomes her own panoptical male connoisseur, chaining herself in a prison of constant surveillance.
The structure of the Panopticon entails a tower with wide windows in the center that opens onto the inner side of the ring, and each cell having two windows which face the tower. “All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower” (Foucault 1979, 200). As a result, each inmate is permanently visible to the supervisor in the tower, and “eventually becomes to himself his own jailer”. Sandra Lee Bartky argues in Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power:
“The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”
To be feminine in the eyes of society is to act feminine, and to conform to the ever-evolving standards of femininity. In the modern patriarchy, women are nurtured into “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1979, 201). For Natalie, an American woman married to an American man of a wealthy, Christian, white background, the standard becomes a wholesome, traditional wife. Becoming the poster wife of the Manosphere forums, a walking advertisement of ‘Eating local, working the land, and spreading good Christian values’, which she is then able to monetize through propagating such a lifestyle online, drives Natalie into a metamorphosis.
Natalie is an unreliable narrator. Her inner monologue involves frequent imagination of the Angry Women, embodied by her university roommate Reena, or high school classmate Vanessa, supposedly miserable and lonely, finding catharsis in leaving hateful comments online. Natalie, in her magnanimous and sanctimonious manner, is happy to be of service, of course: ‘I was a shark, and they were five million tiny fish, nipping at the nutrients along my belly.’
Natalie’s judgments are filtered through narcissism and projection. While she pities (and secretly feeds on) the imagined misery of the Angry Women, her own domestic ‘perfection’ is propped up by the very modern conveniences and paid labor she publicly disavows: nannies, producers, and staff who enable the illusion she sells.
Natalie basks in the aggression of the Angry Women, their supposed hatefulness and misery, certainly because as a good Christian woman, she will turn the other cheek and forgive. She pities them — Reena and her friends, Vanessa, all of the Angry Women. She feels pity for Vanessa, all the ‘liberated’ women who ‘compromised every ounce of themselves in the name of building a life for themselves that they didn’t enjoy’. Because certainly the Angry Woman, with her long hours at the office, the packed commute to her dark apartment where she will be disrespected by her one child and unmanly husband, is unhappy. And naturally, all these Angry Women spend their days furiously typing out comments under Natalie’s posts showcasing her barn, her body (’the skirt hanging loose around my hips was the very same one I’d worn in school a decade earlier’), her husband and children, because there is nothing better for them to do. However, that is not quite true, is it? Natalie the unreliable narrator certainly feels that it is, and we may never know if it is true, although we can take a guess.
‘As I turned the corner with my girls, Vanessa threw a middle finger at my back. I didn’t see her do it, but I felt her do it. I swear I did. […] Pity. I pitied her. But also: fuck her. Sorry Lord, but really, fuck her—’
These apologies to God are pervasive in the book, with Natalie apologising to her observer after every aggressive intrusive thought. Natalie’s conviction that someone is watching her pertains to God, the people she is sure placed her in 1855, and all other Christian women that ever have been. As Natalie’s mother reveals, she imagines she is being watched by an audience. That is the secret to the seemingly effortless performance of the role of mother, homemaker, wife — it is all a lie.
‘They weren’t actually happy. They were just pretending they were.’ And this lying was fine with the Lord, since He was ‘the original audience member for our lives’.
What is ironic is that Natalie may have genuine faith at the beginning of the book, but the more she performs the role of Online Natalie, the more real Natalie deviates from her.
Burke eventually twists the surveyor-surveyed dichotomy into an uncanny, unsettling merging of the Natalies, with Natalie’s true thoughts being blurted out in a series of increasingly violent outbursts: ‘A swell of fury rose in me, so sudden it knocked my thoughts off-kilter, sent them spilling over the levies of my mind.’ The most revealing moments in Yesteryear are not the eruptions themselves, but what happens immediately after. When Natalie’s thoughts crack and something ugly bleeds through — a curse, a flash of hatred — the observer is already there. Before the thought has finished forming, she is apologising to God for it. Burke writes ‘America hates angry women. The Lord hates angry women. You hate angry women. Do not be an angry woman’, and this echoes something many women have heard throughout their lives. Women are expected to mitigate their anger and avoid confrontation, as it would show them in an unfeminine light, and through Natalie’s path to insanity Burke demonstrates a dam that bursts and sweeps away all in its path in a roaring tide of fury and resentment.
In feminist literature, the doppelgänger acts as a powerful motif that explores the fractured female psyche, highlighting the split between a woman’s true self and the submissive character demanded by a patriarchal society. It often manifests as the ‘monster’ acting out the protagonist’s repressed desires and righteous anger. Per Gothic tradition — such as in Jane Eyre and Rebecca — the double must be eliminated for social order to be restored. Burke, on the other hand, inverts the Gothic tradition, making real Natalie the double and eventually eliminating her. Real Natalie and Online Natalie merge into one, and Online Natalie usurps power over the body:
‘I fix my expression into a smile and lift my hand into the air. I wave at my babies. I shout lovingly, “Good-bye!”’
The theme of surveillance is, to me, the most striking in the novel, and deeply resonates with my experience as a woman. To be a woman is to always look over your shoulder, to constantly be your own panel of judges, and to not allow a single mishap, otherwise ‘what will people think?’
‘What happened to the women in the Bible who looked forward, though? What about them? I couldn’t remember, but there was something about the notion that felt instinctively wrong to me. It sniffed of greed and felt worryingly close to witchcraft.’
Interestingly, Natalie refers to herself as a witch on more than one occasion: ‘Offline Natalie. Ugly and sharp and awkward and old. Like some fairy-tale witch.’ She also refers to herself as a witch when she brings the Mills family shame after she is accused of assaulting Shannon: ‘Kill the witch. Burn her.’ Natalie spends the novel constructing herself as the opposite of the witch — the deviant, the Angry Woman, the one who refused to perform. And yet when she looks inward at her uncensored self, the word she reaches for is witch. How ironic.
When her community turns on Natalie, internal and external punishment become the same. This can be connected to Bartky’s essay:
‘The disciplinary power that inscribes femininity in the female body is everywhere and it is nowhere; the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular.’
The witch trial is that mechanism made visible, and everyone — her family, the law, and her followers on social media — burn her, yet no one is responsible.
Natalie is a deeply unlikeable character. She is both a villain and a victim, a willing participant in the machine that grinds women down, and one of its casualties. She is the warden and the prisoner.
‘I did everything I was supposed to. I had the children and married the man and created a universe for all of us to live in, and what was I going to get for it? Murdered, apparently.’
She policed herself into nothing, and the townspeople burned her anyway. The panoptical male connoisseur she had so carefully cultivated in her own mind did not protect her when the crowd came. He never does. He is only there to watch.