The Simulacrum Becomes Total: An Analysis of Yesteryear
Natalie Heller Mills is an unlikable, petty, judgmental tradwife influencer living on Yesteryear Ranch. Caro Claire Burke invites readers to despise her protagonist early on, as the condescending Natalie spews vitriol at nearly everyone around her (“idiot, idiot, idiot”). But Yesteryear does far more than shame tradwives or ask us to laugh at an unpleasant woman. Burke gradually widens the lens, moving from Natalie’s individual failures to a systemic critique of modern patriarchy.
In Yesteryear, patriarchy permeates the novel’s entire social world. It shapes modern feminism and tradwife ideology alike, is passed from mothers to daughters, organizes marriage and motherhood, determines which forms of female anger and ambition are permissible, and even structures the public desire to watch, judge, and punish women. Patriarchy becomes more than an external system imposed on Natalie. It is internalized as a narrative women are taught to inhabit. Natalie’s tragedy is that every attempt she makes to escape one form of patriarchal constraint leads her deeper into another.
Natalie grows up under gendered expectations to be more pleasant, likable, and acceptable, yet she never finds much belonging within modern femininity. Traditional womanhood eventually gives that alienation a narrative: perhaps Natalie is not failing at modern life; perhaps modern life itself is corrupt. Influencer culture rewards this narrative, allowing her to construct an identity that reconciles her anger, loneliness, and ambition. Eventually, however, the distinction between identity and performance collapses. Yesteryear Ranch becomes a patriarchal fantasy, an inherited trauma response, an influencer simulation, and finally, a material reality in which Natalie and her family actually live.
The Demand to Be a Good Woman
From the start, Natalie is abrasive, angry, competitive, judgmental, and socially disconnected. She does not seem able or willing to perform the femininity expected of her peers. From early childhood, her mother repeatedly tells her she needs to be nice.
That demand has an unmistakably gendered dimension. A boy who is intense, ambitious, blunt, combative, or arrogant may still be considered difficult, but those qualities are especially policed in girls. Women are expected to smooth interactions, accommodate, maintain relationships, make others comfortable, “and don't forget to smile!” Natalie struggles with all of this. Her anger is too visible, her ambition too sharp, and her contempt too obvious. Although she tries, she struggles to make herself more palatable.
What makes Yesteryear particularly interesting is that Natalie is disciplined by competing versions of femininity. Modern society tells her to be accomplished, ambitious, and intelligent. Traditional femininity gives her another set of instructions: “Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean.” Natalie struggles to perform both.
Natalie attends Harvard but still does not find a place where she feels she truly belongs. She is alienated from her peers and judged as too abrasive and cold - not nice enough. She does not seem to easily build intimacy with others. Modern femininity therefore does not feel like liberation to Natalie; it becomes another arena in which she fails to fit.
The supposedly liberated world still contains rules about what a woman is permitted to be. Patriarchal power has not necessarily disappeared. It has become less visible, more diffuse, and more internalized. Rather than explicitly instructing women to obey men, modern femininity demands that they be confident, self-managing, emotionally regulated, professionally and sexually autonomous, socially skilled, and effortlessly relational.
Yesteryear therefore rejects the comforting story that modernity has displaced patriarchy. Instead, patriarchal discipline mutates. The traditional woman is expected to be obedient and self-sacrificing, while the modern woman is expected to be properly liberated, displaying success, confidence, social adeptness, emotional control, and likability. Natalie experiences both as demands to perform an acceptable femininity.
The Angry Women
Natalie’s anger is comically ironic: she spends much of the novel condemning other women as angry women while she name-calls, lashes out, and shows contempt for others. Yet be nice and angry women are really two sides of the same patriarchal system. Natalie has spent her life being told that her anger makes her unacceptable, and she eventually internalizes that judgment so thoroughly that she begins policing herself and other women (“someone is always watching”). This closely mirrors Foucault’s model of disciplinary power, in which the rule no longer requires continuous external enforcement because the subject learns to monitor herself. Natalie carries the gaze with her. The demand to be pleasant, likable, and emotionally controlled becomes self-surveillance, which then extends outward as she applies the same standards to the women around her.
Throughout the novel, Natalie is told in various ways that she is unlikable and how to correct herself. She should smile more, be nicer, and stop being so mean. People notice that she is struggling, but they tend to respond to the unpleasantness of her expression rather than to whatever may be producing it. Her anger becomes evidence against her.
Interestingly, the reader may become part of that mechanism, too. Many book reviews complain that Natalie is too unlikable. But does Natalie have to earn our willingness to take her seriously by being likable? What does a woman have to be like before we decide that systemic harm matters? Natalie is punished in the novel for being the wrong kind of woman, but she may also be punished outside the novel by readers who reject her for failing to provide an appropriately sympathetic female consciousness.
There is almost a recursive chain of judgment at work, where patriarchy polices women, women police one another, Natalie polices other women, Natalie polices herself, Natalie’s Instagram audience polices her, and the reader polices Natalie.
That final step is especially uncomfortable because we consume Natalie much as her followers do. We watch, scrutinize, and judge her. We may even enjoy her downfall. And the moment we decide she deserves whatever happens to her because she is awful, the novel can turn that judgment back on us.
Performance of Identity
The problem, however, extends beyond Natalie’s anger or the ways others judge her. Yesteryear depicts a social world in which genuine grace is almost entirely absent. People notice Natalie is struggling but rarely ask what might lie beneath her anger. Her mother tells her to be nicer; her mother-in-law suggests medication; her roommate, Reena, offers her alcohol. None of these moments invite Natalie to articulate what she is actually experiencing. Instead, others repeatedly offer ways to change, soften, distract from, or move past the discomfort.
And yet Natalie offers no such grace to others. When her sister, Abigail, attempts to connect with her, Natalie avoids vulnerability and responds with condescension and contempt. The tragedy of Yesteryear is that this failure is not uniquely Natalie’s. It is pervasive, relational, and systemic. Almost no one in the novel seems capable of encountering another person without judgment, competition, correction, or concern for position.
In the absence of genuine connection, the characters fall back on performative roles. Yesteryear is filled with people performing identities that dictate how they should behave and where they belong. Natalie performs wife, mother, tradwife, influencer, and eventually pioneer. Caleb performs husband and patriarch, even though at times he seems to recognize how poorly those roles fit either of them. Natalie herself wonders whether she and Caleb were born into the wrong genders, a revealing moment in a novel so preoccupied with how thoroughly gendered identities are learned and inhabited.
Judith Butler describes identity as constituted through repeated social performance, and Yesteryear pushes that idea toward a literal endpoint. Natalie and Caleb initially perform the roles of tradwife and husband for an Instagram account, and over time they come to embody them. Natalie moves from a modern entrepreneur and influencer to the pioneer wife she once performed online, while Caleb moves away from the softer, more nurturing version of himself (in particular, the man who wanted to become a kindergarten teacher, a nurturing and culturally feminized role centered on connection with children) and into the role of traditional husband, patriarch, and eventually violent man. Their identities are not revealed as some hidden truth beneath the performance. Instead, the repetition of those roles gradually makes the performance feel real, though Burke cleverly frames it as an apparent alternative reality.
Influencer culture intensifies this process because influencing is itself a performance of identity. The influencer presents a curated self, but the boundary between real and fake quickly becomes difficult to locate. Natalie’s online persona is not false per se, nor is her offline self necessarily the “real” Natalie waiting underneath. Instead, Natalie exists as a multiplicity of selves, continuously performed, selected, reinforced, and circulated.
Influencers also occupy a peculiar cultural role because they give audiences someone onto whom they can project admiration, desire, identification, contempt, pity, and hatred. We can love them, envy them, scrutinize them, judge them, or wait for them to fail. For the influencer, all of these reactions constitute engagement. What matters is that the audience keeps watching.
This makes the platform itself part of identity formation. Likes, views, comments, and engagement continually signal which versions of the self are rewarded, while the algorithm helps shape the performance by reinforcing what attracts attention. In that sense, with an almost Twilight Zone or Black Mirror logic, the algorithm becomes a co-author of the self.
What happens, then, when a culture already composed of constructed identities develops technologies that continuously measure, reward, edit, and circulate those constructions? The influencer economy does not invent performative identity so much as industrialize it, turning the self into a stream of short-form clips, selective framing, rapid cuts, captions, reactions, and carefully arranged moments. Reality becomes designed for consumption, and the influencer becomes both person and product.
Maybe we have always constructed ourselves through narratives, performances, recognition, and repetition. The difference is that neoliberal influencer culture turns that process into an economy. Identity becomes measurable, monetizable, and endlessly editable.
In Yesteryear, that process eventually becomes literal. Natalie begins by performing pioneer domesticity for an audience. Over time, she and Caleb reorganize their actual lives around the performance until the distinction between representation and reality collapses. Yesteryear Ranch simultaneously becomes a representation of pioneer life, a piece of media, and the family’s lived reality. Once Natalie disappears from social media, she does not abandon the performance; she removes everything that contradicts it.
Natalie’s reconstruction of the past also mirrors the tradwife fantasy itself. Yesteryear is not a return to an actual historical past but to a story about that past, an imagined period of simpler families, clearer gender roles, and greater social coherence. Natalie does not recover history, but instead, she inhabits a representation of it. The simulacrum becomes total.
Menopause and the Disposable Woman
Menopause marks the point at which Natalie is no longer reproductively useful to the system she has spent her life trying to serve. After she has fulfilled the role the tradwife and patriarchal ideal demanded of her, the structure around her collapses, and she is expelled from it.
The novel’s portrayal of menopause exposes the disposability built into patriarchal femininity. Natalie has organized her life around reproductive womanhood, only to reach the moment when fertility ends and discover that the supposedly permanent identities of wife, mother, and tradwife have an expiration date. The system that defined her through reproduction has little use for her once reproduction ends. In that sense, menopause marks another collapse of the roles Natalie has spent her life trying to inhabit.
That collapse makes Natalie’s final imprisonment especially brutal. She is formed by a patriarchal structure, attempts to survive it by adopting the identities available to her, and becomes increasingly entangled in those roles with each effort to escape. What once served as social and psychological confinement eventually becomes literal confinement. There is something almost fatalistic about that trajectory.
Throughout the novel, Natalie’s failure to conform is met with various forms of discipline. She is told to be nicer, to smile, to soften, to medicate, and to behave differently. By the end, that social discipline becomes literal confinement. The woman whose distress has repeatedly been treated as something to regulate eventually becomes a woman physically regulated by a prison cell - the metaphor becomes concrete.
Caleb undergoes a parallel transformation. Patriarchy narrows his possibilities as well, but the roles available to him grant far more freedom and autonomy than those available to Natalie. By the end of the novel, his performance of the “provider” role becomes absurd. Caleb leaves Yesteryear Ranch for “work” each day because the traditional family narrative requires a husband to exit the domestic sphere while his wife remains home. Whether he is actually engaged in economically productive labor becomes almost beside the point, for the ritual itself preserves the gender structure.
In reality, Caleb leaves the house to watch football with his sons. Caleb performs the working patriarch while effectively going off to watch television on a couch. Football makes the performance almost comically perfect. Caleb leaves the feminine domestic sphere and joins his sons in a recognizably masculine space organized around sports, leisure, and fraternity at the Manosphere. His performance of masculinity gives him freedom and leisure, while Natalie’s performance of femininity gives her labor. Natalie and Caleb have become the roles they once performed.
The ending offers a measure of hope as Mary takes over the narration, suggesting the possibility that the next generation might tell a different story. But Yesteryear has spent too much time showing how deeply patriarchy and generational trauma permeate family life for that hope to feel secure. Natalie also believed she was escaping the world that formed her, only to reproduce many of its structures in another form. Mary’s voice may mark a break, but the novel leaves open the more unsettling question of whether anyone can simply step outside a system that has already shaped the stories, roles, and relationships through which they understand themselves.
I finished Yesteryear feeling that I had read a tragedy. Mary’s narration offers the possibility of a break, but it also reads like the opening of the next cycle.
