On Yesteryear by Caro Clair Burke
By Jane Holwerda
Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City, Kansas. My current mission is to read books I’ve collected. But I am sometimes waylaid by “new” things promoted by media I align with. And so, a few weeks back, I closed Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to read Caro Claire Burke’s novel. Already in film production, the central character is played by Anne Hathaway, who appears in publicity stills, ever the gamine if more gaunt and stricken than even in her Les Miserables’ death scene.
Hathaway portrays Natalie Heller Miller, a popular influencer of “Yesteryear” who models the “trad-wife” life by styling 19th century pioneerism: self-reliance, farm-to-table menus, home-schooled children, a rancher-farmer husband. Natalie uses 21st century technologies, but only to stream her husband in straw hat and coveralls with a mule and cart, herself cooking and collecting eggs from her chickens, and giving birth. At home. Without anesthesia. Or so she says.
Actually, Natalie’s farmhouse is outfitted with fully modern kitchens, baths, laundry room, and a fully functioning production studio – but hidden from her followers. Revenue from “Yesteryear” merchandize and sponsorships pays down a multimillion-dollar farm loan. Natalie has staff: nannies and a production director. Her husband, no farmer but an urban trust fund baby, frequents box store parking lots to hire migrants cheaply for the hard work then spends his time roaming online the manosphere and porn worlds or sexing up one of Natalie’s staff who’s about to go public.
As a mega-media reveal looms, Natalie suffers various crises, most significantly that she seems to have teleported to the 1850s where she is indeed a pioneer, though not a very good one – near starvation and destitute, this family is tough as nails, as rustic as their piney-wood outhouse, and hard-scrabble as hungry chickens. Or so it seems.
Thackeray’s Victorian classic Vanity Fair and Burkes’s current bestselling Yesteryear have some things in common. Like Yesteryear’s Natalie, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, herself a young woman, performs gentility, chastity and servility – those proclaimed 19th century womanly Christian virtues—while masking her ruthless, grasping self from the social sets for which she performs. Both Natalie and Becky pretend they married for love, even as we readers see their ambition for socioeconomic success, in the limited ways their respective communities allow.
It’s like Becky Sharp is Natalie Heller Miller’s great6-grandmother. Thackeray titled his novel for a phrase of 17th century Puritan John Bunyan, an influencer of his era and for our own American colonial history and maybe present. “Vanity Fair” for Bunyan, is a carnival where pride and self-interest rule. Or, as in Ecclesiastes, “...everything… done under the sun...is vanity and a striving after wind.” Did I mention that Natalie presents as a Christian of a recognizable contemporary sect who waxes nostalgic for bygone timesand disses feminists—she calls them “Angry Women,” those “elitist, out-of-touch progressives” even while she tends her own thriving career, her family’s sole means of support.
Burke’s skill in crafting satire and her courage in striking her targets so satisfyingly is worthy of applause, and she has mine. I might even go for the yet-to-be-released film. Meanwhile, the satire of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, set far in the past, remains relevant. Why aren’t high school students made to read it rather than the weird and creepy Wuthering Heights? Which this dear reader won’t read again. Though you, of course, are welcome to – Read on!
