Copy of Villains, Not Coherence (pt 2)

If you haven’t read Yesteryear, let me catch you up. A tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 and is faced with brutal reality instead of the fantasy life that she has made millions hawking online. Folks are calling it satire, dark comedy, a thriller. 

I am calling it a strawman argument with a protagonist the author wrote but didn’t fully understand. 

Most of the commentary about Yesteryear is focused on Natalie as an unlikeable narrator and a probing of performance vs. authenticity. Those themes are there in ways that are, in my opinion, not well developed, but ok. 

It’s impossible to write true satire when you don’t have empathy for your target. I don’t think Burke understands religious women. Maybe she was concerned about being misread as agreeing with them if she had developed a more robust Natalie. But in that move to write from the outside in, maybe due to it, I find something fascinating is happening. 

Burke wrote Natalie as a narcissist. Not in the online discourse version, but in the clinically significant symptoms sense. I am not sure if this was intended or a happy accident, taking tempting shortcuts when imagining the interior life of a famous fundamentalist woman. But it leads to a reading of Yesteryear that I find engaging nevertheless. 

What happens when life dishes out all the elements needed for a personality structure like high narcissism to form within a religious cultural context where success is found through abnegation and humility? 

What happens when our automatic defenses and social scripts are polar opposites?

(Spoilers ahead)

Yesteryear teaches us what happens. Madness. A perpetually tightening trap. When the way to superiority is subservience and outperforming selflessness is the only safe path, the screws will always squeeze until something (or someone) breaks. 

By leaving out the inner devotional core of many who hold religious belief, Burke creates a compelling thought experiment around conflicting drives and demands. When Natalie and those around her remain unwilling or unable to name the discrepancy, the cycle continues and many are left in the wake of destruction. Fundamentalist communities hold no righteous release valve for this pressure. Certainty is the gestalt. And a Narcissist would rather die than balk. In fact, they believe that surrender will kill them. 

We as readers are tempted to take the same shortcuts as well. We write Natalie off as unlikeable, backwards, crazy. She is all three. But we are not invited to look again into the context nor the coherence in the outcome. We seem afraid to understand her. 

Yet the discourse continues. Debating in the comment section, picking a fight at book club, we try to make sense of it. But often, like Natalie, we pretend authentic engagement but we reach an automatic and unconscious stopping point. We make meaning right up until we run the risk of an understanding in which the atrocities are coherent - not good, not without the need for consequences - but we recognize how they got there. Instead, at the first whiff of that recognition, we run. 

Though I am not religious, a helpful phrase comes to mind. A phrase that names this reality and all its implied luck. It’s a truism that helps me stay in the room. “There, but for the grace of god, go I.” Or more plainly said - “That could have been me.” If I were born into those circumstances with those influences, even those genetics, I might have, could have, would have done what she did. With this awareness I can have compassion for her coherence and blatant gratitude that it is not my path.

Understanding doesn’t mean arrival at a verdict. It means continuing to hold the complexity in a way that keeps our hearts open. We don’t (only) do this for those who have caused so much harm. We do it for ourselves. For our families. To become people who can hold the horrors alongside humanity. For what we practice toward others we will also give to ourselves. 

And I have never met an adult that is all villain nor all victim. Not once. None of us get off that easily. 

Autumn Starks is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), Internal Family Systems Certified IFS Therapist, Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), special interest in Complex PTSD and other disorders resulting from religious trauma and spiritual abuse, Certified in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute, and is the founder of Starks Therapy Group in Oak Park, IL where she partners with Richard Clark, CRNA, APRN, to provide ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and they host together the Ketamine Collective for therapists.

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