Can Caroline C-Clark's "Once Upon a Time" Be the First Big "Trad Wife" Novel? This was my hope: finally, a literary response to the social trend pushing women to embody "traditional Christian values" - pro-natalism and wife obedience - on "the great social media." I'm not immune to hype, and "Once Upon a Time" is generating hype, leading to a bidding war for the rights and a deal with Anne Hathaway for the movie.
We should admit that the premise - a traditional wife on Instagram wakes up apparently in pioneer days of yore and discovers that traditional wifehood isn't as fun as her sanitized social media reenactment suggests - is genius. As one of the "angry women" that our heroine Natalie despises so much, I was eager for a little sweet schadenfreude.
Natalie is a "good Christian woman" with a core of anger, or, as she describes herself, "the manicured pixie of the American Dream girl's deep, dark fantasies about this country." She knows exactly what she's doing, because "America hates women. What a comfort it is to remember that." Her bitter and sometimes funny voice - on the night she loses her virginity to her new husband, she says, "I felt like I needed a dish towel to cover his penis and wait an hour for it to grow" - means the novel moves quickly. Intelligent, ruthlessly ambitious, and heartless toward her own children, she's a kind of Maggie Bex Sharpe, or "Go-Go Gilly" Amy Dunne if she wore smokings. "Once Upon a Time" is the story of how she builds a massive following, only to meet her downfall. "I wanted all the aesthetics of the old days and all the comforts of modernity," Natalie says. In other words, "time machine," but, naturally, 1805 is nothing like she imagined it.
Berke is good at exploring how children can't consent to social media exposure and where that crosses into child neglect. There are also some interesting ideas about religion and performance - "Who is our Lord and Savior if not the original member of our life's audience?" The short passages set in "1805" are sketchy; one description of endless laundry that makes her fingers "break and bleed" is excellent, but I wanted more. This storyline is more compelling than the larger space given to how she built her Instagram account. Did she really travel back in time? Is it a terrible reality show? A message from God? Or has she lost her mind?
The solution to this mystery is the novel's main driver, at the expense of deeper problems. Natalie is a mother multiple times, but Berke couldn't make her believable. I'm always interested in what a novelist chooses. Here, Berke almost entirely ignores the female body, a strange choice for a novel about a woman who has multiple children as part of the pro-natalist agenda. The descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth are shallow and clichéd ("My body must be cut to let the baby out"), and her growing insistence on unmedicated childbirth is completely unexplored. Breastfeeding is simply that: no mention of attachment, no spillage, no description. Natalie's postpartum difficulties in bonding with her children are oversimplified.
It's a shame, as is Berke's choice to almost entirely remove politics from the narrative. There are hints at homophobia, misogyny, and racism at the root of the movement ("Some women no longer knew they were women. Some men no longer knew they were men... the birth rate was falling... the white race was on the brink of extinction"), but this novel mostly fails to meet the political moment. Perhaps this is a deliberate move to reach more American readers, but for a European, it's a puzzle.
However, the more unforgivable sin, and this is how "Once Upon a Time" uses birth damage and child disability as a plot point. It's a shocking misstep, as well as showing a disappointing lack of curiosity on the writer's part about how these events shape both mother and child: it feels cynical and underdeveloped. In her attempt to create a clever twist in the story, Berke lets the humanity of the characters fall by the wayside. Perhaps this is what happens when your novel is being developed by producers and Hollywood executives from its first draft. Berke, who is undoubtedly talented, had she been left alone to explore these questions more deeply, we might have had a very different book. As it is, the plot twist involving child disability feels out of place and unethical. For a book that promises so much, "Once Upon a Time" is a real lesson in how not to let a fun premise derail a good story.
