51 pages • 1 hour read
Lauren GroffThe Vaster Wilds
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Negation of Self
Content Warning: This section of the guide references extreme classism and the violent nature of colonialism and imperialism.
The girl struggles with her sense of self during her journey. Alone for the first time in her life, she has to develop an understanding of her place in the world that is unrelated to the responsibilities and expectations that she has long been accustomed to fulfilling. Her past continues to rear its head in various flashbacks, visions, and memories, making her survival a further struggle as she is unused to focusing on herself. This habitual negation of self becomes immediately apparent during her first morning away from the fort, for she has trouble adapting to focus only on her own needs. As the narrative states, “All her life, she had awoken thinking first of the child Bess, of her hunger, her need, her happiness. Now that there was no child Bess to think of, she was struck to stone, for she did not know how to think first of herself” (29).
Her treatment as a pet rather than as a human being also has a profound effect upon her sense of herself, and the solitude of her travels allows her the time she needs to confront and overcome this deleterious treatment. Because she is intelligent, she realizes the depths of ignorance that have been enforced upon her over the years, and her yearning for greater things can be seen in the fantasies she dwells upon, such as coming across perfumed French poets dressed in silk. Although she understands such fantasies to be ridiculous, she simply does not have any other experiences upon which to base her desires when she first sets out. That her final, dying fantasy of her “second self” is so different than what she initially imagines shows the profundity of her spiritual development.
As her journey continues, she gains unexpected epiphanies from the natural world that facilitate her self-actualization. She does not accept the individualistic, self-centered view of the world that so many other colonists have embraced, nor does she persist in her own self-negation. Instead, she sees a path for interconnectedness that transcends individual relationships. She recognizes the wonder inherent in nature and comes to appreciate the fact that all living things within an environment affect the state of that environment. This insight allows her to understand her own importance, as she too is a part of the world. She therefore develops her own moral sensibilities in relation to her experiences, and her musings result in convictions such as the statement that “[i]t is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world” (222). As she dies, her newfound philosophy fully crystalizes into a larger understanding.
The Inevitable Violence of Colonialism
The colonial settlement of Jamestown is the specter that haunts the girl’s flight northwards. A place of violence and suffering, her only recollections of it are negative. The girl knows from personal experience that the settlement is made up of hunters, farmers, and “the avid amoral sons of nobility who would murder to find themselves masters of more land and fortune than their eldest brothers” (72). These selfish desires are the bedrock of the colony, and their journey to the shores of North America is motivated by an overwhelming desire for wealth and status that can only be purchased through their callous exploitation of the land. Even as they claim religious motivation as a rationalization, their real desire is for power.
As the colonists devolve from these grandly misguided ideals of wealth and philanthropy of faith and succumb to desperation, infighting, and cannibalism, their downward spiral reveals the real nature of the colonial venture as a whole. Having traveled to the settlement to establish a colonial system that mirrors the very one they left behind in England, they inevitably create a society that carries the seeds of its own destruction. In their desperation to maintain control, they refuse to let anyone try to escape the boundaries of the colony even as it falls apart around them. They even send someone after the girl who is willing to risk the dangers beyond the fort in order to punish and hurt someone who has violated the established social order. The ingrained violence of the man sent to follow her is also significant, for he is a murderer who categorizes his different violent impulses as “a difference between private violence and violence to fight for a foothold in this place. One could be taken out in private, savored, the other was a godly duty” (45).
That the girl dies from smallpox rather than from an animal attack or a natural disaster is also significant to the author’s larger critique of the hubris of colonialism. Accordingly, even the girl’s vision of the death of her “second self” conforms to this pattern, for by falling on her own hatchet, she dies not from an environmental hazard but from a remnant of the fort. The deaths of the colonists are also a result of their unpreparedness and lack of understanding of the land they have so arrogantly dared to claim. As the girl dies alone, reflecting on the beauty around her and the dangers that her smallpox would have posed to any Indigenous people who tried to help her, she thinks of “the settlement so arrogant so dirty upon the river James, of those men who call themselves of god who tore up the trees and burned them, and took the fish the clean air the land the game” (66). Even in this feverish, stream-of-consciousness moment, her thoughts critique the sheer violence of the colonists, whose actions include both the physical violence against the Powhatan people and the internal violence that ultimately tears the colony apart. Just as each individual is connected to the larger world, each person’s actions affect the whole ecosystem, making the land itself suffer violence and deprivation as well.
Entering the Unknown
From the very beginning, the girl embraces the unknown in order to survive, and by willingly entering into an unknown world, she gains a unique understanding of nature and broadens her own philosophical views while also living for her own sake for the first time in her life. Yet despite the vast strides she makes in the realm of personal development during this time, the fact remains that a mere two weeks in the woods is not enough to broaden her knowledge into real understanding of her surroundings. In some respects, she retains a sense of clarity and awareness about her own ignorance, for she knows that her fear of the Indigenous people in the area is in reality “the fear of the unknown, for she had seen very little of them, only once in the autumn when the Powhatan had been grudging friends of the fort” (46).
The nature of the unknown and its relativity according to experience is shown through the insights that the more detached passages of narration provide into the Indigenous people’s lives. For example, the girl doesn’t realizes that the beauty and cleanness of a particular section of forest is due to the Indigenous people’s efforts to cultivate it; her upbringing in England has taught her to define a garden in a very specific way, and she cannot recognize the forest-garden that spreads before her eyes. Similarly, even if she were able to recognize these signs of nearby human habitation, she would not find it within her power to overcome her fear of other people long enough to seek out their help. Her lack of knowledge extends even to herself. When passing by some children playing along the riverbank, she fantasizes about being a ghost or a phantom to them, when in reality, they know their environment so well that they were already aware of her presence in their woods, as well as her great failings and lack of survival skills.
Although the girl’s ability to gain new knowledge about her surroundings is never fully realized, her experiences in the wilderness do allow her to shed some of the limiting views she carried with her from the settlement and from England. It is her journey through parts unknown that leads to her loss of faith and her subsequent reimagining of the metaphysical world, as well as her transcendent spiritual experience just before her death. This progression mirrors the development of her sense of self, as both are enabled by the absence of the social structures that shackled her to arrogant and outmoded modes of colonial thinking. The unknown allows her to develop a more nuanced view of the world’s cosmology, bringing her feelings of wonder and connection even as she pushes forward alone. Her last thoughts show the profound effect that the embrace of the unknown has had on her, letting her appreciate life anew even as she departs from it.
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By Lauren Groff
