The Vaster Wilds

“For all the souls who had come over to this country were now at the end of this winter of horror starved, and many of the very stoutest had hungered and shat and coughed themselves into the final kingdom of death, and even the most vicious of the men who had come across the ocean had weakened and become strangely indolent, lying on their cots all day and staring blankly at the gray and ice-pissing ice-shitting skies.”

The folly of the colonial project has led to massive amounts horror and death throughout history. Within the context of the novel, the privations that the colony’s inhabitants experience are the direct result of their attempts to invade and subdue the world around them. This quote establishes a striking contrast between their initial attempts to claim the surrounding lands for themselves, and their desperate plight as they find their skills and strength unequal to the task.

“The world, the girl knew, was worse than savage, the world was unmoved. It did not care, it could not care, what happened to her, not one bit. She was a mote, a speck, a floating windborne fleck of dust.”

The girl struggles throughout her journey with the conflict between her sufferings in nature, her faith in God, and her feelings that the universe is uncaring. Still in the first throes of deprivation from the fort, she cannot see past the harshness of her environment to its beauty and interconnectedness.

“There would be poetry in the repetition: fish into girl, girl into fish. Perhaps the eternal chain of being was not a chain at all but a ring, one life not ending where the other begins but all souls overlapping.”

The girl’s focus on mythology and storytelling helps her to endure difficult and dangerous situations, both in the story’s present and in her memories. This pattern also reveals her early insight into the more expansive view of nature that she will come to develop. It also foreshadows her future death and her entrance into the life cycle of the forest.

“Not a soul had been left untouched by the storm, and all had bargained with god in their hearts to relinquish pride and vanity and greed if they could survive this depth of terror. But the promises so seared into their flesh would fade as the storm faded away, as the bruises diminished and the bones knit whole again, and they would go on as the sinners they had always been.”

The hypocrisy of the settlers is repeatedly brought up, particularly when the narrative examines the contradictions inherent in their religious beliefs. Not only do they ignore their promises during the storm, but they also quickly forget the falsely religious reasons that some of them claimed to have for joining the colony. Their behavior does not mirror their claimed views.

“Her own body became a ghostly apparition fading in and out of view.”

The girl’s struggle with her own physical form comes up repeatedly as her injuries and memories work against her own desires. The mist brings this struggle into a visual form, tearing the girl’s body from her while she still resides inside of it.

“In her sleep, a voice spoke to her. What, girl, is the purpose of your journey? the voice said. I want to live, the girl said. If I stop I will die. You are willing, the voice said, to suffer so greatly? I have known suffering before, she said. Not so great as this, the voice said.”

The girl’s desperate desire to live is her main driving force to keep going. The voice in her head tests her resolve throughout the story, forcing her to verbally confirm her belief that survival is worth suffering.

“He did not know that his countrymen had landed again not so very far from where he was and, in vengeance for the massacred priests, had painted the earth red with the blood of the natives, women and children and old men, and set fire to their buildings, and sailed off home again, for empire has no pity and is never sated.”

The violence of empire is here made explicit, manifesting as revenge for a violence caused by the Europeans’ own arrogance and ill-preparedness. The plight of the abandoned Jesuit priest shows that the colonial project as a whole is violent and vindictive, for the violence it enacts, even in retribution, does nothing to help the colonists who have suffered.

“They slipped the girl little pieces of fruit and slivers of cheese as one feeds treats to a pet dog.”

The girl has spent her entire life prior to the colony being denied self-actualization, instead being treated as an extension of her mistress’s whims. This lifestyle may have provided her with some rudimentary comforts, but it ultimately dehumanized her and denied her the opportunity to develop a stable sense of self.

“But when she came to the house of the mistress and her first husband the goldsmith, she began to be called many things, Girl, and Wench, and Fool, and Child, and Zed, for she was always the least and the littlest and the last to be counted like the strangest of all the letters of the alphabet.”

The girl has lacked an individual identity beyond what her mistress assigned to her, lacking even a name that was not also an insult. She is accepted in the household, but only as an afterthought and not as a full member or even as a human being.

“And the primordial night terrors overlapped in swift frenzy with the terrors from her actual life, badness against badness, sliding.”

The girl’s fear is something she has carried with her from London over the ocean to the new world. Her fright is influenced by her personal experiences, and though she has been told many stories of the horrors of the land she travels through, her memories come from the bad experiences that her own society has inflicted upon her.

“Only your little parrot has the mind for it. As well, we shall be requiring entertainment, and here’s a pretty little thing to sing and dance for us. For you have trained your little pet so well that she reflects so beautifully upon you.”

      The girl’s subjugation and lack of agency harm her in a broad sense, for her desperately powerless situation allows those who hold power over her to harm her in many ways. Her inability to deny those above her puts her in a vulnerable position, and she is cruelly abused by her mistress’s son. The further gendered nature of the violence prevents even her more powerful mistress from interfering and putting a stop to the abuse.

“The soreness in her body from her six days running was such that she felt infinitely older than her years, a wizened hag, and she knew that, even should she have long months of only rest, there had been things in her body that had been changed forever. She was but sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age, but the wilderness had so moved upon her that she would never be young again.”

Just as the girl is being changed mentally by her journey, she is also being changed physically. Her body is keeping the score of her experiences, preventing her from ever returning to the life she lived before her flight.

“There was no awe here. The madness of the woman in the boat was so forceful that it was like the rays of the sun; the children felt it touching them even where they stood. A living skeleton she was, the boat so ungainly it was like a flipped beetle waggling its helpless legs, a ridiculous sight.”

The children of the Indigenous village are able to see the terrible situation that the girl is in, as well as her lack of suitability for her environment and journey. This fact proves the falsity of her own self-perception in relation to the environment and reaffirms her lack of understanding of the world she has entered.

“And it was exhilarating to name such things; it was a kind of power. She grew drunk upon it and giddily named everything she saw.”

Because the girl has never had access to the power structures of the colonial apparatus, she has never able to take part in the rewards of their violent invasion the land. On her own, the act of naming things for herself finally allows her to understand the power names can hold. In this light, she also comes to realize the systems of power inherent in the several demeaning names that she has been forced to bear throughout her life. In naming other things for herself, she regains a small measure of that power for herself.

“But no name that came to her seemed right, and soon the fever and the walking burned the idea out of her mind, and she went on walking, still nameless, unmastered, through the wilds.”

The girl’s lack of a proper name is a sign of her subjugation and dehumanization, but it also implies her unique lack of ties to her society. Her movement through the wilderness can therefore be interpreted as an odd form of freedom. In this context, her lack of a name is no longer an insult but a peaceful example of her independence from the social bonds that once held her fast to a cruel and indifferent culture.

“If she were to stand in the middle of them, she would feel overwhelmed with her own smallness and would fear that they would trample her. O that this place could hold such lovable monsters in it! She felt a warmth come over her for the land, as hard and unforgiving and wild as it was.”

Though still influenced by the colonial idea of a land of monsters, the girl is now able to love and appreciate the land she travels through for its own beauty. Her love for the land places her at odds with her society, but makes her far happier and allows her to accept wonder into her view of nature in the wild.

“And she began to see now that when god created man and woman together and said to let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, perhaps by dominion god did not mean the right to kill or suppress the fish, the fowl, the cattle, and every creeping thing.”

This quote not only refers to the girl’s understanding of the ills within the aims of the colonial project, but also the problems with how poorly her own community has treated her. Her time in nature forces her to be ruthless toward nature, but she also learns to understand the cycle of birth and death that allows all life to continue.

“My people would look upon such places and hate what they saw, would replace it all with cobbled streets and smithies throwing black clouds of smoke into the air.”

The girl is increasingly alienated from the view her fellow countrymen take toward the land she is traveling through. Her increased awareness makes the desires she once understood and shared feel wrong.

“When she woke, she stood to walk forward once more, and this new suffering, which in the city of her birth would have made her mewl like a babe and take to a cot, was hardly a ripple in all the waves of what she felt.”

The girl’s relationship to her body has continued to change and develop, as has her relationship to pain. Her pain and sufferings have grown, and her body has changed, but so has her level of understanding and self-assuredness.

“It is a moral failure to miss the profound beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. Yes, she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full.”

The wonder that has continually come to the girl even in her darkest moments has now entered her moral philosophical view of the world. Now the girl finds that that wonder and appreciation are an essential part of life.

“Her fever roved through her, she let it, and the smallpox swallowed her body in dark bloom. This thing she had carried with her own bones and flesh and fought with would be far more deadly than any foe.”

Though the girl has been afraid of the dangers in the wilderness, the real danger came from a disease within her body and bones: a pestilence brought to this land by people from her country. Her body, and her society have jointly betrayed her will.

“Only this girl idiot in her crystalline wisdom had known what all the wise and witty never would. There could be no fight in this world, only submission.”

The girl has fought to survive, but ironically, her fate was decided before she ever left the fort, for smallpox itself has been her silent, deadly companion throughout her journey. This passage highlights that Bess’s understanding of submission reflects what the girl is now experiencing—that her struggle to survive mattered less than her new understanding of nature and her place within it.

“She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat.”

The faith that the girl has struggled to maintain throughout her journey has now at last reached an apotheosis of understanding. Having shed the religious system that English society ingrained within her, she now feels something far more illuminating and sophisticated than her earlier conviction that God had betrayed her.