The Vaster Wilds

The Negation of Self takes on a desperately physical quality in this section of the novel, for the girl’s journey spirals into ever more treacherous obstacles as she unknowingly strays from her ultimate goal and becomes ever more subject to the whims of the wilderness. With her food supply, energy, and tools all failing her at one point or another, she retreats more and more deeply into the recesses of her own mind in order to cope, and while these periods of quasi-lucidity provide the story with much-needed exposition, they also emphasize the gravity of her physical decline. This trend is also demonstrated in more practical ways, for the author’s descriptions often the focus on the girl’s bodily processes in great detail, outlining her failures of strength and the weakening of her very sinews as she suffers extreme deprivation and injuries. The irreversible changes that her physical body undergoes also emphasize how profoundly her ordeal has aged her, for as the narrative states, “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 […] there had been things in her body that had been changed forever” (150). Thus, the girl’s body is keeping score of her trials even as she blocks them out of her mind with fantasies in order to retain the willpower to keep pushing forward.

Yet even these fantasies provide her with little escape, as she is often consumed by painful recollections of past traumas and injustices, and in this way, the narrative further emphasizes The Inevitable Violence of Colonialism, along with the associated presence of male violence in general. The memory of Kit and his friends’ acts of abuse and rape comes to her when she is cornered by weather and has just been attacked by the Jesuit priest. By juxtaposing these two separate events, the author implies that the girl perceives such misogynistic violence and sexual assault to simply be facts of life that must be endured. The harshness and cruelty of this cultural reality is further emphasized when these injustices are contrasted with the girl’s recollections of her lost Dutch sailor: the man she once imagined sharing a life with. Significantly, when she conjures him up to be an imaginary companion on her journey, it is clear that she only finds comfort in the “company” of a man who was sweet in life and is now safely dead. The Dutch sailor’s status as a ghost or hallucination makes him a safe companion, for as lonely as the girl is, she believes that other people are too dangerous to approach, and her many experiences with male violence repeatedly confirm this view. That the Europeans who have traveled to the colonies are most commonly violent and rough men makes her increasingly wary of encountering others, and in this way, the dysfunctional violence of her own culture will kill her more surely than the ravages of the wilderness. While disease, injury, and exposure will eventually spell her demise, the girl only endures these things because her own society has taught her to fear the company of other people, and it is because of this fear that she fails to reach out to those who might help her.

In addition to her ongoing fear of Entering the Unknown human dangers around her, the girl is also hindered by her lack of knowledge. Although she experiences rapid changes in her worldview, she has not progressed far enough beyond her upbringing and culture to fully reject colonial modes of thinking. Though she has not personally experienced violence from the local Powhatan people, she remains afraid of encountering them. She also fails to recognize the evidence of the care they place into the land or the active cultivation efforts they partake in to make the forest more fruitful; instead, she attributes the forest’s every detail to the workings of nature alone. Her lack of insight into the Powhatan people’s lives is also shown in her thoughts about the children whom she passes on the riverbank. She imagines that the children will believe she is a ghost, and that the story of her passing on the river will be told for generations. Although this fantasy does not arise from any sense of malice or ill-will toward the Powhatan people, her fantasy still mistakenly places her in a role of central importance within Indigenous stories. In reality, the children are far more focused on their own childish squabbles than on reporting her presence, and the fact that they never think about her again emphasizes the lack of weight that the colonists hold in the perceptions of the local inhabitants.

Above all else, the author uses a series of environmental hazards and mishaps to emphasize the true precariousness of the girl’s situation, for even as her fevered mind appreciates the beauty of her surroundings, she must also contend with the growing scarcity she finds there. For example, she beholds the wonder of a forest transformed into a land of ice, but she also fears the death and danger that such an environment may hold as the tree branches crack and fall underneath the weight of the frozen water. Thus, the narrative implies that a moment like this, or some other momentary bad luck with weather would be more than enough to endanger the girl’s life. Yet this desperate situation is due only to her lack of resources, supplies, and knowledge, for as the author repeatedly emphasizes, the Powhatan people who inhabit the areas she passes through are living normally and leading healthy, successful lives; they, unlike the colonists, are not trapped in a cycle of suffering, disease, and starvation.