51 pages • 1 hour read
The Vaster Wilds
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Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary
The girl moves on in the morning. She finds a squirrel’s nest and kills the baby squirrels, taking their store of nuts and the nest’s warm fibers. She roasts the baby squirrels over a fire and drinks a cup of melted snow as the mist begins to abate. The girl knows she needs to find a place to rest and light a fire. She dreams of a savior in the form of a Frenchman from the north and remembers the Frenchmen who used to visit her mistress’s house in London. They were scented with perfume and treated her like a pet, fondling her, giving her sweets, and teaching her French phrases. She laughs at herself for thinking that any Frenchmen she meets here would be like them, for she knows that the Frenchmen she seeks will be just as greedy and rough as the Englishmen she left behind.
She remembers the minister’s initial desire to travel to the colony and her mistress’s resulting anger. Her mistress knew the minister’s desire was born of greed, but her jealousy compelled her to join him rather than letting him go to the colony alone. The girl reflects that no one asked her whether she wanted to go; she didn’t even ask the question of herself. To distract herself from these memories, she invents a life for herself with a Frenchman, imagining a cabin, food, company, and no fear of the wilderness. She imagines becoming rich off the fur trade and sailing to France as the wife of a wealthy man, then living in the countryside surrounded by loved ones, delicious food, and servants of her own. She becomes so absorbed in her dreams that she ends up walking in circles. Renewing her focus, she continues on until she comes upon a stretch of recently burned forest. The lack of life disturbs her, and she resolves to move on quickly. She finds a thick blackberry bush with dried berries in abundance and joyfully collects them. As the day begins to fade, she finds a cave. Though she is wary of possible dangers inside, she makes herself a bed of pine boughs and builds a fire. She falls asleep but wakes up to find a bear snuffling at her. Terrified, she holds still until the bear leaves and then quickly flees. After a while, she realizes that she has left her leather gloves in the cave and is devastated by the loss.
Chapter 7 Summary
Continuing in her journey, the girl comes across a second river, but the ice here has broken up and she cannot cross it. Despairing, she begins to head west to find a place to ford it. Coming upon two nesting ducks, she steals the eggs and kills the female duck. She imagines the grief of the mallard when he wakes. As she continues, the voice in her head speaks to her again, asking why she is pushing on. She insists that she must live and is willing to endure suffering to do so. The voice asks if her sufferings are a punishment, and the girl says that she accepts them penitently. The next day, however, she feels frustrated, as she knows that there are worse people in the world who have not been made to suffer as she has. She finds fresh buds on the trees and thanks God for his benevolence.
Chapter 8 Summary
The girl stops to warm herself and tend to her feet, which have begun to bleed. The fire she lights draws the attention of a former Spanish Jesuit missionary living as a hermit in the woods. He fled into the wilderness 40 years earlier when some of the Powhatan people attacked the mission he lived in; this attack was precipitated by the missionaries’ demands and insults. The man does not know that the Spanish have returned to the area to take violent revenge for the killings of the Jesuits, and he now believes himself to be a holy hermit. He does not know that he has only survived because the Powhatan people secretly leave him food. Seeing the girl, he convinces himself that she is a devil sent to torment him and believes that he must kill her to affirm his faith. He watches her as she tends to herself and plans to stone her to death. Distracted by the girl, he does not act until she comes upon the boat that he carved for himself and sets off in it. Enraged, he throws one stone at her that misses and another that knocks her out. However, the boat floats too far away for him to retrieve it, and he weeps.
Chapter 9 Summary
The girl floats unconscious in the boat for many miles. In her mind, she is stuck on a cold and colorless beach as she tries to reach Bess. When she does so, she sees the back of Bess rendered “perfect,” as Bess never was in life. The girl remembers that the mistress was upset by Bess’s intellectual disability and never cared for her, seeing her daughter as an example of her own weakness. Still dreaming, the girl is suddenly sure that if she were she to look upon the dream-Bess’s face, she would find it erased. The girl wakes suddenly when the boat begins to flood with water. She manages to paddle herself to the northern bank of the river and painfully removes her soaked skirts and builds a fire. Looking at herself in the water, she is horrified by how profoundly hunger and the head wound have changed her once-pretty face. She remembers being loved like a pet for her beauty and charm, and she struggles to reconcile that past life with her current appearance.
She finds and cooks some oysters, discovering pearls that she saves in the hopes of trading in the future. She sleeps and wakes in pain but is scared that if she doesn’t keep moving, she will die. She repairs the boat with some pitch and sets off again. The boat allows her to travel swiftly, and she is able to return to the forest after hiding it. On foot once again, the girl comes upon a meadow that shows many signs of spring and is able to rest there comfortably without a fire. Lying down, she feels completely at home in the world and with God. She remembers being given the name Lamentations during her first four years of life in the poorhouse, as a reminder of her parents’ sins. Once in her mistress’s, however, they had called her either Girl or Zed, as she was always the oddest and the last, just like the final letter of the alphabet. She remembers her mistress marveling at her dark skin and agreeing to take her on.
Her mistress took her in because she just lost her pet monkey a few days before, and she wanted a new pet. (The girl was also called Zed because that had been the monkey’s name.) The mistress’s first husband, a goldsmith, was upset by this decision, emphasizing that the girl was a human being, not a monkey, but the mistress did not care. She trained the girl like she would a pleasing pet or toy, but the girl still marveled at the comfort of the mistress’s house compared to the poorhouse. Back in the present moment, the girl awakens in the meadow and sees the paw print of an animal that passed by her in the night. She waits for her terror to pass and feels alive.
Chapter 10 Summary
The girl makes her way back to the river, suffering great pain from her head wound. She drinks some water but realizes that the coldness of the water might kill her. Brewing some pine tea, she decides to use the boat to continue along the river. The river is treacherous and cold, and although she does not realize it, she follows a route that leads away from the northern settlements that she is trying to reach. As the sun begins to set, she exits her boat to look for food, worried by the coldness of the wind and the possibility of a storm. She resolves to find a sheltered place and decides that even if she has to share a cave with a bear again, she will fight instead of running away.
Chapters 6-10 Analysis
As the girl persists in Entering the Unknown, her flight causes great changes in both her self-conception and her physical body, for although her accumulated injuries cause her great pain, they have also changed the way that she views her appearance and takes care of her body, for she must consider the most minute of environmental details as she strives to keep herself alive. The dire nature of her predicament is made clear when she hesitates to drink the icy water, instead warming it in order to preserve what little body heat she has left. This emphasizes her desperation and her cleverness, as well as her adaptability. When she sees her reflection in the water and must contend with the destruction of her pretty looks, she is forced to acknowledge “the transfigurement of herself out of the person she thought she had carried in her face” (110). In this moment, she becomes forever alienated from her previous sense of self, for no longer is she the pretty, dutiful servant who was unwillingly brought to the Jamestown colony. Through the changes in her appearance, her change in purpose is made manifest.
While the girl herself will never live long enough to learn what years of living in the wilderness might do to her, the author presents a hypothetical glimpse into the future with the portrayal of the Jesuit priest who has lived alone in the woods for 40 years. Emphasizing the ravages of time, the author describes him as “a chimera, half man, half beast” whose “[h]uman eyes were embedded within a matted mass of hair from the scalp” (94), and this deliberately monstrous appearance is designed to invoke a real-life version of the unknown monsters that the girl has been taught to fear. Yet the encounter also implies that such monstrosities originate not from the unknown wilderness, but from the patterns of colonialism itself. Thus, the scene emphasizes The Inevitable Violence of Colonialism, for the priest’s situation has itself been defined by colonial violence, and even after all these years of solitude, his very first instincts upon seeing the girl are to vilify her and attack her. His observations reflect a mind that has clung to misguided beliefs in misogyny, selfishness, and self-righteousness. He feels no compunction over the thought of killing the girl, for he sees her as a demon and desires to keep her goods and supplies for himself. As a result, his attack on the girl mirrors the attacks of the imaginary monsters that the girl has been fearing, thus emphasizing the inherently monstrous nature of certain European colonists: a monstrosity that far outstrips the dangers of the land that such colonists have invaded.
In an attempt to further emphasize the girl’s current isolation and past traumas within her community, these chapters contain many references to families; some of these images reflect colonial violence even as others craft an idyllic vision of a placid, tranquil family life that the girl will never know. Within such scenes, even the girl herself is portrayed within the larger lens of colonial violence, for in her desperate attempts to survive, she necessarily disturbs the tranquility of the winter landscape and ravages the homes of the resident wildlife. The girl must break apart families in her search for food, killing and eating the baby squirrels in front of their mother and stealing the duck eggs and killing the female duck while the mallard sleeps. In the midst of these incidents, her daydreams of the family she could build with the imaginary French fur trapper parallel the dream of a mate and chicks that she has stolen from the mallard. These broken and imaginary families stand in contrast to the mistress’s family, for the woman despised her own daughter’s disability and ignored Bess entirely, focusing instead on her own whims. Her decision to take the girl in was also not motivated by kindness, but rather by her selfish desire to replace her pet monkey with a human “pet” of sorts. When compared to the animal parents who are loyal to their offspring, the girl’s human family is revealed to function on nothing but selfishness and exploitation.
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By Lauren Groff
