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.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
The girl is in great pain from her head wound and her recent exertions. She believes that she can see to the western end of the continent and briefly fantasizes about making it all the way across as her fever continues to rage. She makes it to a river but suddenly senses that someone is behind her and takes off at a run. She comes upon a waterfall and discovers a small cave behind it. Hiding there, she sees two Piscataway hunters. She remains behind the waterfall even after they leave, fearing that they might still be near. The girl falls asleep and wakes up to see a bear in the water downstream. She believes that she can see wonder in the bear’s eyes and is shaken by the thought that its wonder mirrors the human wonder she has felt. She questions whether that means that the bear has a soul, and wonders whether it is therefore a sin to kill a bear. This thought sends her theological understanding of the world into turmoil, and she questions whether the priests she has known really had much knowledge of God. She feels that God is in all things, and then fears that if this is so, then God must be nothing at all. The girl despairs and falls back to sleep. When she wakes, the bear is gone.
Chapter 17 Summary
Deciding that the men are gone, she makes her way down from behind the waterfall. Still afraid, she runs, thinking of the stories she has heard of girls who turn into animals and trees to escape their pursuers. She imagines herself turning into a tree and passes out. When she is able to stand again, she runs until the pain from running starts to feel good. As the combined fever and exertion raise her temperature, she removes layers of clothing until she is running naked. She begins to hallucinate the voices of the artists her mistress used to entertain. After hours of dazed running, she comes upon a hot spring. Shocked but delighted, she enters the warm water and is able to wash away all the lice, nits, and dirt that have clung to her and her clothing. She spends hours lying in the pool, cleaning all the pests away.
Nearby, she finds a beehive. She manages to steal honey and then hide in the pool to escape the bees. After resting in the pool, she moves onward, dreaming of the time when the plague hit London. Having nursed sick babies in the poorhouse, she was consigned to tend to the sick goldsmith, her mistress’s first husband. The other servants locked her into a room with the sick man. He comforted her by assuring her that he would likely be dead within four days. She told him stories, and he in turn told her the story of his life. He confessed to her that he was afraid of dying. When he finally died, the other members of the household left her locked in with his dead body till morning. After a year of mourning, the mistress became enthralled by her second husband, the minister. The girl disliked the minister, but the mistress quickly married him. Back in the present moment, the girl suddenly becomes convinced that a plague swept through and killed everyone after she left London. She thinks of herself as the last specimen of humanity and becomes determined to preserve human kindness. She makes a bed of dried leaves and goes to sleep.
Chapter 18 Summary
In the middle of the night, the girl wakes up shivering and sick with fever. She lights a fire and goes back to sleep, dreaming of a star that falls onto a black mountaintop. When she awakens again, she sees a wolf who knocks her makeshift tent into her fire, setting one of her blankets alight. The wolf runs from the fire, and the girl lights more fire on three sides and makes a scarf from the burnt blanket. Laughing, she imagines how terrifying her appearance would be to anyone who comes across her. Afraid of the wolf, she stays awake all night.
Chapter 19 Summary
The girl’s fever finally peaks, and she realizes that she has smallpox. She laughs out of sheer despair, thinking of the death and disfiguration that smallpox can bring. Though she considers giving up, she pushes onward. Forcing herself forward through her fever, she begins to hallucinate, seeing a London feast in a forest clearing. She fades in and out of awareness as she walks. At one point, she comes to the edge of a cliff and falls. Landing at the bottom, she hears something snap and then passes out.
Chapter 20 Summary
When she wakes up, she realizes that the cliff was actually only a slight incline and that she did not fall very far. Her side hurts, but she can move her hands and feet. Ignoring her pain, she continues onward. Staring at the sky, she sees light coming through a dark cloud and feels love for all nature. She believes that she can see angels in the beams of sunlight and runs toward them so that they can take her away. However, when she looks up again, the sun is gone and she has been abandoned. Realizing that there never were any angels, she is consumed by despair.
She asks God to kill her as proof of his existence, but she does not die, and the smallpox worsens to the point that she begins to consider suicide. A bear and her two cubs come down to the nearby river, and the girl attempts to reach them in hopes that the bear will eat her. As she gets closer, the bear cubs run up to her. She pets the cubs and waits for the mother bear to kill her, but the mother bear simply collects her cubs and moves on. Giving up, the girl lies down to wait. She laughs at the idea that although she has survived so much adversity, the thing that will likely kill her was already hiding inside her own body.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
As the girl’s physical body becomes ever more ravaged by hardship and disease, she comes to serve as a metaphor for the end result of The Inevitable Violence of Colonialism, for everything that has happened to her has occurred because of the rigid and self-destructive construct of the British Empire and its satellite colonies. Throughout all of her trials, her body has kept the score, and thanks to the severe depredations of the colony itself, she discovers too late that her journey has been doomed from the very beginning, for the smallpox within her system has worked a slow but sure decline upon her. As she staggers toward a near-certain death, her desperate state represents the culmination of the dangers inherent in England’s colonial project. In addition to the girl’s physical illness, her many injuries are caused by various colonial intrusions into this land. The smallpox comes from the colony, and the head wound is inflicted by the abandoned Jesuit priest: another lost remnant of a failed colonial experiment. Her other injuries are caused by her flight and the rigors to which she subjects her body, and this desperate flight would never have been necessary if the colonists had been better prepared or had never come to begin with. Thus, the smallpox stands as the most definitive example of how the colonists bring about their own doom.
The author therefore implies that the girl’s dire circumstances are all the more tragic because she did not choose to come to this country herself; instead, she was forced into her current predicament as those who held absolute power over her life decreed her fate without even consulting her for her opinion on the matter. With this scenario, the author therefore highlights the colonists’ exploitation and objectification of the girl. This dynamic is also demonstrated to have existed well before she ever set foot on a ship, for the girl’s fevered memories reveal the utter lack of choice she endured in her life back in London. Far from being able to protect herself from the whims of those whom she served, she was forced to endure the shame and humiliation of sexual assault, which her mistress knowingly condoned. Now, surrounded by the vastness of the wilderness, she has finally moved beyond the idealization of London that she felt during her initial flight from the doomed colony, for even as she hallucinates a London-style feast, she also remembers the anger and limitations that surrounded it. Likewise, the way in which her childhood self was forced to nurse the mistress’s plague-infected first husband also shows the criminal indifference and systemic failures of English society as a whole. Also implicit in the juxtaposition is the idea that although the girl and the mistress’s first husband was of a far higher class and a more socially powerful gender, he died as she is dying—alone and in great pain—for death is famously known to be no respecter of persons.
The dangers of her body’s own failures make the natural dangers that surround her all the more perilous. Her fever prevents her from focusing properly or making logical decisions, and her diminished state causes her to fall and injure herself even further. However, more important to the narrative is the way in which these latest hardships alter her state of consciousness, for these natural dangers serve as avenues that further expand her view of the universe and her understanding of the theological basis of the world. The combination of the metaphysical and the natural world is best seen in the two bear encounters that bookend this section of the story. The first encounter is at a distance, and she catches a glimpse of the wonder in the bear’s eyes as it views the waterfall; this moment sparks her philosophical contemplations about the presence of a bear’s soul. This experience in the natural world causes the girl to completely overhaul her religious convictions, which foreshadows her sudden loss of faith, and the second interaction, in which the mother bear refrains from killing her, implies that her prayer for death has not been answered. Here, her experiences of religion are mirrored by nature itself, and although the response was not the one that she hoped for, she nonetheless feels herself to be part of a far larger and more comprehensible ecosystem.
This development of her own ideology and view of the world are in direct contrast to The Negation of Self that she experienced during her years of service to her cruel and indifferent mistress. Because English society has denied her any sense of individuality, it is only by separating from it completely that she can finally create her own spirituality and philosophy. Her experiences in the wilderness, especially her encounter with the bear’s wonder, highlight her growing separation from the culture in which she was raised, for her understanding of the world has splintered from that of the other colonists. Surrounded by the wordless truths of the wilderness, she realizes “that when the godliest of the ministers in the city and in this awful place, back in the fort, spoke on God’s behalf they were only speaking a mote of the far greater truth” (186).
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By Lauren Groff
