When I was young, I somehow learned to love wilderness stories. There are lots of them to be found, in the dusty old storehouse of the American literary tradition. I narrowly avoided an English major in college (I studied Spanish and Comparative Literature, instead...) But I took a lot of English courses (including this nature-rich one). I became obsessed with Emerson’s theories of nature, and Thoreau’s iconoclasm (I even wrote a profile of a living historian who “plays” Thoreau, at Walden). And then I got into more contemporary writers, like Edward Abbey. I was intoxicated by their visions of something mystical and quasi-divine out there, in the wilderness.
Inspired by these writers, I decided in my early twenties that becoming myself meant getting out into the wilderness, on my own. It didn’t take long for this vision to be dashed against the rocks. Maybe the moment it all fell apart for me was when I decided to hike Mount Khatadin all by myself, one weekend while I was living in Maine. It’s the tallest mountain in the state, with an infamous trail at the summit that’s almost a mile long and is so perilously thin, it’s been dubbed the Knife’s Edge. The worst part of it wasn’t even the hike. It was the night I spent, camping out at the bottom of the trail, alone. There were groups of men camping, all around me. I spent the entire night awake, in my tent, sleeplessly terrified that someone would attack me.
The following morning I made it all the way up to the Knife’s Edge. When I arrived the wind was so powerful, I couldn’t stand up straight. But there was this little voice inside my head—my inner Thoreau maybe—that was laughing at me, trying to convince me that I was just scared. I sat behind a rock, staring at the trail that stared back at me, for close to an hour. Then this fit and jolly French Canadian couple came bounding up the trail and were like, “oh, this wind is dangerous!” They folded me under their wings, ushered me down the mountain, and I was so grateful for their companionship I almost cried. I repented for my hubris, and it only slowly began to dawn on me that I’d been overdosing on stories about the more than human world written by (white) men, for (white) men.
That was the beginning of my education in ecofeminism, I guess you could say. I don’t think I realized that’s what it was until I was in graduate school and actually began to read ecofeminist theory, which made the argument that patriarchy was the twin domination/exploitation of women and nature (Carol Adam’s Sexual Politics of Meat makes this point very concisely). I’ve always found that basic argument to be pretty intuitively appealing, though at some point ecofeminism as a theoretical framework lost its appeal for me. I think it was, in part, because the spiritual seasoning of it seemed to be a little saccharine. Ecofeminist texts always seemed to be suggesting that there was a kind of salvation in the solidarity of women and nature. But I felt like there was also something horrifying in nature (and in women!) that always seemed to go unaddressed.
I recently finished reading Lauren Groff’s new book, The Vaster Wilds, and I was left with the feeling that while there were ecofeminist dimensions to the story (she’s certainly critical of the way that men dominate both women and nature), it also illuminated that dimension of wilderness horror that I’ve often felt goes missing from these explorations of solidarity between women and nature.
Life in the Vaster Wild
I loved Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which was a strange portrait of mystical power and ruthlessness, in a medieval abbey filled with nuns. But I loved The Vaster Wilds more, I think. Judith Shulevitz has called it a “new gospel.” But I happen to think of it as something more like a horror story. As Victoria Nelson has argued (and I recently discussed), horror is the genre in which religious ideas most frequently show up in secular contexts. Theology is a buried, repressed, element of secular modernity that threatens to reappear. So, while there are certainly moments of great beauty in the novel, horror feels like the right word to me, maybe in part because the book offers some serious theological contemplation: how horrifying!
There is really only one character in The Vaster Wilds. She’s referred to as “the girl”, and we learn almost immediately that she’s escaped from famine (and other horrors) at the Jamestown fort. Over the course of the novel other characters from her past appear, as we learn about the journey that brought her to the new colony. But most of the novel follows in her wake as she tries to stay alive in the hostile and frigid wilderness, all on her own.
There’s a lot of horror in her simple attempts to stay alive. There are graphic descriptions of her inability to keep food down, when she first begins to eat again after leaving the famine behind. A fish that the girl finds frozen in the ice quickly becomes a mess of barely digested shit that fails to nourish her. Given the sparse plot line, I found the novel surprisingly suspenseful. And I suppose that its central tensions were animated, more than anything, by a constant sense of nervous anxiety that the girl would (at any moment) just die. All of this lends to an underlying tenor of horror in the text.
The most horrifying elements of the narrative, however, are the men. The girl’s attempts to stay alive on her own, out in the vaster wild, are terrifying. But it’s also clear that as bad as it is, it’s better than where she comes from. As she reflects, out in the wilderness, the world she comes from is “worse than savage.” It’s not just the human world that’s horrifying. It’s the men of that world. The girl has, as we learn, lived through much abuse and exploitation. Her life (in England, on the ship across the ocean, and in Jamestown) as a woman with dark skin has been filled with it. And it’s the mostly godly men in the story (such as the handsome but lecherous minister, who marries the widow she’s been indentured to) who are the worst of all. As she notes, men “particularly the godly ones” have “little common sense.” More than that, however, they also seem to be irreparably brutal.
Knowing this, about her backstory, it makes sense that she would experience the hovering sense of potential annihilation that she experiences out in the woods as a kind of liberation. The woods, the wilderness, the vaster wild are all innocent in ways that the world (the one built by human colonizers) cannot be. In the vaster wild, she becomes no one. A nothing. But, she observes, “with no past, a nothing could be free.” Out in the vaster wild, she begins to see things differently. Living among birds and bears, her sense of life (and what might be of most value within it, what might merit the description “divine”) expands and blossoms. She becomes thoughtful, and curious.
I kept thinking that the vaster wild would be her salvation. That, outside the patriarchal world where men exploit women and nature, she would be liberated: that God would save her, in the divine form of Nature. I didn’t necessarily want the story to end that way, I suppose. But I expected it to. It’s a familiar storyline.
The vaster wild is certainly a mystical space, for the girl. She seems to catch a glimpse of God in several different ways. During one phase of the story, God is a pinprick of light inside of her. But then the light goes dark. At another point, she sees God at work as a strange matrix embedded in material reality, connecting all things. But then it becomes difficult to find. Every vision of the divine that she catches hold of seems to disappear and slip away. There’s a kind of iconoclasm or apophaticism at work in the text that speaks a vision of God, and then unsays it.
Perhaps the most cogent and lasting theological observation she makes is when she’s staring at a bear, who’s staring at the water (this reminded me of Jane Goodall’s observation of chimps waterfall displays). The girl wonders to herself if perhaps the bear has caught a glimpse of God. She then has a realization that the humans she knows (the Christian sort she’s grown up with) have essentially tried to colonize God. But the indigenous people of the land already know God, through different means and methods. And the bears and birds and other creatures also know God, in a way that she will never be able to access or experience. And they must be convinced of the rightness and realness of their God, too.
There’s a little chill of horror, in this realization. She’s not left feeling confidently filled with divine presence, but instead overwhelmed with the vastness of divine mystery. In that moment she’s not saved. She’s not rescued from the pain of life and death, or the smallness of her own being. Rather, she’s a totally contingent being, caught up in the flow of things like a fish in the water. Or like a bear watching the river flow. There’s nothing more permanent than that flow. Nothing saves her from its incessant mysterious movements.
It’s unsettling, it’s a little horrifying. But it’s also wise. This acute sense of contingency is what always comes to mind, for me, when I see people reference that strange old phrase the fear of God. Unsettling though it may be, I’ve never been convinced that it’s possible to see anything beautiful in divine visions if they’re not limned with a little of that fear. It’s not a fear of a violent annihilation. It’s the important fear that we might see something true: that we are, like the fish, just little swimmers in this wild rushing river of life.
I Don’t Want to Survive in the Vaster Wild
I have been subject to romanticize wilderness, in my own life. It was a romance from when I was foolish and young, we could say. But I’ve come to be skeptical of the drive to be liberated by that vaster wild. Groff’s novel certainly made me feel that, if I had the chance to somehow survive alone in the vaster wild, I don’t think I’d want it. The book was a reminder of the fact that aloneness and wilderness are unlikely to sustain most of us beyond mere survival.
There is a potent mystery in the vaster wild. And remembering that is enough for me.
What I want, deeply, is the tender laughter I share with those who can understand my words, the closeness and the warmth of community. The awe I might feel, in the face of the vaster wild, is profound. It can incite a profound sort of knowledge. But it scares me, too. Those places where I feel most connected to the more than human world are also those places where I am subject to feel most alone and afraid. I don’t want to avoid these feelings. I don’t want to avoid the vaster wild. I want to know that it’s out there. I want to come into contact with it, brush up against it, from time to time. But I don’t want to get lost—not yet—in the vaster wild. I don’t think I could survive in the vaster wild. Not for long anyhow. But perhaps that understanding is exactly what the vaster wild needs from me.