'The wildest land', a frontier story without testosterone celebrations

Lauren Groff explains that she found the germ of her latest novel,

The Wildest Land , flipping through

Smithsonian

magazine

in a waiting room. The report detailed what life was like in Jamestown, the first British settlement in the New World. Built in 1609 on the banks of the James River, in present-day Virginia, the fort was a deadly focus of disease constantly besieged by the local natives. Already in the first years it was devastated by a famine that killed most of its reckless inhabitants. A detail impressed the writer and she remained floating in her subconscious: a team of archaeologists found there the corpse of a fourteen-year-old girl with unmistakable signs of having been cannibalized.

It is from this strong sinister that the protagonist flees on the first page of the novel. Although neither the place nor the girl have a name, and the forest through which she runs in terror could be any wild and untamed place on the planet. We know that she is a servant, that she came by ship from the old world and that she maintains feverish conversations with her consciousness, which she identifies with the voice of God. The girl advances without pause, besieged by real and imaginary horrors (most of them real), such as the soldiers who are undoubtedly pursuing her to punish an enigmatic crime, the indigenous people with their skin covered in clay who would skewer her without hesitation, and, above all, nature itself, that brutal and indifferent mystery. She has the vague plan of heading north, towards the French colonies, where she hopes to take refuge from the cruelty and despair of her compatriots. She carries with her three or four items stolen from the fort, which do not include a scale map.

A pressing problem is the cold: the girl advances in the absolute winter that preceded the cities, the asphalt and the methane gas emissions. The other setback is hunger, which was already accentuated by the famine in the fort. This combination of factors makes it difficult not to think about

The Snow Society

, another epic tale of survival in frigid, extreme conditions. A reader who knows the distance between Virginia and Quebec knows that the feat the girl proposes is as improbable as returning alive from twelve weeks in the Andes. She herself has no illusions: “she knew that the world was worse than savage, the world was impassive.” And yet, the survival instinct trumps fear, resulting in a repetitive and extremely detailed struggle to light fires and find shelter from the elements. She also sharpens her wits, and minimizes her conscientiousness, when it comes to getting food: brutally decapitated baby squirrels, larvae, oysters, fish, berries, honey stolen straight from the honeycomb.

North American frontier stories tend to be testosterone celebrations of the solitary man in the face of nature. In

The Wildest Land

the protagonist is female, which multiplies the potential dangers and turns the novel into a metaphor for what it means to be a woman in the world. Thanks to her daydreams and

flashbacks

, we know that the girl was a victim of sexual violence there in the metropolis. Her relationship with men, with the exception of a lover who died a brutal death, is one of distrust and hatred. The girl knows that as much as she longs for the warmth of community, marital love, and faith in God, she only has herself. This is how this female Robinson Crusoe of the 17th century ends up embodying a feminist consciousness—and, as her journey progresses, an environmentalist and anticolonial consciousness—much more typical of our times.

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