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The nameless female protagonist in Lauren Groff’s new novel “The Wide Wilderness” may be one of the loneliest characters in world literature. At the beginning of the 17th century, the young maid of an English lady escapes from the stockade of Fort Jamestown, wanders through the late winter forests of Virginia and is completely on her own.
Their escape has primarily to do with hunger and the authoritarian order in the first English settlement in North America. This was created in 1607 and is an integral part of the American culture of remembrance and is also considered the nucleus of the British Empire. This great world story contrasts radically with the experiences of the young woman who fights for survival during her winter escape. She is afraid of being taken back to Jamestown. The life of the first English settlers in America at the beginning of the 17th century was hard and deprived and is known in English-language historiography as the “Starving Time”. A smallpox epidemic also spread among the settlers, from which many died. Lauren Groff stages all of this in an almost disturbing way in her new novel.
The author, who was born in 1978 and lives in Florida, very cleverly combines real history and literary fiction in her novels, for example in her critically acclaimed novel “Matrix” (2022) about the medieval French poet Marie de France. And so at the center of “The Wide Wilderness” is a woman who has to fight against resistance and impending dangers. In 300 pages, Groff’s heroine wanders through seemingly endless North America. In flashbacks we gradually learn something about her past. Abandoned on the streets in London, she ends up in an orphanage and at the age of five comes to her mistress, for whom she has to look after a baby. In those years the plague raged in London. The maid survives the epidemics time and time again, but sees many people die. Eventually she is taken by her mistress to the New World, where nothing is as bright and magnificent as it is supposed to be.
“The Vast Wilderness” is a radical counter-narrative to the American founding myth. Instead of male heroic figures who supposedly discover new land and missionize the local residents with their Christian faith in order to build a new society, the entire presence of the white conquerors is marked by failure. The settlers endure hunger, illness, death and experience bloody conflicts with the indigenous groups towards whom they behave hostilely and violently.
Groff tells the story vividly and unvarnishedly about an authoritarian and violent order in which the young maid is stuck and from which she frees herself, only to wander lonely, abandoned and desperate through a wilderness that is hostile to her life. All she has is a flint, a hatchet, boots she stole from Fort Jamestown, and a blanket, which is also soon singed by the campfire.
The desperate teenage pioneer keeps dreaming of a young sailor with whom she fell in love during the crossing, but who died in a storm. The horror of memories of the plague, the beatings and the sexual assaults she suffered in London is mixed with the fear of wild animals, hunger and the worry of being alone forever. The question of whether or not she will actually meet anyone runs as a common thread through this novel, which remains very suspenseful until the last page. The young woman increasingly doubts all certainties, including God, which is a radical step for her time. The idea of conquering the world and subjugating it seems increasingly absurd to her. With this struggling hermit who marches feverishly through the New World, Lauren Groff has created an extraordinary literary character who adds a whole new perspective to the American founding myth.
Lauren Groff: The Vast Wilderness. A.d. American English v. Stefanie Jakobs. Claasen, 288 p., hardcover, €25.
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