Colonial Violence and Guilt in Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds

Introduction: The Internalised Stain of Empire

In The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff refuses to let the reader look away from the violence that pulses at the heart of early English colonisation. The novel’s central thematic claim is that colonial brutality is not merely an external force enacted upon Indigenous peoples and the land—it also colonises the conscience of the settlers themselves, embedding a corrosive guilt that can never be fully exorcised. The unnamed girl (often called Lamentations or Zed in criticism) carries this guilt in her body and memory, even as she flees the starving Jamestown-like fort. Her story lays bare how systemic violence is sustained by the complicity of every participant, from the governor to the servant girl who runs.

1. The Fort as a Crucible of Cruelty

The novel opens with the girl escaping a winter night and a fort that has become a charnel house. The outline tells us she steals clothes from a dead boy and her mistress, runs past the corpse of a soldier killed by a Native warrior. From the retrieved evidence, we learn the depth of violence that defines the fort’s existence. In chapter 4, the girl recalls stories told by the settlers: a soldier whose head was cleaved and bread stuffed in his mouth; men who returned from raids with their scalps ripped off; the flaying of a rapist by Indigenous women using oyster shells. These horrors are recounted not as moral critique but as the everyday currency of fear that binds the colony.

Yet the girl’s own reaction reveals the first layer of guilt. She feels the dirty press of the man’s body in the story, as she has felt similar violence in her own life. The evidence shows that “the brutality of the bodies of men, she, herself, did know.” Her empathy for the Indigenous girl who was raped does not lead her to question the colonial project—instead, she merely recognises a shared suffering. Her memory of London’s public executions, with heads on pikes and carts rolling past, undercuts the settlers’ claim that the Powhatan are uniquely savage. “Godlessness and murder,” she reflects, “were certainly not limited to the people of this new country.” This moment marks the beginning of her guilt: she knows the English are no better, and yet she remains inside the walls of the fort, complicit in its existence.

2. The Cannibalism of Bess and the Murder of the Minister

The deepest wound of guilt in the narrative comes from the girl’s memory of the child Bess. Bess, the feverish child the girl nursed, dies of starvation. The stark horror of chapter 22 sits at the novel’s moral centre. After Bess’s burial, the minister and mistress exhume the body and butcher it for meat. The girl watches, frozen, until she sees the mistress—the woman who raised her—“weep and greedily reach” for a morsel of the child’s fried brain. The girl attacks, but she is overpowered.

This scene crystallises the colonial guilt of survival at any cost. The settlers have become so desperate that they devour their own children, even as they claim to bring civilisation. The girl’s flight from the fort is born not from pure innocence—she steals, she lies, she later kills the minister when he seizes her throat. She thrusts a knife into his belly. Her sin, she reflects, “was the sin of murder.” Yet she also knows she was defending her life. The guilt of Bess’s death haunts her more than the killing of the minister. She cannot stop “the horror of what they had done to the body of her sweet girl Bess” from replaying in her mind. The colonial system has forced her into a position where she must kill to escape a community that has itself become a cannibalistic monster.

3. The Vision of an Alternative Self: Complicity and Disease

As the girl lies dying by the river in the final chapters, she experiences a vision of an alternative self who survives alone in the wilderness for decades. In chapter 24, this second self reflects on the arrival of more English ships, watching “vultures blacken the ground with their white scat” as a sign of overabundance. The voice in her vision asks if she rues the loss of her god, and she answers with a devastating realisation: “The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves. I am not of them. I will not be.”

Yet the vision also forces her to acknowledge her own unwitting role in the violence of colonisation. She imagines that if the Indigenous men at the waterfall had carried her to their village, she would have brought smallpox with her. The disease would have “passed from hand to hand” and “set whole villages ablaze.” Her body, even in its suffering, is “complicit though her mind would not have wanted death to seed itself.” This is the most profound articulation of guilt in the novel: the girl recognises that she is a carrier of the English plague, both literal and metaphorical. She cannot separate herself from the project even when she tries to escape it.

The vision also reveals her longing for human connection. The alternative self feels that humans are “never meant to live alone,” but she also acknowledges the fear that kept her from seeking refuge with the Powhatan. The girl’s guilt, then, is not only for what she has done, but for what she has failed to do—to reach out to the “others” who might have saved her. She grieves the long life she might have had “among the other people,” but her fear outweighed her desire.

4. Complexity and Contradiction: Guilt Without Absolution

The novel refuses to offer a clean moral resolution. The girl’s guilt is not washed away by her suffering or her death. In the final chapter, she accepts a vulture as a sign of death, blesses an ant, and “passes into the wind.” There is no afterlife, only returning to nothing. This suggests that guilt is not repaid in some cosmic ledger; it simply is, as permanent as the bodies that fed the soil.

Furthermore, the novel challenges the reader to recognise that the girl is simultaneously a victim and a perpetrator. She is starved, beaten, sexually vulnerable, and orphaned by empire. Yet she steals, she kills, and her very presence on the land is part of the invasion. The symbol of the river represents the division she tries to place between herself and the fort—but the river also carries English disease downstream. The vulture that waits for her in the final chapter is not evil; it is simply the physical manifestation of a cycle that includes her own flesh. The hollow log and fallen tree, which in the novel shelters the hermit who lived forty years without fire, becomes a symbol of the alternative non-violent life the girl could never quite reach.

The glassblower, her lost love, represents the possibility of a domestic future built on love rather than domination. Yet even that future, the novel implies, would have required “acres of meadow” taken from the people of the land. There is no escape from complicity. The only honest response, the novel suggests, is to sit with the guilt and let it transform how we see.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the novel portray the relationship between individual guilt and systemic colonial violence?
   The girl’s individual guilt—for stealing, for killing the minister—is inseparable from the larger violence of the settlement. She internalises the colony’s sins even as she flees them, suggesting that the system colonises the conscience of every participant.

2. Why is the memory of Bess’s cannibalism so central to the girl’s sense of guilt?
   Bess represents innocence and love. The girl’s failure to protect her, and the subsequent dismemberment by the very people who should have cared for her, shatters any moral framework. The girl’s guilt is not about the act of cannibalism per se but about her forced witnessing of a community’s self-devouring.

3. How does the vision of the alternative self complicate the theme of guilt?
   The alternative self lives alone for decades but still recognises that her survival is only possible because of the tolerance of the Powhatan. The vision also forces the girl to acknowledge that she would have spread disease if brought into the village, making her body a weapon of colonial destruction.

4. What role do symbols like the river and the vulture play in the cycle of guilt and violence?
   The river is both a barrier and a channel of infection, representing the impossibility of escaping the colony’s reach. The vulture is a natural scavenger, but its presence in the final chapters underscores how the girl’s death is part of a larger system of consumption—the same system that consumed Bess.

5. Is the girl ultimately redeemed by her death? Why or why not?
   No. The novel offers no redemption. The girl’s consciousness dissolves into the wind without judgment or forgiveness. This suggests that guilt is not something to be absolved but something to be borne with awareness. Her final blessing of the ant is an acknowledgement of the value of all life, even in the face of the violence she has inherited.