62 pages • 2-hour read
Willa of the Wood
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Themes
Content Warning: This section discusses physical and emotional abuse, cultural erasure and assimilation, murder, violence, animal suffering and death, child death and injury, and the systemic abuse of Indigenous people.
The Importance of Identity and Belonging
Throughout the novel, Willa struggles to determine her own identity and figure out where she belongs, caught between her devotion to her Faeran clan and her need to be truly loved and cared for. As Faeran society buckles and breaks under the weight of the padaran’s corrupt leadership, Willa’s journey to a loving new home with Nathaniel explores the importance of identity and belonging.
The role of culture is especially important in the novel, intimately shaping the characters’ sense of identity. Willa identifies herself at first as devotedly Faeran, regarding both the Indigenous Cherokee people and the white settlers as “other.” She even fears and mistrusts humans, having believed the Faerans’ prejudiced stories painting humans as irredeemably destructive and evil. Willa’s gradual acceptance of life with humans shows that identity can be more flexible and that belonging often depends on coexisting and accepting other peoples and cultures.
Nathaniel represents a healthier alternative to the Faerans’ clannish, insular mentality. He is a white man, married to a Cherokee woman, and all their children have Cherokee names and long hair, showing their retention of that culture. Similarly, Nathaniel never tries to change Willa’s ways. While the padaran, a Faeran man himself, tries to force the Faeran people to speak only English and forbids witchcraft, Nathaniel only expresses interest in her culture and introduces human practices to help her expand her world, not limit it. Willa can belong with Nathaniel and his family because they understand how to welcome difference and embrace it, not erase it in favor of homogeny and “safeness.” She is not only free to be Faeran with them, but encouraged to be, showing their capacity for love and acceptance.
At the same time, the complete loss of Willa’s connection to her people shows that, no matter how safe the Steadman family may be, Willa must endure the rejection of her original community. While she can stand alone and maintain the traditions she knows, the Faeran people will grow in a different direction without her and the guidance of her grandmother she retains, implying that they will eventually diverge from her completely.
While the Faeran people might become healthy and retain much of their cultural knowledge, their rejection of Willa separates her from that growth, forcing her to develop her own identity—permanently. With the love and support of the Steadman family, she ends the novel as a fully realized, independent person, even though the loss of her literal connection to her people is undeniably tragic.
The Role of Family in Resisting Oppression
Willa’s family, whether biological or chosen, is a key part of the novel and her journey. While the padaran is ultimately revealed as Willa’s conniving uncle, Willa learns that family is not defined by blood ties alone, but by genuine love and care. Armed with this knowledge, Willa is able to reject her uncle’s corrupt leadership and find a healthier family unit with her found family. In tracing Willa’s changing understanding of what it means to have a family, the novel examines the role of family in resisting oppression.
Willa’s first family is almost all dead by the time the novel begins, except for her disabled and magically powerful grandmother, Mamaw. Although Willa believes they were killed by humans, it is eventually revealed that the padaran—her father’s brother—called for their deaths so they would not reveal the truth about him. Willa’s family was a threat because they were determined to preserve the “truth,” or the old ways of the Faeran, through their children. The padaran’s choice to murder his family cements his doom, as it leaves him an isolated and precarious figure.
By contrast, Willa’s yearning for the family she lost helps her to resist the corrupt, evil influence of her uncle, the padaran. The lies he tells to manipulate her are not enough to keep her controlled by the jaetters’ cult tactics. Even dead, Willa’s family helps her resist the padaran’s control, because thanks to her grandmother and her connection to the natural world, she understands that they are never truly gone. Willa’s commitment to upholding her family’s true values gives her the strength and motivation she needs to unmask her uncle towards the novel’s close.
Willa’s second family, chosen primarily as Nathaniel, then gives her the strength to finish the narrative and stamp out the padaran’s evil ways. Willa and Nathaniel need one another and grow together by choice, even though it is not something either of them expect. Willa, however, maintains an idea of family as something that happens once, not something that can be chosen and grow beyond normative boundaries. Her love for Nathaniel pushes her to find his children, even when she believes this will erase her place in his life.
Willa’s devotion and love is what pushes her to resist the padaran and free Nathaniel’s children, even if it harms her. In doing so, she discovers that family and love are not limited. Instead, families are capable of changing, growing, and adapting, just like people. Nathaniel and his children embrace Willa as one of their own, with Willa realizing that it is love and care, not blood ties, that truly define a family.
The Challenges of Growing Through Grief
Grief is a central theme in the novel, with nearly every character having lost something or someone very important to them: Willa loses her family and then her grandmother, Nathaniel loses his wife, children, and dog, many of the Faeran lose their twins, and the land itself loses control over nature to the loggers. How these characters deal with grief demonstrates the varying responses people can have to grief, as well as what responses are helpful or harmful to oneself and others. The novel ultimately suggests that grief is a normal part of life, but that the best way to cope with it is to grow through it despite the challenges it poses.
Both Nathaniel and Willa are first introduced as people who have experienced intense loss. Nathaniel is quick to anger and suspicious of others due to his grief over his wife and children. When Willa gets to know him, she almost immediately realizes he is grieving: He openly cries and spends his days doing seemingly senseless things out of desperation for closure over his children’s disappearance. Nathaniel’s efforts to move on have failed; he “buried” his children but still can’t process their deaths. Willa, too, has not yet moved on from the deaths of her family, and still dwells on Alliw and her grandmother, wondering what life would be like if they were still alive.
Their paralleled experiences and empathy for one another reveals that “moving on” is impossible and even unhelpful. Neither Willa nor Nathaniel needs to “move on,” they need to learn how to process their grief together, allowing themselves to have a family again without replacing their love and need for the world they once had. Willa realizes later in the novel that Alliw is an inherent part of her: There is nothing she can do that will make her “lose” Alliw again, thus allowing Willa to live and experience joy again without guilt. Nathaniel realizes that the world still offers beauty and meaning, and once again opens his heart to love in learning to care for Willa.
By contrast, the dangers of stagnancy in the face of grief are presented in the decay of the Faeran people. The “loss” of their old ways, and their collective inability to culturally process this loss, has made them literally rot. Even though they are not consciously grieving, the Faeran people are stagnant and unliving, much as Nathaniel initially is in the novel. Willa’s moments of stagnancy are much briefer within the novel. After each large loss, she always sits with her grief for a time before nature reminds her to keep moving and living. By the novel’s end, Willa has learned both to honor her grief and to grow through the experience of it, helping her find a balance between loving and preserving the memory of what she has lost while giving her the strength to face the future.
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