‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 89
nithorne, and fi nds herself pregnant as a result of the aff air but seeks to conceal
the pregnancy from those around her. By the time the birth draws near Arthur has
departed with his army regiment to Windsor and Hetty sets off , alone and on foot,
in search of him. She arrives to fi nd that she is too late and reverses her movement,
but in the course of her journey gives birth, and in a hasty panic she hides the baby
in the woods where it is soon discovered, dead. Hetty is tried and found guilty of
child-murder for which she is sentenced fi rst to death and then, with a last-minute
plea, to transportation to Australia. In Th e Mill on the Floss the provincial locale
centres around the activity of Dorlcote Mill on the banks of the River Floss, and
includes the nearby town of St Ogg’s, another fi ctionalized Midlands place. Th e
narrative traces Maggie’s development from childhood to early womanhood, and
sees her become involved in two forbidden relationships: fi rst with Philip Wakem,
son of the lawyer with whom her father has a long-standing feud that reaches its
climax in Wakem’s purchase of the Tulliver mill; and then with Stephen Guest, the
lover of Maggie’s cousin Lucy. Th e narrative of Maggie and Stephen culminates in
a misguided attempt by Stephen to persuade Maggie to elope, rowing her miles
downriver and causing an absence of several days. Maggie meets with strong con-
demnation for her actions once she returns home, and her fate is fi nally sealed in
the fl ood of the Floss that drowns Maggie and her brother Tom.
Th e novels thus chart a trajectory of female sexuality through a structural use
of mobility, with signifi cant journeys marking crucial stages in the development
of each novel. Th is further extends to a representational use of mobility through-
out the novels, and in order to fully interpret the movements of each text it is
fi rst helpful to explore the wider dynamics and intersections of gender, rurality
and mobility at this point in the century.
Th e historically problematic connotations of female mobility are well docu-
mented in feminist literature, which recognizes that women’s presence within
and movement through public spaces represents a distinct challenge to the
discursive gendering of public/private spaces as masculine/feminine.^6 Th e cul-
tural denigration of female mobility has frequently centred on the association
of mobility with sexuality, freedom of movement indicating the freedom of ‘a
sexuality that needs to be controlled and contained’ as Rebecca Solnit writes;
furthermore, as Wendy Parkins identifi es, the connections between mobility
and sexuality also attest to a profound cultural anxiety about ‘a potentially unfet-
tered female agency’.^7
Within this wider discourse of sexuality and mobility, it is walking that entails
the strongest sexual connotations – encapsulated in the use of ‘streetwalking’
to signify prostitution, a usage which directly associates female mobility with
sexual promiscuity.^8 With the rise in social and medical literature concerned
with the growing problem of prostitution in the mid-nineteenth-century city,
the streetwalker became a particularly pertinent and widely discussed fi gure;