90 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
the simultaneous strengthening of a discourse of respectable femininity meant
that walking out alone or with a man became problematic for even the most
reputable of women such that, as Linda McDowell writes, ‘the very act of their
appearance on the streets left the status of women open to interpretation and,
oft en, to unwanted sexual attentions’.^9 Th ese discourses might typically be associ-
ated with the urban environment but, as Karen Sayer recognizes, ‘the projection
of urban concerns onto the rural’ was typical in discourses of sexuality and these
ideas thus resonated with equal strength in rural contexts.^10 Furthermore, the
associations between walking and sex were present in the concept of ‘walking
out’ which constituted a traditional part of rural lower-class courtship patterns
and, as Anne Wallace writes, was oft en ‘understood to include sexual intercourse
... the lovers’ walk [providing ] the perfect opportunity for such activity’.^11
Women’s walking could also carry positive connotations as a feminine pursuit,
‘the country lady’s amusement’, as Dorothy Wordsworth wrote.^12 In novels such
as Pride and Prejudice, Solnit identifi es, the walk is ‘both socially and spatially the
widest latitude available to the women contained within these social strictures, the
activity in which they fi nd a chance to exert body and imagination’.^13 It is also oft en
a space of female companionship, providing an opportunity for friendships to
form: in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, for example, walking in the woodland solidi-
fi es women’s connections to one another and to the natural environment.^14
Walking also connotes a further set of associations in the rural context, sug-
gesting the nostalgic formulation of the rural as space away from the forces of
modernity. If new forms of mobility were becoming increasingly widespread
by the mid-nineteenth century, then walking resonated as a persistence of pre-
Industrial transport modes, seemingly playing into the cultural evocation of
rurality as remote and pre-modern. In this vein, Wallace suggests that in Adam
Bede walking operates as ‘a sign or agent of continuity with an imagined Eng-
lish past, a more rural and more communal way of life’ which contributes to
the novel’s continued assertion of ‘the possibility of some recovery of past value
into an “existing society”’.^15 However, this obscures the fact that even by the late
1850s walking continued to be a necessary form of mobility for many of the
rural working classes, constituting part of the daily fabric of the present-day rural
context and thus, as we see in Eliot’s usage, could fi gure as a meaningful site for
engaging with contemporary discourses around female mobility.
Th e associations between wildness and wandering are forged from early
childhood in Th e Mill on the Floss in the narrative of Maggie Tulliver. Maggie’s
mischievous nature is immediately signalled through her mother’s complaints:
‘how to keep her in a clean pinafore two hours together passes my cunning’ notes
Mrs Tulliver, citing her particular fondness for ‘wanderin’ up an’ down by the
water, like a wild thing : she’ll tumble in some day’.^16 Th e use of ‘wild’ here is
indicative of Maggie’s character: she is of a passionate nature that does not con-