‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 91
form to the social expectations of femininity and her habit of ‘wanderin’ like a
wild thing’ is just one aspect of a character that refuses the constraints of typical
notions of femininity – clean pinafores, neat hair – and signals an association
with an uncivilized, untamed nature. Yet it is signifi cant that her ‘wildness’ is
expressed through a reference to mobility, indicating that the primary issue at
stake is Maggie’s ‘wandering’ beyond the place of the home: it is wandering, and
the threat to social order that this uncontained mobility represents, that consti-
tutes the true wildness of Maggie’s behaviour.
Mrs Tulliver’s dismay at Maggie’s wandering also emphasizes cleanliness: her
chief problem is ‘how to keep her in a clean pinafore two hours together’, and
in a similar vein we are later told that her brother Tom’s ‘contemptuous concep-
tion of a girl included the attribute of being unfi t to walk in dirty places’.^17 Th is
introduces a further association between femininity and dirt, picking up on the
symbolic resonances of purity and cleanliness in the ideal construct of feminin-
ity, set against the moral and social uncleanliness of women who stray beyond
the bounds of feminine respectability. If girls are ‘unfi t to walk in dirty places’
then wandering women, it is implied, risk the association with moral impurity.
Th e connections between wandering and wildness forged here thus immedi-
ately situate women’s walking as problematic; this represents the start of a theme
that develops as Maggie grows up into an articulation of the wildness of wander-
ing as more specifi cally connected to female sexuality. Aft er a lapse of several
years, in book 5 we encounter Maggie now at seventeen years old and see the
fi rst glimpse of her having developed from a girl into ‘the mould of early wom-
anhood’ whilst she is out walking in the Red Deeps: the narrator describes her
‘broad-chested fi gure’, with her ‘dark colouring and jet crown surmounting her
tall fi gure’; her ‘brown cheek is fi rm and rounded, the full lips are red’ and she is
said to ‘seem to have a sort of kinship with the grand Scotch fi rs’.^18 Her entrance
into sexual maturity is revealed through, and thus connected with, the natural
outdoor space and with the act of walking out alone, suggestive of the way in
which women have traditionally been associated with nature and the rural land-
scape as a feminine, sexualized space.^19 Th e language throughout the passage also
carries sexual connotations, alluding to ‘pleasure’ and ‘indulgence’. Maggie her-
self is a chaste young woman, but the surroundings in which she appears signal
the potentially perilous implications of her presence in that space.
Maggie’s childhood wildness thus becomes recast, as she matures, to be
more clearly suggestive of the connections between sexual dangers and women
wandering alone out of doors. In turning to Adam Bede, similar issues are dem-
onstrated in Hetty Sorrel’s narrative which commences when she is already at
maturity. Th e class dynamics of Adam Bede situate Hetty’s walking within a dif-
ferent context: Maggie Tulliver’s wandering in the Red Deeps is possible due to
the relative amount of free time in her day as a middle-class woman, but for the