94 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
lover, else that could never have happened’.^34 Tom’s assumption that she ‘must have’
behaved improperly signals not that he assumes sexual interaction to have taken
place, but rather that the very act of walking-out is in and of itself immodest behav-
iour. Mobility and sexuality are at once confl ated and simultaneously disentangled,
such that the act of mobility is not only representative of sexual impropriety but is
itself immodest enough that it can stand in lieu of that behaviour.
Th is becomes more pertinently reiterated in a further instance in which Mag-
gie and Stephen meet in a space of mobility. When the arrangement of a boat
party falls through, Maggie and Stephen are left to go out on the river together
for what Maggie thinks will be a brief trip: ‘we shall not be long together’.^35 Mag-
gie’s awareness again of the impropriety of the act is accompanied by a strong
emphasis on her passivity throughout the episode. In getting onto the boat, for
example, the narrative describes how
Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped
with fi rm tender care into the boat ... all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear
her along without any act of her own will ... and she felt nothing else.^36Th e passage initially remains dubious as to how responsible Maggie is for her
actions, but as the journey progresses there develops a clearer indication of her
lack of consent in being led away: Maggie stares idly from the boat ‘only dimly
conscious of the banks’, while Stephen knowingly takes her further and further
from their intended destination.^37 On Maggie’s discovery of the mistake, it tran-
spires that Stephen has meanwhile been planning the direction that events can
now take: ‘everything has come together without our seeking’, he tells her, ‘see
how the tide is carrying us out – away from all those unnatural bonds that we
have been trying to make faster round us’. Maggie’s distress – she is ‘in an agony’,
and ‘she clasped her hands and broke into a sob’ – is met by a calmness in Stephen
that, although he says that he has ‘contrived nothing, we have thought of noth-
ing ourselves’, nonetheless sees him insist that their only option is to ‘hurry on to
York, and then to Scotland – and never pause a moment till we are bound to each
other so that only death can part us’. Maggie becomes ‘faint and trembling with
fear’, having no option but to be drawn into a plan that, at best, will now take her
several days to return home from and will still be ruinous to her reputation.^38
It is notable, then, that this episode recasts the way in which mobility is sexu-
ally problematic for women: Stephen’s behaviour is written in such a way as to
suggest that it is the predatory nature of men, rather than the sexual availabil-
ity of women, that is at work here. Although Maggie complies with his wish to
travel in the boat, thus taking herself into a space where she may be perceived as
sexually available, Eliot highlights instead that it is Stephen’s actions that prey
upon her presence there. Th is draws to light a feature that is present in the other
mobile encounters between men and women in both novels: in the Red Deeps
episodes between Philip and Maggie it is again noticeable that their encounter
has been orchestrated by Philip: