‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 95
I wished to see you very much. I watched a long while yesterday on the bank near your
house ... Th en I watched again today, and when I saw the way you took, I kept you in
sight and came down the bank.^39Although Maggie is ‘very glad’ that he has taken this action, it is nonetheless
again indicative that it is not her walking in the Red Deeps but rather Philip’s
opportunistic use of that walk that eff ects subsequent events. A similar pattern
is identifi able in Adam Bede in Arthur’s encounter with Hetty: he thinks of how
the desire to see Hetty had rushed back like an ill-stemmed current ... Th e Hermitage
stood in Fir-tree Grove – the way Hetty was sure to come in walking from the Hall
Farm. So nothing could be simpler and more natural: meeting Hetty was a mere cir-
cumstance of his walk, not his object.^40Each instance works to subvert the implication that female wandering is danger-
ous because of the woman’s actions, instead iterating that the problem is not so
much women’s presence in these spaces but rather men’s actions to abuse that
situation.
In Maggie’s journey down the river it is further noticeable that despite her
lack of compliance with Stephen’s plan and her insistence on turning back, this
counts for nothing on her return. Maggie meets with immediate, strong reproach
from her brother and before she can tell him that she is ‘perhaps not so guilty
as you believe me to be’ and explain how she ‘came back as soon as I could’, she
meets with his condemnation: ‘you have disgraced us all ... you have been base
- deceitful – no motives are strong enough to restrain you’.^41 Th is is echoed, too,
by the community’s response that clearly iterates the sexual double standard:
‘Th e world’s wife, with that fi ne instinct which is given her for the preservation
of society, saw at once that Miss Tulliver’s conduct had been of the most aggra-
vated kind’; meanwhile, Stephen is relieved from responsibility as ‘rather pitiable
than otherwise ... it was clear that he had given way in spite of himself – he had
shaken her off as soon as he could’.^42 Notably it is the ‘world’s wife’ that iterates
these codes, situating women as the ‘preservers’ of social values, and thus strictest
perpetrators of gender ideologies, within the rural community.
What again becomes clear in this response is that the reaction to Maggie’s
behaviour operates via a confl ation of sex and mobility, such that mobility can
come to stand in place of, and be constituted as equally transgressive as, sexual
wrongdoing. Despite the fact that any sexual wrongdoing could only be assumed
and that Stephen writes a letter ‘making her appear quite innocent’, Maggie is
nonetheless positioned and treated as a fallen woman: the very act of going on
a journey with Stephen is, in and of itself, constitutive of ‘fallen’ behaviour.^43
While Tom’s earlier scorn of Maggie focused on the act of walking rather than
the act of sexual transgression, so too does the community’s response to her con-
duct serve to reiterate that Maggie’s mobility, and the terms on which it took
place, count for more than the reality of sexual interaction between Maggie and
Stephen. Just as fallen women could never retain the status of virtue, for the