96 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
woman who has travelled away in such circumstances, nothing can reclaim her
virtuous status; the perception of female mobility amounts to the same thing
and results in the same structure of social condemnation as that employed for
sexual fallenness.
Furthermore, the full hypocrisy of the community is made clear through
another iteration of mobility: had Maggie’s journey taken a diff erent form and
she had returned ‘aft er a few months of well-chosen travel, as Mrs Stephen Guest
- with a post-marital trousseau’ then public opinion ‘would have judged in strict
consistency with those results’ – that is to say, she would have been accepted
back into the community as the rightful wife of Stephen.^44 Th e honeymoon
journey would have rendered Maggie acceptable, absorbing her into the com-
munity of ‘the world’s wife’ that represents the only socially acceptable position
for women in this society; instead, her journey stands as a failed attempt that
casts her out from this possibility.
Th e narratives thus use mobility to make visible the sexual moral codes of
the community and the gendered imbalances through which it is structured: at
no other point do the texts explore these codes to such an extent. At the same
time, this last example suggests that they also draw attention to crucial distinc-
tions that make clear the ways in which the condemnation of female mobility is
not just a corollary of the sexual moral code but comes to constitute transgres-
sion in and of itself. Th is ability to detach sexuality from mobility is important
because this begins to suggest that these narratives are not only concerned with
the damaging implications of the sexual moral codes placed on women but also
the eff ects of a gendered politics of mobility in which female movement – and
thus, freedom and individual agency – is repeatedly curtailed and constrained.
In and Out of Place: Women and Rural Space
Despite the apparent diff erences between the rural locales of each novel, both
places are clearly situated within the wider context of the region and the nation.
In Th e Mill on the Floss, a wider network of trade is immediately signalled: the
novel opens with ‘the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the
sea ... on this mighty tide the black ships ... are borne along’.^45 So too is Maggie
distinctly knowledgeable ‘all about the diff erent sorts of people in the world’,
from the ‘Dutchmen very fat, and smoking’, to the ‘lion countries ... Africa,
where it’s very hot’.^46 Yet this opens up a painful contradiction for Maggie, as
reading and learning about the world beyond her limited sphere breeds dis-
content with the constraints of her situation: she tells Philip that reading ‘has
made me restless – it has made me think a great deal about the world; and I have
impatient thoughts again – I get weary of my home’.^47 Indeed it is notable that
the one opportunity that would take Maggie into the wider world is curtailed: