‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 97
while making her way home alone from the journey upriver with Stephen she
fi nds herself in York for the night, but while the city would off er the potential
for escape and independence aft er Maggie’s perceived transgression – a freedom
that becomes available to Stephen Guest – she returns immediately home, cast
back upon the rural environment as the only space available to her.^48
In Adam Bede, discussions of the wider world are opened up primarily
through Dinah Morris, the female preacher, who speaks of regional variation
in the people and landscapes that she traverses.^49 Yet although Dinah represents
a rare opportunity for female mobility, the narrative does little to explore the
implications and meanings of her mobility as an act of independence or free-
dom, and in this context it serves primarily to highlight the contrast with Hetty’s
limited sphere. As we have already seen, Hetty’s movements in the local area
are constrained by her aunt, and we are further told that her ‘farthest journey
had been to Rosseter on the pillion with her uncle’.^50 Hetty’s situation isn’t
unusual: as Gillian Beer notes, there is a ‘heavy weighting’ of people in place
through labour and Dinah is ‘the only person in the book who can travel freely
and without consequences’.^51 But Hetty is distinguished from others through
her expression of a desire to move further away: she wishes ‘to go for a lady’s
maid’ which would help her escape social condemnation for her wrongdoing,
but this wish is immediately curbed by her uncle.^52 In this suppressed potential
of moving away, Hetty serves to reiterate the structure of the rural locale as a
place where, as Lucie Armitt writes of the novel, ‘whatever happens, hearth and
home will always be waiting. It is a reassuring refl ection of rural “real” life for
patriarchs, but less promising for female readers’.^53
However, Hetty’s narrative takes another divergence from this structure, for
as fallen woman she cannot be the ideal ‘keeper of home and hearth’ and her
sexual transgression results in movement away from the community. Having
concealed the pregnancy for as long as she can, Hetty fears the discovery of her
‘great dread’ and perceives that her only options are to drown herself or to fl ee in
search of Arthur. A long journey ensues that, in the symbolic terms of the text,
operates as an articulation of the penalties for Hetty’s earlier actions: as Parkins
writes, ‘the “wandering” woman literalises sexual transgression’ and Hetty’s wan-
dering journey stands as a fi tting assertion of gender codes that necessitate the
punishment of the fallen woman.^54 But in taking Hetty across a range of rural
locations between the Midlands and Windsor, the journey also serves to further
examine the diffi culties of women’s position in the rural landscape.
Th e narration of Hetty’s journey is notable fi rstly for the physically strenuous
eff ects on her body and the mental anxiety that are centred in the text: Hetty is
struck by ‘the terror of wandering out into the world, of which she knew noth-
ing’, and throughout the long, arduous journey she is oft en described as ‘weak
and tired’, ‘very weary too with these days of new fatigue and anxiety’, such that