‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 99
between women and landscape as being in harmony with one another: far from
being ‘in place’ or at one with nature in her rural walk, Hetty’s body is worn down
by movement through a diffi cult and hostile space.
Th is sense of being out of place is further obvious in the fi nal stages of her jour-
ney. On reaching Windsor, Hetty fi nds that she has missed Arthur and therefore
decides to retrace her route to the Midlands, drawn back by the thought of ‘the
grassy Warwickshire fi elds, with the bushy tree-studded hedgerows’.^60 On arriv-
ing in the region she has longed for, she wanders out into the fi elds away from
habitation and fi nds ‘a sense of escape’ in isolation from the sight of others. Here
the natural environment becomes fi gured as a protective, comforting landscape
in which Hetty can fi nd relief; noticeably this is the relief of privacy rather than
any affi liation with nature, but for a moment Eliot enables Hetty to fi nd a space of
solitude in the landscape.^61 Her relief is soon ended, however, by ‘an elderly man
in a smock-frock’ who challenges her for wandering off the road:
But what do you do gettin’ out o’ the highroad ... Y ’ull be getting’ into mischief, if
you dooant mind ... Why dooant you keep where there’s fi nger-poasses an’ folks to ax
the way on ... anybody ‘ud think you was a wild woman, an’ look at yer.^62In the towns, men have ‘stared at her and joked her rudely’ in public houses and
on the streets, reiterating a familiar discourse about women’s availability in the
space of the streets; but here she is challenged for being off the high road, for
seeking out a space beyond visibility. Th ere is, it seems, no space beyond the
home in which women can exist in any positive sense: no space in which solitude
or privacy can be found, for her very position alone in the rural environment
situates her – just as it did the young Maggie – as a ‘wild woman’.
Hetty’s experience here thus serves to emphasize not only, as with Maggie,
the notion of wandering women as wild women straying beyond the bounds of
the home, but also, in its spatial location, the particular double bind of women
who are perceived as out of place in the rural environment: as Jo Little writes,
‘despite the “closeness to nature” of constructions of women’s gender identities,
they are not always seen as “in place” in the rural environment ... their presence
there may be seen as unsettling and inappropriate’, and Hetty’s journey indeed
reiterates that there is no place for women in rural space, no place in which a
moment of solitude or restoration can be found within the rural landscape.^63
Eliot thus utilizes mobility in the rural landscape as a narrative space in
which to make visible the gendered patterns of exclusion that structure the rural
landscape; in doing so, the rural environment emerges as a space of hostility and
reproach to women who can fi nd no place within it, either on or off the road.
However, another possibility becomes clear: as well as critiquing the connec-
tions between sexuality, mobility and women in her writing, Eliot also off ers
the possibility of a rural space away from these discourses and utilizes spaces of