‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’ 101
unrestrainedly, and in which she can take pleasure from the natural environment
around her. Th is recalls the ways in which women’s walking could carry positive
connotations as a ‘feminine pursuit’, and here we see Maggie reiterate Solnit’s
assertion that the walk, ‘both socially and spatially the widest latitude available’
to women, is utilized as a space in which she fi nds ‘a chance to exert body and
imagination’.^69 As a middle-class woman, Maggie’s walk off ers an interesting con-
tribution to this positive formulation of walking, extending the social reach of a
trope ordinarily restricted to the more leisured ladies of country estates. Further-
more, Eliot’s use of this walk not only reclaims an act of mobility as a feminine
pursuit but also claims a space of rurality for women: if women are typically ‘out
of place’ in the rural environment, then here we see an example of a woman forg-
ing a space in which she is ‘in place’, her presence not, as Little writes, ‘unsettling
and inappropriate’, but rather at home in this space.
Th is is not altogether unproblematic: Maggie is aware that her indulgence
might be too much, feeling that it is ‘a pleasure she loved so well that sometimes,
in her ardours of renunciation, she thought she ought to deny herself the fre-
quent indulgence in it’.^70 Yet this recognition works not, as it might, to cast her
pleasure as wrong but rather to make a bold assertion about Maggie’s right to
that pleasure as a woman. As Beer writes, Maggie is the site of multiple desires –
knowledge, sexual love, freedom – that are ‘unrealizable in terms of the old order
and the fi xed stereotypes by which she is surrounded’ not because her desires are
taboo per se, but because ‘the claiming of them as female desires’ transgresses
gendered expectations.^71 Th is instance of Maggie walking represents one further
example of this iteration of desire, simultaneously acknowledging and surpassing
the barriers that cast Maggie’s walk as subversive of gendered codes.
In this space of rural solitude Eliot also begins to carve out a narrative that
can be situated as an emergent form of modern privacy. As Wendy Gan writes,
‘by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the idea of access to privacy,
as evidenced by the increasing representations of women desiring to be private ...
had become more appealing as well as increasingly necessary to women’.^72 In her
essay in this collection, Samantha Walton identifi es that in the Findlater sisters’
novel Crossriggs, the rural context is instrumental in off ering a space in which a
progressive woman has
greater freedom to move unimpeded by dress or codes of behaviour, and the privacy
and invisibility to retreat and refl ect on her position in the world, with the ultimate
reward being the space it gives her to imagine and pursue new and modern forms of
selfh ood and experience.^73I’d suggest that the rural solitude of Maggie in Th e Mill on the Floss provides a
similar iteration of the private solitude of rural space, representing a version of
the domestic garden that, Gan identifi es, ‘provided women with a spatial alter-