- 103 –
7 ‘I NEVER LIKED LONG WALKS’: GENDER,
NATURE AND JANE EYRE’S RURAL
WA N D E R I N G
Katherine F. Montgomery
Although Jane Eyre begins by proclaiming that she ‘never liked long walks’, one
of the most peculiar and memorable episodes of Jane Eyre (1847) fi nds the
novel’s heroine fl eeing Th ornfi eld to wander the English countryside, nearly per-
ishing of exposure and hunger.^1 Th is episode is notable not only for its drama, or
for the irony of the once-indoorsy Jane’s situation, but in that Jane nearly dies in
the midst of the very natural world that has been strongly and repeatedly used
to characterize her as something more (or less) than human herself. Th roughout
the novel Jane shows an innate sensitivity to and association with the natural
world, and particularly in the interviews with Rochester that immediately pre-
cede her crisis, Jane is described in terms that are far more wild and nature-based
than human. Her fl ight from Th ornfi eld and her subsequent wandering, how-
ever, throw this natural characterization into a deadly crisis. Jane nearly dies of
exposure; the poetic language that had turned her into a creature of nature is
swift ly undermined, and any romance in Rochester’s characterization of Jane as
a bird is undone when, starving, she eats porridge meant for a pig.
Jane’s affi liation with nature is not simply a romantic fantasy imposed
by Rochester: entwined throughout Jane’s turn to nature and her traumatic
experience in it are practical questions of her own economic status. It is Jane’s
vulnerable position as a dependent that fi rst encourages her escapist natural
imagination, and later drives her, ill-equipped and friendless, into the rural wild,
where she enters a landscape heavily coded in terms of women’s economic strug-
gles. Within this context, Jane’s realization that ‘I was a human being, and had
a human being’s wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply
them’ becomes not simply a commentary on her hunger, but a more profound
realization that she must learn to reconcile her own drive for independence
with her social condition as a dependent young woman, scraping to hold on to
a marginally middle-class position.^2 Th e similarly vulnerable positions of Mary
and Diana Rivers, and the other women that Jane meets in the countryside, sug-