‘I Never Liked Long Walks’ 111
economy – not just of Morton, but of England – is profoundly unsupportive to
women who must support themselves. Jane’s movement through this landscape
refl ects this position: she says that she ‘drew near houses; I left them, and came
back again, and again I wandered away’, a back-and-forth movement that refl ects
the limbo in which she is caught, between the need to support herself and the
impossibility of doing so, as well as the more psychological tension between her
propensity for independence and her need for human aid.^29
However, the support that other women can off er is almost nonexistent:
aft er the cold reality of nature, Jane is thrown into the equally cold reality of rural
women’s lives, which consist of struggle with only small margins of security. Th e
economy in which Jane fi nds herself is one of survival and little comfort, without
the luxury of aiding others, and the women to whom she applies have no power to
admit her back into society, being relatively powerless themselves, and hampered
by a patriarchy that requires them to be suspicious of a single and unattached
young woman looking for work. Jane herself has internalized these strictures: of the
shopwoman, she asks, ‘what claim had I to importune her?’ and of another young
woman, she says, ‘it was not her business to think for me, or to seek a place for
me: besides, in her eyes, how doubtful must have appeared my character, position,
tale’.^30 (Aft er Hannah bars her from the door of Moor House and Jane collapses
outside, St John tells Hannah that she has ‘done [her] duty in excluding’.)^31 Jane’s
strength fails her swift ly, but it only requires an hour or two to establish that she
cannot gain entry to this economy on her own, and other women are unable to
assist her. Not only are they powerless themselves, but her wandering makes her a
fi gure of suspicion in ways that men’s wandering would not.
Charlotte Mathieson explores at greater length the moral suspicions attached
to wandering women in rural areas, and writes that:
It is in the spaces of walking that the damaging eff ects of gendered codes come to
light with most visible eff ect, walking operating to signal most strongly the ways in
which rurality is problematized for women; far from the rural idyll, walking repre-
sents the central site through which the constrictions and constraints of women’s lives
are played out.^32Even though Jane herself is new to the rural environment, her wander around
Morton shows her encountering a series of just such gendered ‘constrictions and
constraints’ as she attempts to re-enter society and faces suspicions about her his-
tory and respectability, her lack of connections, her uncertain class status. From
start to fi nish, this episode particularly emphasizes how these constraints are tied
up with Jane’s economic condition: as she grows weaker, she says ‘far better that
crows and ravens ... should pick my fl esh from my bones, than that they should
be prisoned in a workhouse coffi n and moulder in a pauper’s grave’.^33 Th e for-
merly romanticized birds, onetime ‘emblems of love’, will soon come to pick her