Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

134 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920

origin, marking the points from which the process of voyaging begins. Th is is
illustrated in the narrator’s description of Rachel’s progress in Chapter 10, where
South America and the gardens of Richmond are placed on either end of a lin-
ear narrative of development: ‘During the three months she had been [in South
America] she had made up considerably, as Helen meant she should, for time
spent in interminable walks round sheltered gardens, and the household gos-
sip of her aunts’.^15 Th e gardens in Richmond are used to demonstrate Rachel’s
intellectual and psychological restriction, and to link these factors with physical
limitation. Th is is refl ected in Woolf ’s use of the word ‘sheltered’, which suggests
both spatial and social constraint. Th e relationship between Rachel’s psycho-
logical state and her physical surroundings is clear when Rachel considers her
previous life retrospectively:

Her mind was fi xed upon the characters of her aunts, their views, and the way they

lived. Indeed this was a subject which lasted her hundreds of morning walks round

Richmond Park, and blotted out the trees and the people and the deer.^16

As in the previous passage, the garden space is associated with the activity of
going ‘round’, a motion that defi nes Rachel’s patterns of thought. Trapped in this
cycle, continuously covering the same physical and mental ground, any kind of
development is rendered impracticable. Her eff orts to make sense of the situa-
tion are such that she ceases to see anything clearly, and the ‘trees and the people
and the deer’ become blotted out. In this example the garden space is impli-
cated in Rachel’s ignorance, and is consequently seen (or not seen, in this case)
through her blinkered and frustrated perspective.
As the two previous quotes demonstrate, the gardens of Rachel’s upbring-
ing oft en function as semi-psychological spaces in the novel, and are associated
with the sensation of being physically and mentally trapped. In another exam-
ple the imagery is reversed, with allusions to the garden space contributing to
Rachel’s conception of her psychological, emotional and physical restriction. An
example of this is Rachel’s reaction to being told that there are prostitutes in Pic-
cadilly Circus, a fact of which she had not previously been aware. Her response
is to refl ect on her upbringing with a renewed sensitivity to its spatiality and her
mobility within it, initially exclaiming :

‘So that’s why I can’t walk alone!’

By this new light she saw her life for the fi rst time a creeping hedged in thing,

driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged into darkness,

made dull and crippled forever.^17

Th e image of high walls and the sensation of being ‘hedged in’ bears a relation-
ship to the ‘sheltered gardens’ that Woolf links to Rachel’s ignorance, and the
concept of being blinded, or ‘plunged into darkness’, relates to her previous recol-