148 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
European accounts of China. Little’s interaction with Chinese women in the
remote Chinese region helps her to resolve her confl icting beliefs in women’s
independence and domestic responsibilities. Yet it is the fl uidity of her values
where Chinese women are concerned that allows her to picture the possibilities
of self-refl exivity that is disallowed by Western social norms, and to suggest an
elusive alliance with Chinese women. Little’s writing suggests that ‘exposure to
the Orient resulted in a reconstitution of Western values that surpassed in scope
any attempt to project a unifi ed vision of the East’.^16
If we focus on Little’s representation of rurality as being closely depend-
ent on others, this allows us to problematize the notion of the rural idyll and
complicates the polarity of race identities. I aim to sharpen critical analysis of
the social construction of rurality through a reading of Little’s experience with
Chinese women in the discursive network and social positioning of gender. Th e
overgeneralization in the supposed countryside hegemony results in the model
of a homogenous racialized category pitted beneath the white. By extension,
this chapter proposes that works about racial identity and rurality implicitly or
explicitly detach racial identities from other historical oppressions such as those
surrounding gender and class. Th is chapter not only specifi es the contribution
that race-based oppression makes to inequality, but also seeks to foreground the
multiplicity and mobility of subject positioning. By investigating rurality, I hope
to expand debates about the countryside as an imaginative resource. By thinking
about rurality as an imagined cultural geography, this chapter off ers perspec-
tives on two things. Th e fi rst is to reveal the boundary-making practices from
colonialism’s cultures that are constructed in the late nineteenth-century setting
of rural China. Th e second is to expose the possibility of alternative feminist per-
spectives to racialized alliances at times of national and gender reform in China.
Little’s experience on the Chinese farm contradicts the idyllic view of the rural,
which alienates her from her British female subjectivity, but enables her to be
receptive to alternative models of womanhood. It is in this sense that feminist
and colonial discourses have prompted new interest in human geography across
boundaries. Th us, a focus on the social construction of English rurality and gen-
der has emerged as a prominent transnational activity.
Th e Transnational Rural
As mentioned already, Little’s diary is an inspiring account of an English woman
learning to deal with the vicissitudes of the rural idyll. Th e period between 1860
and 1930 was the high point of the rural idyll.^17 Th is vision of rurality had a
strong affi nity with tranquillity, goodness, wholeness and freedom. It also maps
onto cartographies of identity encapsulating norms and values which explain
and shape what is valuable in a nation, a region or a locality.^18 Th e ‘idyll’ confi rms