50 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
that the plants or ‘actors’ were merely ‘dumb, rooted things’ whereas the reader
is already aware that Cynthia had called them ‘living creatures’ and Jack Gibbs
had called the fl owers in her paintings ‘alive’. Th e scene can be read in relation
to the more general historical context of suff rage and the New Woman fi gure, a
blossoming of possibility for women and a new freedom from previous socially
imposed restraint, but it is also specifi c to the character of Cynthia, or what
Robert terms only a few pages later her one contradiction, ‘that strange essen-
tial contradiction of fl esh and spirit’ which he comes to understand on their
walk which encountered the courting couple.^47 Th ere is ambivalence in the pas-
sage, and danger, as Mother Nature’s children trample each other in the bid to
reach her arms but ultimately the passage rejoices in a female nature ‘stretching
her cramped limbs, [and] tossing aside her irksome robe of civility’.^48 Crucially,
this is what the process of painting within this environment, in relation to this
rural location, enables Cynthia to do. It is a space of possibility and through
her connection to it Cynthia comes to understand the possibilities open to her
as a woman. Robert describes the blossoming of this understanding in Cynthia
shortly aft er the above passage, the gradual dissolution of her ‘reserve’ which is
registered through small gestures of her body which he perceives, such as ‘wrists
crossed upon the knee, and hands lying half open with the palms upwards’.^49
Despite this Robert still describes her as ‘reticent of gesture’ but it is the possibil-
ity for the future which is most important in the scene, that Cynthia is waiting
‘on her mountain height’ for the ‘compelling summons’.^50 It is Cynthia’s relation-
ship to this rural location, the space at the margins of rurality between land and
sea, which creates a site of possibility distinguishable from her previous connec-
tion to the moon in its freedom from a preconceived identity based on gender.
Gendered Readings on the Beach
Th e central scene of the novel takes place on the beach. Th e artists are invited by
local man Mr Blewett to watch the bringing in of a pilchard catch and so both
groups occupy the space of the beach at the same time – one for work and the
other at leisure, observing the work of the locals.^51 In the fi lms and television
adaptations set in Cornwall that Moseley examines, the beach is found to be ‘a less
dramatic, less unsettling and safer space than the cliff -top’.^52 In Cynthia in the West
the beach is the scene of a dramatic rescue at the end of the novel and, in the scene
on which I concentrate here, a place of frenetic activity and a coming together of
the two social groups which unsettles gender codes that had seemed to be stable
earlier in the novel. Here they are in fl ux, like the action of the waves on the sand.
How the beach operates as a site of possibility but also uncertainty with
regards to gender will be discussed below, yet it is important to note that class
boundaries which defi ne and divide the two groups remain fi xed. As I have