‘Going Out, Going Alone’ 59
the heroine’s desire for mobility as both a symbol of and a means to liberation is
bound up with ambitions to experience what modernity has to off er: the diversions
and stimulations of city life; opportunities for creative expression and recognition;
and expanded networks of social exchange and intimacy;^13the rural off ers women the freedom to be both private and mobile, an unob-
served spectator and aff ectively engaged walker in a living world. With its crowd
of spectators and its limitless codes concerning feminine behaviour and propri-
ety, neither the city nor the home could off er such freedom. In a similar vein, this
is how Simone de Beauvoir established the meaning of natural spaces for women
in her landmark feminist study, Th e Second Sex:
At home, mother law, customs, routine hold sway, and she would fain escape these
aspects of her past; she would in her turn become a sovereign subject. But, as a mem-
ber of society, she enters upon adult life only in becoming a woman; she pays for her
liberation by an abdication. Whereas among plants and animals she is a human being ;
she is freed at once from her family and from the males – a subject, a free being.^14For women, the rural off ers the freedom not to be an object – the Other – but a
sovereign subject, capable of gaining a sense of autonomous selfh ood, which de
Beauvoir describes as the attainment of ‘liberty through a continual reaching out
towards other liberties’.^15 De Beauvoir goes on to describe the ecstasies reported
by young women who feel, in the solitude of nature, a rare sense of sovereignty
over themselves and their world. Th is she relates to the early sense of transcend-
ence felt by all infants before gender division forces women to suppress ‘the
fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego)’ to transcend itself – ‘to engage in
freely chosen projects’ – and consigns women to immanence, a state of interior-
ity, passivity and self-immersion: ‘Th e adolescent girl has not yet acquired for
her use any portion of the universal; hence [nature] is her kingdom as a whole;
when she takes possession of it, she also proudly takes possession of herself ’.^16
De Beauvoir’s writing is crucial here because of the insight she gives into the
importance of invisibility for women in natural spaces, and its signifi cance in
their attainment of subjecthood and transcendence. Alone in the countryside,
the woman is out of the grasp of routine and custom, and also out of sight of any-
one to consign her to the social category ‘woman’. In nature, ‘to have a body no
longer seems a blemish to be ashamed of ... Th e fl esh is no longer a defi lement;
it means joy and beauty’.^17 Self-consciousness about the body and its impulses is
put on hold, and the free subject escapes momentarily the whole realm of social
signifi cation, achieving freedom and transcendence by being unobserved, uncat-
egorized and unconstrained.
By contrasting depictions of female and male movement in the city and
countryside in the Findlaters’ novel Crossriggs, and then turning to depictions of
rural retreat and exclusion in works by the Findlaters which depict rural poverty,