Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

(Jacob Rumans) #1

66 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920


is, as I suggest, only superfi cially subversive, because there are no meaningful
obstacles in the way of their marriage (it is marriage that Van wants, rather than a
scandalous aff air). Van’s performance, then, is merely a hopeful simulation of an
eventual outcome which, though somewhat modernizing in spirit, could none-
theless be quickly integrated into conventional propriety. By refusing to play at
being Van’s wife, Alex makes a gesture towards non-conformity on a par with
her expressions of dissatisfaction at restrictions on women’s movement, dress
and behaviour, all of which act as a synecdoche for the wider curtailments of
women’s lives. Going along with Van’s performance would further corner her
into a conventional setting , which is in eff ect what the city, with its crowd of
spectators, forces them to do, and it is by escaping back to the countryside, to
invisibility, that she has space to refl ect on these constraints and expectations.
Urban space, then, instead of off ering a liberating alternative, presents Alex
with a stark and oppressive sense of her disabling femininity. In the crowd of
‘draggled looking women in mackintosh cloaks’ on Princes Street, and in the
Edinburgh Waverley Station waiting room, where Alex refl ects on the women
around her and tries to guess whether they are married, she fi nds herself not
autonomously anonymous, but hideously visible:


She was moved to bitter mirth by the row of women ... their sordidness, their damp
tasteless clothing, their weariful unattractive faces ... How terrible, thrice terrible too,
is that grim spinster ... who looks as if she were entreating the world not to laugh
at her. I just need to give one glance at my own appearance in that mirror to assure
myself that the woman who keeps the waiting room is a beauty compared to me too


  • but I won’t – I’d rather not know what I’m looking like!^38


Alex fi nds herself too visible, too open to critique and judgement in an urban
context where she is just one of a mass of weariful, unattractive women open
to the gaze of the crowd of critical, and yet indiff erent, individuals. Physical or
imaginary escape to urban spaces and modernizing communities may promise
to satisfy women’s needs for career advancement and intellectual and fi nancial
independence, but natural spaces, in spite of the constraints of rural existence,
do at least permit Alex moments of privacy and liberty – moments of transcend-
ent invisibility – impossible in the crowded city.
Th is is in spite of the desire of Van and Robert to exploit these moments
of privacy and invisibility to try to corner Alex romantically. When Van hints
at the liberty the two of them have when alone in the countryside, Alex makes
her strongest statement about how nature frees her from what de Beauvoir calls
immanence:


How can you talk of being ‘alone’ on a day like this, with larks, and bees, and but-
terfl ies, and fl ying things all through the air, and birds in the hedges, and horses
ploughing, and dogs barking, and everything expressing its happiness around us –
that’s what I like – the feeling of sharing it all on such a morning with every other
thing that lives!^39
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