‘Going Out, Going Alone’ 67
In Crossriggs the rural does not entirely satisfy Alex’s demands for freedom, and
neither does the urban. At the novel’s close she leaves Crossriggs and begins a voy-
age around the world. Before she boards the ship, she visits the suburban home
of Bessie Reid, a woman a few years older than Alex who previously escaped
from her spinsterhood at Crossriggs. As the disappointing visit to Bessie’s con-
ventional household demonstrates, rural women may move to the centres of
urban modernity, but what awaits them is a recognizable domestic suburbia. A
modern temperament can be nurtured in a rural setting , but its attendant needs
may not be met in the urban, where traditional demands of women still persist.
Alex’s escape from Scotland and from Britain altogether therefore gestures at the
paucity of opportunities in these Isles for progressive women in those years. Alex
must be moved beyond the confi nes of contemporary society to make it possible
to imagine her achieving the new and modern form of selfh ood that she craves.
Modernity as Amusement in ‘Th e Pictures’ (1921)
Th e theme of modern subjectivity in a rural space receives a diff erent treatment
in Jane Helen Findlater’s short story, ‘Th e Pictures’.^40 Set in the isolated farmland
of Scotland’s West Coast, the story highlights the tragicomic plight of a young
farm worker, Wee Katie, who is deprived of the chance to attend the sole showing
of a touring cinema because her employers’ baby is suddenly taken ill. With all
the work of the farm her responsibility, Katie is denied her chance to witness this
modern amusement which, as the narrator states, is what the lonely child craves
most: ‘in her heart burned a wild thirst for amusement’.^41 Th is craving is a conse-
quence of more than youth, as ‘remote as Olnig Farm was some modern ideas had
penetrated to it’.^42 From the melodies played by a passing tinker, Katie has learnt
to drop her work and dance; through newspapers, she keeps up to date with the
latest sensational murder cases;^43 and again, through reading of such things in the
Weekly Scotsman, she has been inspired to demand a particularly modern form
of liberty – an aft ernoon out. Recalling the incident mentioned by Gan of the
urban maid who paces the city streets to regain a sense of identity, Katie puts on
her Sunday gown, crams ‘her empurpled hands into a pair of cotton gloves’ and,
with nothing else to do, walks ‘in solitary (albeit gloved) splendour, along the
wind-swept moor road to Achinbeg’ to be amused by nothing more than a closed
Hotel, a poorly stocked shop and the railway station, where ‘two or three trains
came crawling in almost at a foot pace!’.^44 Katie may try to inhabit a modern con-
sciousness by emulating a leisured, mobile, consumer identity, but the material
amusements of modernity have not kept pace with their cultural representations.
While to Alex in Crossriggs, modern subjectivity is achieved through privacy and
self-refl ection in the transcendent invisibility of rural locations, Katie’s only con-
solation is to dress up and become an object – if only of her own imagination
- and a spectacle of modernity visible to no one on the solitary road.