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6 ‘WANDERING LIKE A WILD THING’:
RURALITY, WOMEN AND WALKING IN
GEORGE ELIOT’S ADAM BEDE AND
THE MILL ON THE FLOSS
Charlotte Mathieson
In George Eliot’s early fi ction – the short stories of Scenes of Clerical Life (1857–
8) and the novels Adam Bede (1859), Th e Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas
Marner (1861) – a range of locations serve as landscapes for craft ing the ‘rural
realism’ that Eliot found to be lacking in many literary and artistic representa-
tions of rural spaces.^1 Drawing on the scenes of her early years in Warwickshire
and further developed through meticulous research into agricultural life and
rural traditions, these works are tightly plotted against sharply observed details
of the agricultural landscape – harvest dates, fl ora and fauna – and enlivened
with acute attention to the distinct local dialects and customs that give each rural
location its individual characteristics.^2 As critics have oft en remarked, Eliot’s use
of early nineteenth-century settings can at times evoke a romanticized nostalgia
for an idyllic pre-Industrial landscape, and despite the intention to better depict
the rural working classes, Eliot’s social vision remains limited in scope.^3 Yet at the
same time the human interactions that play out in these places are oft en far from
idyllic, demonstrating the moral complexities of socio-cultural ideologies that
shape, and are shaped by, the rural locale.
In the fi rst two full-length novels, Adam Bede and Th e Mill on the Floss, gen-
der ideologies form a central point of critique in Eliot’s examination of the rural:
the stories of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver in Th e Mill on
the Floss examine the implications of social and sexual transgression for women
within the rural community. Intersecting with wider debates about female sex-
uality current at the time, these novels demonstrate the acute formulation of
gender codes within rural environments and utilize these spaces as sites through
which to mediate and refl ect on wider cultural questions around femininity and
sexuality. In particular, as this essay will show, these texts explore the intersec-
tions between sexuality and mobility in rural locations: mobility operates as a