88 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
key site through which the novels make visible the extent and eff ects of gen-
der ideologies, and the gendered politics of mobility that constrain and curtail
women’s lives come to constitute a central site of critique. Other scholars have
discussed the ways in which Eliot engages with wider discourses about female
mobility and modernity, and I hope here to draw more distinct attention to the
ways in which these themes are informed by the use of rural environments as cen-
tral to the articulation, contestation and reformulation of debates around female
sexuality and mobility.^4 In Eliot’s delineation of female mobility we fi nd repre-
sentations that, while recognizing rural spaces as actively engaged with wider
debates about female mobility and modernity – an important contestation of
rurality as a space of nostalgic isolation – are also attentive to the particular, and
oft en more acute, iterations that gender ideologies take in the rural environment.
Yet at the same time, rural mobility comes to constitute a space of possibility in
which Eliot explores the positive potential of locating women in rural spaces,
reassessing the relationship between women and rurality in such a way as to
off er an alternative formulation of the discursive associations between female
mobility and sexuality. While mobility has thus far received little attention in
the context of rural environments, either in Eliot’s work or in feminist revalua-
tions of women in rural spaces, this essay hopes to demonstrate that spaces and
structures of mobility represent important sites for interrogating the relation-
ship between gender and rural space.
‘Wandering Like a Wild Th ing’: Th e Politics of Women’s Walking
Th e rural locales and the representation of the two central women in Adam Bede
and Th e Mill on the Floss diff er in a number of signifi cant ways. While Adam
Bede centres upon an agricultural landscape structured through the dynamics
of the country estate and the rural farm, in Th e Mill on the Floss the pressures of
urban industry and business impinge upon provincial life – pressures that even-
tually result in the fi nancial collapse of the Tulliver’s mill as a family business. So
too do Maggie Tulliver and Hetty Sorrel vary in their complexity as characters
and in the degree of sympathy aff orded by Eliot’s representation: Maggie Tul-
liver is unarguably one of Eliot’s great heroines but Hetty Sorrel, as many critics
have discussed, is portrayed with a sharp critique of her lack of emotional and
psychological depth that restricts reading her as a sympathetic or heroic fi gure.^5
Yet an initial overview of the novels reveals a number of telling similarities
in the structures of mobility and sexuality that unfold. Adam Bede looks back
to a rural community at the turn of the nineteenth century, the narrative com-
mencing in 1799 in the fi ctionalized Midlands village of Hayslope, Loamshire,
an agricultural landscape centred on the Donnithorne estate. Th e young farmer’s
niece Hetty Sorrel falls in love with the gentleman of the estate, Arthur Don-