At Work and at Play 53
above, they should be read as a new kind of invader. First, the painters break the
boundaries of the eminence on which they have been placed. Jack Gibbs infi l-
trates the action on the beach, attempting to bodily insert ‘a shoulder between
a broad back and burly chest’. While the previous reading above, which emascu-
lates characters such as Jack, who is ‘pushed aside’ by the workers, is still evident
here, an alternative reading is simultaneously possible.^66 Jack encroaches onto
the space of the beach occupied by the fi shermen who are trapped between a
hostile sea and dragging their boats towards the artist colonizers representative
of the future, the inevitable spread of tourism, and the equally inevitable decline
of the industry which is their livelihood.
Concurrently, the eminence of rock from which the painters watch the scene
on the beach replicates the location of the Wilmingtons’ house overlooking Tre-
gurda. It is a topography which suggests their class position in relation to the
locals but which also both enables and represents their role as observer and the
locals’ position as the observed. Th e fi shermen are the object of their gaze in this
scene and throughout the novel. Th is suggests the future fate of the fi shermen,
desperately toiling for their livelihood here, but destined to become immortal-
ized yet immobilized in the work of the incoming artists. While the paintings
may suggest and create a timelessness which, as Deacon argues, was one of the
primary attractions of the fi shing villages in Cornwall to artists, their very pres-
ence in this scene belies the timeless quality which they seek. Instead, they are
part of the process of industrial decline and cultural change in the face of which
the fi sherfolk can off er no resistance. Th ey are the invasion of modernity. Once
again, the site of the beach is a space of possibility, uncertainty and danger, a site
of fl ux where boundaries are permeable.
Th e readings of gender and place in this chapter are possible only though an
understanding of the particularity of the rural space: the uniqueness of the his-
torical, cultural and economic processes which both create that space and enable
an interpretation of it. Th is perspective enables an interrogation of fi xed struc-
tures of gender within the coastal space to reveal the beach and cliff as a site of
possibility and fl uidity where such structures are broken down. Whereas Robert
is still locked into a melancholy self-loathing on the beach through his under-
standing of the expectations of masculinity, it is Cynthia who is most attuned
to the possibilities for her as a woman, realized through that coastal landscape.
Th e result is a subtle yet fl owering (a term which is recoded in this context) defi -
ance of the masculine perspective which off ers a connection to the landscape
only through a feminization of the moon. Instead, she creates her own space,
within the unruly garden on the cliff top, within which to challenge dominant
social constructions of gender. Signifi cantly, these possibilities for social progres-
sion are provided through a rural environment, thus also subverting traditional
understandings of rural and urban locales and positing the rural as a site of pos-
sibility with regards to the interpretation and lived experience of gender.