70 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
Adorno and Horkheimer describe the consumer who can only think and
feel when stimulated by mass culture. Although she does not have access to the
stimulations of modernity, merely knowing that they exist has devalued the rural
for Katie, meaning that when she is presented with something truly singular she
is unable to perceive its rareness and quality. In a short story which ironizes its
depiction of the small tragedies of Katie’s life, a more solemn tone is adopted at
its close when her employer calls a miserable Katie away from the byre. Promis-
ing to show her something ‘ye’ll no’ see the likes of twice in a lifetime’, the Farmer
draws her attention to the atmospheric eff ects and extreme clearness of the air,
which has made the rarely sighted distant Island of Barra visible on the sky-
line: ‘as far as the eye could venture – so far that it seemed more like a delusion
of the senses than a reality – away on the utmost horizon, another Island had
become visible’.^53 Findlater has already described the Western Isles as the ‘Isles
of the Blessed’ in reference to their associations with paradise in Gaelic folklore,
which had recently been revived and resituated in contemporary culture by late
nineteenth-century Celtic Twilight writers, most notably Fiona Macleod (Wil-
liam Sharp) in his 1894 ‘Romance of the Isles’ Pharais.^54 In Pharais, the retreat
of the island dwellers from the mainland symbolizes the rejection of modernity
and the conversion of Gaelic beliefs from living culture into dead myth, but for
Findlater, neither traditional culture nor the charms of urban modernity hold
the key to future independence and self-determination for women. Katie’s blind-
ness to the worth of the vision of Barra functions as a metaphor for her dulled
senses and reduced imagination: a vision that is subtle, nuanced and speculative
is intangible to her, and along with it, the subtle and speculative thought-pro-
cesses that such a vision might have inspired. Th e catastrophe of ‘Th e Pictures’ is
not that Katie misses the ‘one off ’ screening of the fi lm, but how she responds to
the Farmer’s delight at seeing Barra for the fi rst time in years:
But Katie did not see anything to be excited about.
She turned away without a second glance at the land that was very far off.
‘I’m no’ carin’’, was all she said.^55Although she has never experienced the excitements of modernity, simply know-
ing they exist and feeling, without experiencing, the syncopations of modern life,
have made the rural lose all possible meaning. Unable to appreciate the rewards
the rural off ers in terms of privacy and invisibility, she is neither a mobile nor a
self-refl exive subject and her existence, which she is unable to gain any perspec-
tive on or to change, is eff ectively doomed to stasis and autopoiesis.
In these two works by the Findlaters, the distinction between the sense of
selfh ood experienced by women in urban versus rural space is key to making
sense of gendered socio-spatial codes and their negotiation by female charac-
ters in early twentieth-century Scottish women’s writing , and in transitional