It’s hard to separate the rational fears from the confected ones, but they all turn on a sense that a woman looks vulnerable when she runs, whether in a marathon or back home at night. In many parts of the globe today, women’s disadvantage can still be measured by restrictions on their movement and visibility. In Pakistan in 2005, fifty women were arrested for trying to run a marathon – to run, to appear as a body in public, can be dangerous. Although She Runs the Night skirted political matters, in some women-only running events, the link between bodily freedom and running is clearly marked, from the Thelma & Louise Women’s Half Marathon that’s held in Utah each year, to the Casablanca Women’s Run and the Beirut Marathon Women’s Race.
The most notorious case of violence against a woman runner is that of Trisha Meili, better known as the Central Park Jogger, who was gang-raped in Manhattan’s Central Park in 1989. That case generated tremendous media attention; five men were quickly and wrongfully convicted of the crime, and didn’t have their convictions overturned for many years. In her 1991 essay on the attack and its aftermath, Joan Didion asks why this particular story was reported with such enthusiasm when thousands of other violent crimes against women pass without media comment. The Jogger, Didion argues, was idealised in terms of her gender, race and class: the white, middle-class victim of a crime committed, or so it was thought, by poor men of colour. This tale was so easy to tell that most commentators, afflicted by a bout of chivalric blindness, omitted to scrutinise the credibility of the case against the men. As Didion writes, ‘stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims … have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems’.
That’s not only true in New York City. In the case of the Jogger, a miscarriage of justice was overshadowed by the confirmation in public opinion that running involves an element of risk for women. This isn’t to argue that violence against women runners never happens. In 2015, an eighteen-year-old Bendigo woman went missing while jogging and was found, distressed, twenty-four hours later. Too often, though, a woman running alone is taken to signify both risk and irresponsibility – as if to strike out on your own is to ask for trouble or, at least, to invite objectification. Is it safe? we ask ourselves, and we can never be certain of the answer.
When a young woman named Masa Vukotic was found stabbed to death in a Melbourne park in 2015, a senior policeman was widely quoted in the media as warning women to avoid being in these kinds of public spaces on their own. He later revised his comments, advising women merely to ‘be aware of their circumstances’ but the core message remained: women must be vigilant; women must take responsibility. When, six weeks later, a young woman was gang-raped at knifepoint in Albury, my home town, the mayor claimed that women walking the streets by themselves at night were issuing an ‘invitation’ to attackers. These comments rightly sparked outrage. To me, it sounded as if these powerful men were saying that being a woman alone in a public space is to ask for trouble. I often walked the streets of Albury on my own at night after Mum and Dad died; I didn’t learn to drive until I was thirty-three. Did the mayor and the policeman wish for a return to the days of chaperones, curfews and dress codes? Like many others, I wondered why they didn’t speak directly to the men who attack women in parks, and tell them to stop.
*
Going for a run shouldn’t feel like a performance. Often, it does. Women get looked at – ogled, appraised, admired, gazed upon with adoration, spied on – all day and all night. Women runners aren’t all the same, of course. We’re not united by some essential experience of womanhood but we do have to endure this visibility. As trans activist Julia Serano writes, ‘the one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women and treated accordingly’. Cue some bloke in the park yelling out an oik comment about norks.
Decades have passed since it’s been established that women can run marathons without damage to themselves (or to the patriarchy), yet everyone has a view on what women runners should look like. Depending on who you listen to, women runners are either too thin, too fat, too masculine or too muscly. Runners’ faces are too gaunt, their bodies are too sunburnt; they’ve lost their gorgeous curves, or they’re carrying too much weight. With their hair scraped back and their sweaty faces, women who run are insufficiently feminine. It’s as if they’re not making an effort. Their breasts look weird, their calves are thick, they should have been able to run off their post-baby stomachs. Women runners are too sexy, in their skimpy little outfits (Why doesn’t she cover up?) and not sexy enough, too strong to simper (Doesn’t she know men are threatened by strong women?). Even if you’re not running for male attention – and my guess is that most women runners aren’t – it’s hard to evade these norms. Why is she out there on her own, doesn’t she know it’s dangerous? ask the moralists. What is she doing to herself, doesn’t she want to have kids? worry the catastrophists. Why shouldn’t I stare at her, she’s out in public? She loves it, insist the dickheads.
What I wanted to look like when I ran was invisible. I didn’t want to be available for casting in any of these narratives. That’s why a shadowy gym was initially such a refuge. Some people enjoy being on display – might find it, ghastly word, empowering – but not me. I really did want to blend into my surroundings, to throw off the awareness that I was being looked at. This wasn’t just my own neurosis, but one that many women around me carry. ‘I could never run like you do,’ a friend told me. ‘I’d look like a complete idiot.’ I hear women worrying about looking fat, awkward, sweaty and ugly. The desire to run unnoticed is a common note in memoirs by women runners, whether they’re champions or casual athletes.
It’s too easy to write concerns like these off as a matter of silly female vanity or overconscientiousness about personal safety. It’s exhausting to have absorbed such demands about how we appear to the world. They can slow a woman down; they can stop you altogether. To run in public, I had to convince myself that no one was paying any attention to my gait, that no one was whispering about my heavy thighs, that my sweaty face was uninteresting to strangers, that anyone who bothered to scoff was a fool, that nobody was following me. I wanted to run for long enough to leave all these worries behind, to find a path out of narratives about vulnerability and danger. I wanted to forget what I looked like and to feel nothing more than my limbs moving against the air and the weight shifting from the ball to the heel of my foot as I moved forward.
Fun runs, half marathons and get-fit-quick runs aren’t the only reasons women run. If that woman running alone in the early morning were wearing heels and a dress, even more narrative possibilities would open up: is she scared, drunk, running out on a lover? We’d be worried about her. If it were at sunset, she might be late for a show, possessed by inexplicable glee, trying to hail a cab. We’d wonder whether someone was chasing her, or whether she was in a pushy rush. A mother might run after a two-year-old in a park; a lover might run home late at night, humiliated and disappointed; someone else might run along the footpath without an umbrella on a rainy afternoon. Women figure disproportionately among the refugees of the world; to quit an abusive relationship, you need somewhere to run. We may choose to run marathons but we do not choose to run like this.
Is there a danger in conflating recreational running with more urgent acts of flight? They’re not the same – obviously – but the way we look at women runners is primed by how other women on the run are presented more broadly: vulnerable, powerless. Running for pleasure can be a safe simulation of these desperate flights; one which conditions the physical and mental strength that may be required in a time of danger. Run like someone’s chasing you, advise the motivation guides. But what if someone really is chasing you? The language of running twists and warps such that it can be hard to tell.
*
I still find it hard to call myself a runner without quickly adding a few qualifications: I’m very slow, not at all sporty, nothing like t
hose other runners, you wouldn’t have picked it if I hadn’t told you, right? I might add, What I really am is a reader.
‘Television rots your brain,’ my father always insisted. He hated the cheap tropes of serial TV; like some latter-day Adorno, he thought they deadened the spirit, although his concern was less with the revolutionary spirit of his daughters than their work ethic. My mother worried about what the violence might do to us. The parental will held and, as a result, I spent very little time in front of a small screen when I was a kid. Those crime shows with the creepy stalker camera intros? I wouldn’t have seen a single episode until I was halfway through my teens. Books shaped my ideas about the world; books shaped my ideas about myself. (‘You live in books and you don’t know anything about the real world,’ complained a boyfriend whom I failed to recognise as a textbook rotter.) I read walking to school, I read after class, I read under the covers with a broken light from a two-dollar shop clipped to my paperback.
‘You always did have your nose in a book,’ my grandfather said when I enrolled in graduate school, as if he’d known all along where I was heading. I kept reading, and it turned into something like my job. For the best part of a decade, I stood in front of undergraduates and tried to convince them that no scrim separates literature from the world, that language and life are intermediaries, that the stories we tell about the world bring new worlds into being. Even though our discussions often wandered, I never spoke with my students about running; I could well have asked them to examine how crime shows and newspaper reports about attacks on women runners frame public spaces and female bodies, and so define them.
I was still teaching when I started to run and, of course, just as I noticed women running on TV, I also began to pay attention to the women runners who crossed the pages I was reading: nymphs tearing away in fright in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Daphne on the run from Apollo. Aemylia in The Faerie Queen is captured by a savage man after running away with her lowly born lover; she tells her story to another captive, Amoret, and warns her that the man will rape her. Amoret flees, ‘her fear a spur to haste her flight’.
Hot messes run because they’re out of control, terrified floozies run because they’ve done something silly. Scenes from favourite novels returned to me: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lovelies hurtle around, crazed and drunk; Robin Vote in Nightwood is restless, won’t stay still: these women are trouble, especially to their lovers, and they’re also clearly marked as troubled. Runaway girls may have adventures in fiction, but they tend to wind up back home, re-domesticated. (Turn on the radio and tune into all those pop laments about run-run-runaway babes and girls: Why-why-why did she leave? Who took her home? Was it her father or another man?)
There are exceptions – Athena and the warrior goddesses of the ancient world; Atalanta, outrunning her suitors – but, in a disheartening premonition of the newspaper reports and TV shows about the danger that women runners put themselves in, most of the literary women I encountered were trying to escape belligerent, abusive and threatening men. Literary-minded sports officials could point to the canon and say, look, it’s always been like this.
As I re-read canonical works of fiction that popped up on the syllabus, especially those authored by women, I looked for the runners. Sturdy characters such as Elizabeth Bennet go walking – but can we picture her upping and running around Pemberley? The unhappy and adulterous Emma Bovary runs away from Charles’ house in Tostes; Tess of the d’Urbervilles runs on the moors. Running determines the fate of unruly Judy in Seven Little Australians: running away from home prefigures her death; she later runs to save her little brother and is crushed by a falling tree.
Sometimes running away is a metaphor, but still it’s synonymous with hardship: Elizabeth Bennet’s little sister suffers the consequences of her elopement, and Fanny’s mother in Love in a Cold Climate is branded ‘the Bolter’ because of her flightiness. The escape of Sethe from slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is traumatic. Tragic bodies, bodies of confined women, the defiled bodies of women who didn’t run fast enough, repressed bodies that never knew pleasure, fearful bodies, bodies that were property and so had to be controlled. Maybe it’s familiarity with this grim parade of bodies that prompts spectators to see something wrong with women who run.
I borrowed anthologies of running literature from the library, hoping there were some obvious examples I’d missed. The anthologies confirmed that there are surprisingly few depictions of women running in literary history, and certainly none that treat running as an easy declaration of physical vitality. The editors of running anthologies don’t comment on the fact that distress and disgrace are the common themes that bring women runners in literature together. Instead, they devote their analyses to the many breeds of male runners we encounter in epic poetry, ballads, novels and films.
For men, running can serve many narrative purposes. Men run to hunt, for sport, to chase women, to escape the humdrum, to seek fame and fortune, even for the pleasure of movement. The sun falls on their bodies, the wind speeds their heels. Where was the glory of the female body in motion? Where were the women running because it feels good, or to get somewhere they want to go, or to express a desire for even greater freedoms? For every warrior queen (there aren’t a hell of a lot of them and most meet a gory end), there are many more terrified damsels being hunted.
Screens big and small offer us a few alternatives – but they too require quick qualification. For every Run Lola Run showing a feisty babe running through the city, there’s a hundred screaming cheerleaders being chased through a forest by a cartoon predator, and usually because they’ve fucked or flirted with the wrong guy. Even when tough, uncompromising female characters such as Clarice Starling and Claire Underwood go running in Silence of the Lambs and House of Cards, the very fact that they run alone confirms their outsider status; their tense features show us that they are alert to danger. These are roads to nowhere.
In the literary traditions in which I was schooled, as in history, women are rarely free to roam. I should not have been as surprised as I was to discover that women in literature didn’t enjoy the freedom of movement that I did. The key trope of the madwoman in the attic, as elaborated by feminist literary historians Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, figures the patriarchal confinement of the woman artist; confinement and restriction is also the fate of women who seek mobility. And that’s not all.
In a cruel twist of patriarchal logic, if running is represented as bad news for women, many literary women suffer because they are unable to run, no matter how dire their marriages or cruel their families. The social situation of women – particularly middle-class women – keeps them in place. We would cheer if Dorothea Brooke quit the drippy curate Casaubon, but George Eliot makes it painfully clear in Middlemarch that she cannot. The same goes for the orphaned sisters Laura and Clare, stuck in a prison of dependence controlled by Laura’s husband in Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watchtower. Trapped by circumstance, the girls simply cannot leave. Disobedient women run and suffer the consequences; good women stay home and they suffer too.
I didn’t want to get mired in marriage dramas and morality tales about women knowing their place. I wanted bodies that told stories that weren’t about fear and escape. I wanted acknowledgement of sensations that lie outside of these plots: sunshine, unloosened hair, a quickened pulse, flushed cheeks. If these pleasures sound decidedly post-coital, that’s because women’s mobility and sexuality have been closely linked – and controlled – in literature as in the world. There’s no etymological basis for the sonority between ‘chased’ and ‘chaste’, yet there’s a snarl of unmissable, often contradictory connections in literature between running and women’s sexuality. Women run when they are chased; women must run from predators to stay chaste. It is not natural for women to run unless they’re chased; chaste women have no need to run.
For me, running was nothing like this. When I began to run, my understanding of the significance of my body in the world shifted. I grasped the l
ink between despair and immobility at both an intellectual and embodied level: for years I’d been stuck in grief, convinced my body lacked the eloquence for anything but sadness. My imagination blunted by escapist fantasies, I’d wallowed and boozed and cried to sound that long, droning song. But when I started running, was I writing a new narrative of despair with my feet? Was anybody chasing me then? Hardly. I’d endured the consequences of some poor romantic decisions, but I’d managed to walk out of those situations. In putting my sneakers on, I wasn’t fleeing those ex-lovers, I was running into an entirely different storyline, one that had nothing to do with bad romance. I discovered how transformative it could be to run for hours with no consequences but sore legs, a lighter mood and an appetite. My sense of where I could go and how I could move was reconfigured; the alarmism about women runners struck me as ludicrous. Sure, there was plenty I wanted to leave behind, but running wasn’t a sign of crisis – it was part of the movement, sometimes vigorous, sometimes cautious, toward recovery.
*
As I bandied around my thesis that women in literature don’t run unless they’re in strife, I was frequently reminded of the mythological figure of Atalanta, the hunter who swore an oath of virginity to Artemis. ‘What about Atalanta?’ a Shakespeare scholar rebuked me. ‘What do you mean powerful, happy women don’t run? Now there’s a runner for you. She should lead your discussion.’
And so: Atalanta. She appears many times in Greek mythology as a hunter, an athlete, and even as a crew member on the Argo. In one version of her story, she was abandoned at birth and suckled by a bear. In Robert Graves’ telling of the Calydonian boar hunt, Atalanta, ‘the swiftest mortal alive’, draws first blood with a ‘timely arrow’. She was as celebrated for her beauty as for her speed. Through the ages, the combination of her bravery and her resistance to marriage have fascinated artists – with the bizarre culmination of this being her incarnation as the hood ornament on Studebaker cars. I won’t go into the contested versions of the stories that led Atalanta to be reunited with her father, or his decree – against the advice of no lesser an authority than the Delphic Oracle – that she must marry. Her athletic prowess couldn’t free her from this patriarchal expectation. Atalanta was able to impose one condition: she would only marry the man who could best her in a footrace. In the story of the golden apples, many suitors perish in the effort to outrun Atalanta. One young man, Hippomenes, is scornful of their efforts – until he sees her move. He appeals to Aphrodite for help, and the goddess of love intercedes, giving him three enchanted golden apples. Hippomenes rolls these onto the course, distracting Atalanta. As the virgin gathers love’s apples – of course she can’t resist them, what woman could fight her desire for such rare fruits? – she is passed by Hippomenes. He crosses the line first, wins the race, and, in spite of her protestations, wins the maiden. It’s as if every woman, no matter how withholding, no matter how defiantly fast, is waiting to be seduced.
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