by Deborah Lutz
Yet more than a creative act, walking was—Wordsworth and other Romantic thinkers believed—a statement of egalitarianism, an active means to pledge allegiance to vagabonds, the homeless, and gypsies of all stripes. Southey’s sexism notwithstanding, the political radicalism of walking could also be adapted by renegade women to make a statement about their own marginalization. Stepping out onto the moors was exchanging the rule-bound home with a freer space, what Leslie Stephen, a great rover afoot who formed a walking club named the Sunday Tramps in 1879, called “escaping on ticket-of-leave from the prison house of respectability.” The possibility of this sort of physical liberation from society’s boxes was especially poignant for women. While women walked out on the roads for all sorts of reasons—to go to church, to get to work in a mill, factory, or farm—a woman walking long distances alone, especially if she were a stranger to the area and of the middle or upper class, was viewed with suspicion. Charlotte depicts this situation when Jane Eyre finds herself penniless after fleeing Thornfield. The townsfolk she encounters view her with mistrust; they think she might be a prostitute or even a thief. One servant says to her, “You should not be roving about now; it looks very ill.” The association of the female walker and sexual looseness is made clear by the term “streetwalker.” 16
Anne Lister, a near contemporary of the Brontës and fellow resident of West Yorkshire, wrote in her diary about shocking and alarming her friends and neighbors by walking alone on a regular basis. She even went on her own Romantic Lake District tour in 1824, one day covering more than twenty miles over the mountains, with only a hired male guide as companion. On another occasion, she set out on the high road from her house in Halifax to meet a carriage bringing her lover. After walking over ten miles through a “dreary mountain moor-scene,” she flagged down the carriage, got in, and explained that she had traveled there by foot. The passengers were astonished, even “petrified” of her because of her strange act, and her lover was so “horror-struck” that it marred their relationship irreparably. Another great woman walker was Ellen Weeton, mentioned earlier as despising needlework, whose life could have been written by Anne Brontë. She worked as a governess and companion for various disagreeable people, then married a blackguard who took her small fortune and drove her away (although years later they reconciled). Her one real pleasure was walking, and she loped along mile after mile on her long legs, once covering thirty-six miles in a day. She delighted in “places unfrequented by those of my own species, that my thoughts, as well as my feet, may ramble without restraint.” She especially savored climbing mountains, an unusual practice for a woman alone in the early nineteenth century. “Running wild among” grand scenery thrilled her, made her feel “free and unrestrained as the air I breathed.” Some of her pleasure was marred, and some of her walking tours curtailed, by the fear of insult and assault by men. They sneered and laughed at her and sometimes tried to stop her from ascending mountains because it wasn’t “done.” Anne Lister also had these troubles when out on walks, but her situation was made worse by her masculine appearance (she preferred women over men and much of her walking was a means of cruising for women). Once a man “suddenly attempted to put his hands up my things behind,” but she escaped by wielding her umbrella to good effect. 17
While the Haworth townsfolk became used to the eccentric Brontë girls walking about, Emily took a big dog along when alone. Still, Charlotte, when attempting particularly long walks to see Ellen, faced opposition from her father and aunt. Once, not able to reserve the only gig available at the time in Haworth and wanting to meet Ellen for a seaside foray, she planned to walk to Keighley, catch a coach to Bradford, then walk the last six miles, but the elders in the household blocked her from such unladylike travel, in part because she would be traveling in unknown places, where she herself was a stranger. She was invited to tour the Lake District in 1850 when her fame brought her offers from the wealthy and titled. In contrast to Branwell’s solitary wanderings, however, Charlotte had to see everything from a carriage. She “longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales,” she wrote in a letter to a female friend. But she was forced to control her “erratic and vagrant instincts,” because such behavior would draw too much attention to herself, a “she-artist.” 18
Because of the widespread belief that there was something not quite correct with wayfaring women, the act of walking became a recognized form of defiance. Dorothy Wordsworth was on the vanguard of women who asserted their agency by walking. As her biographer Frances Wilson puts it, “Exchanging the nursery, the parlour and the cultivated garden path for the liberty of the highways and the byways, Dorothy walked out of the life that she and others expected of her.” She did some mountain climbing with her friend Miss Barker, an unmarried older woman who lived alone. Because of her long walks, Dorothy faced censure from her relatives, especially when she joined her brother on cross-country feats, once covering thirty-three miles in one day. Her great-aunt wrote with deep disapproval of her “rambling about the country on foot.” Dorothy put up a vigorous defense: “So far from considering this as a matter of condemnation, I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure to hear that I had courage to make use of the strength with which nature had endowed me.” Courage and physical strength, terms not often associated with women of the time, became rubrics for personal rebellion. 19
Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth’s near contemporary, was well aware of such debates, and she shows the daring and somewhat radical views of her character Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice through her vigorous walking. When her sister Jane falls ill at Netherfield while on a visit to the Bingleys, Elizabeth decides the three-mile walk from her house is just what she needs. Despite her mother’s protest, she sets out, “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity.” When she arrives, the Bingley sisters find it “almost incredible” that she should have walked so far by herself. “She really looked almost wild,” one of them remarks, “to walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence.” Austen presents such walking as not only controversial but also progressive, as having a flavor of the egalitarian principles behind the best aspects of the recent French Revolution and the earlier American one.
When the agitation for women’s rights was becoming more visible a little later in the century, feminists found walking to be a fit way to assert their equality. Two of the most important feminists of the Victorian era, the painter Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) and the poet Bessie Raynor Parkes, the abstainer from sewing already discussed, understood from their love of Wordsworth and Shelley the ideological nature of self-reliant pedestrianism. They did the usual touring of the Lake District, but they also went on a European walking tour in 1850, just the two of them without any male chaperones or guides, something almost unheard of for English women at the time. For their trek, they left behind their corsets, shortened their skirts to give freedom to their legs, and wore black boots. (In contrast, the Brontë sisters wore their usual long skirts when out walking and probably whalebone corsets of the type saved in the Brontë archives.) Walking set Parkes and Smith on their way to their later work advocating voting rights for women.
Like Austen a few decades before her, Emily created a heroine who broke convention by using her two feet. When Catherine Earnshaw is a “wild, wick slip” of a girl, with a “bold, saucy look,” she rebels against home rules by running off “to the moors in the morning and remain[ing] there all day” with the young vagabond Heathcliff. Becoming a woman, she is squeezed into silk dresses and tamed into marrying the proper Edgar Linton and keeping his house, but her longing for the wild freedoms of the past splits her apart. Her mind becomes unhinged and she feels, as the “lady of Thrushcross Grange,” in exile from herself. She burns with desire t
o be “out of doors—I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free!” Although it is winter and she is dying, she asks Nelly to throw open the window so she can feel the wind coming off the moors: “I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills,” she exclaims.
In order to be free, Catherine must reverse time. What she must do is get rid of her woman’s body, which has enmeshed her in gender rules. 20 She sees it as a “shattered prison,” unlike her girl body in which she had an androgynous autonomy, a liberty to slip into the universe, Wordsworth-like. “I’m tired,” she laments, “tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it and in it.” The only way she can do this is to die, which she then does forthwith. Cathy isn’t one to let such trifles as life and death stop her from her heart’s desire.
After Catherine perishes, it is possible that she is finally able to be really with and in it. Emily hints in more than one passage that Catherine roves the moors as a ghost, and that, once Heathcliff dies, they together imbue with their spirits the desolate stretches of heathland. In the oft-quoted passage of Catherine’s dream of dying and going to heaven, she seems to foretell her future afterlife. The Christian heaven would be a miserable place to her, she explains to Nelly when she is still a girl living at the Heights. In her dream, heaven is not her home, and she breaks her heart with weeping to return to earth, “and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” For her, Mother Nature, not God our father, provides paradise. 21
Emily took her place in the history of radical female walkers. Haunting the moors as a teenager, she was already developing Catherine’s character in her Gondal heroines—her Augusta G. Almeda calls herself a “mountaineer.” Unlike Catherine, Emily didn’t have a Heathcliff, but she did have the heath and the cliff, usually all to herself without any man around. While Emily’s experience out roving the area around her home has become central to our understanding of her, her sensations and thoughts on actual walks remain somewhat fugitive; we don’t have Emily’s version of Dorothy Wordsworth’s delightful Alfoxden and Grasmere journals. It is in Emily’s poetry that her relationship to nature can be traced, but even here it is difficult to separate personal reverie from invented Gondal scenarios. Emily remains a shadowy figure despite the plethora of books written about her and Charlotte’s need to interpret her sister, to shape her image. There is something fitting about Emily as a secret, straying subject. 22
Yet, after all, Haworth townsfolk and her family told of her setting out and her absorption in the natural world. In a characteristic description, the church sexton reported seeing Emily from the church windows go through the stile followed by her dogs, “hundreds of times.” “No matter what the weather was, she loved the moors so much that she must go out upon them and enjoy the fresh breezes.” Other accounts speak of her loose-limbed boyishness while out roaming. The tallest person in the family except her father, she “slouched over the moors, whistling to her dogs, and taking long strides over the rough earth.” A “solitude-loving raven,” Charlotte called Emily, “no gentle dove.” 23
Emily’s inwardness had, at times, a flavor of iconoclasm, a turning away from the conventional. She developed no friendships outside of the family and was described by those who knew her as deeply reserved. “My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious,” Charlotte famously remarked of Emily, “circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.” Ellen Nussey, who as Charlotte’s friend was one of the few people outside the family circle who saw Emily with some frequency, found her to be impenetrable, with “a strength of self-containment seen in no other.” Emily encompassed a “law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law.” Around this time Emily picked up the nickname “the major” for her assertive, masculine ways. A teacher later remarked that “she should have been a man—a great navigator,” because of her powerful reason and her “strong, imperious will,” never daunted by opposition or difficulty. This will and tenacity were given free play by the harsh landscape around her; she could push against it as hard as she pleased, like Catherine is given Heathcliff to push against. 24
“Wildered,” an archaic term meaning straying, lost, or wandering (kindred to the later “bewildered”), describes a state common in Emily’s poems. It can be sorrowful, as for a Gondal character: “Sad he stood a wildered stranger / On his own unbounded moor.” The clouds that “wilder me” are exciting, if unsettling, as is a breeze that “whirls the wildering drifts.” Being wildered is to be placed in the unknown, to obtain what Frances Wilson calls the “pilgrim’s liminality,” or the state of straying between fixed selves. Emily often tells of an extreme form of escape, which in one poem she calls “being away.” She is happiest when “most away.” This involves bearing her soul from its “home of clay,” which is a little like Catherine’s dying into nature, but also like Wordsworth’s trance at Tintern Abbey, when he “is laid asleep / In body and become[s] a living soul.” For Emily, it’s a windy night and a bright moon that lets her ease into being not herself “and none beside.” Her sublime height is reached when she is “only spirit wandering wide / Through infinite immensity.” 25
The area around Haworth is a good place to be “wildered.” While not exactly a wilderness, the stark moors feel like they go on forever. From high vantage points the empty hills roll away, giving the walker a feeling of the infinite. Their dramatic loneliness stems in part from the acidic and boggy soil’s inability to support anything but hardy plants such as bracken, heather, and coarse grasses. The rare tree is twisted and contorted because of the strong, and almost constant, wind. The presence of the sky, immense and moody, makes itself felt at every moment. When Elizabeth Gaskell went on her first walk there, with Charlotte, she found that the “sinuous hills seemed to girdle the world like the great Norse serpent, and for my part I don’t know if they don’t stretch up to the North Pole.” It is a “wuthering” place, to use another archaic word important to Emily’s lexicon. “Wuther,” a variant of “whither,” is a violent motion, sound, or force, especially in reference to what the wind does to things and what things do in the wind. It can denote “an attack, onset; a smart blow, or stroke,” as in the force of a rough wind against a tree. Yet another meaning is “to tremble, shake, quiver,” the motion of a tree under the influence of a strong gust. In Wuthering Heights, the landscape and houses are molded to this gale, as are the people, who learn quickly to face the blast boldly and become violent forces in their own right, or be annihilated. They are like the “stunted firs” and the “gaunt thorns” described at the beginning of the novel, mute evidence of the “atmospheric tumult” and powerful north wind in their excessive slant and their limbs stretched one way, “as if craving alms of the sun.” 26
Emily was seduced by this “remote and unclaimed” quality, as Charlotte described it, both in its material self and in the personal states that it led her to. In Emily’s 1840 poem “The Night-Wind,” she (or a poetic alter ego) sits musing at midnight at an open window. A soft draft waves her hair and tells her of the beauties she misses by sitting indoors. It whispers lowly, “How dark the woods will be!” The leaves there speak in the “myriad voices” of the wind, making the trees “Instinct with spirit seem.” But she denies the “wooing” of this “Wanderer,” even as its “kiss grew warmer still.” “O come,” it sighs sweetly, arguing that “ ‘when thy heart is laid at rest / Behind the church-yard stone / I shall have time enough to mourn / And thou to be alone’ –.” That is, the time to drink in the enchantment of night is now, not when she lies under the earth. The poem ends here, with an ambiguous dash, never telling the reader if she ventures into the speaking woods. 27
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p; The presence of the grave in a poem celebrating erotic vitality is surprising at first. But perhaps, after all, what the wind hints at all along is a beautiful death, of the sort the Romantic John Keats alludes to in “Ode to a Nightingale,” another song to a night so beautiful it makes the poet long “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” That poem asks, as does so much of Emily’s writing: Can the sweetness of nature be fully experienced without losing one’s self in it, to the point of insensibility, even annihilation? Then, this question follows: If one is dead, can these sweets still be savored? If Emily’s answer to these questions can be found in her writing, then it is “yes,” but always with ambiguity, boundaries, and limits in sight. Catherine steeped herself in this as a girl with Heathcliff, up on Penistone Crag, but it is reported in retrospect, only after it is over. And then again, she may find ecstatic freedom in death, but this is only suggested in the novel. A few of Emily’s poems contain hymns to the joy of the countryside, like the refrain in an 1838 lyric: “For the moors, for the moors where each high pass / Rose sunny against the clear sky!” Here the birds reflect the feelings of plenitude of the human stroller:
For the moors, where the linnet was trilling . . .