Travelling Companions

Abstract

In Augustus Egg’s painting, Travelling Companions (1862), a pair of women travellers, enclosed in the domesticated space of a train compartment, are oblivious to the exotic southern landscape through which they are passing. In the two novels examined in this chapter, by contrast, the heroines who travel across the European landscape are anything but untouched by the changing locations in which they find themselves. Whereas in North and South and Adam Bede, women’s mobility was confined within the borders of England, in Moths and Miss Brown women’s journeys are on a much larger scale, travelling across the breadth of Europe, and represent the shrinking of distance from the perspective of women travellers vulnerable to exploitation by predatory men and women. While experiencing varying degrees of cultural dislocation through their mobility, the heroines are often placed in contexts where they lack a voice to articulate their own place or purpose. The shifting significations of home and movement in these novels, mapped onto the different locations of the heroines — from the rustic isolation of a Tuscan farmhouse to the salons of aesthetic London, or from the hotels of Monte Carlo to the frozen wastes of Poland — present an ambivalent conception of the modern woman’s mobility in the 1880s. Travel can provide a liberating escape from a constraining social environment or mark a nomadic existence lacking the security and connection of a settled life.