What Charlotte Brontë Has Taught Me About Walking Off Coronavirus Anxieties
There is a possibility of taking a walk today — if we stay six feet apart, are healthy and alone, wear a mask, and not stray far from our block. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent stay-at-home order, it’s hard to take these daily sanctioned walks that lead nowhere in a cosmopolitan place like Washington, DC, though still possible. If we don’t acknowledge the risks of leaving our homes — crowded city sidewalks or maskless pedestrians — we risk losing access to public spaces all together. Already, many trails and parks have been closed across the United States; regions of Italy have banned walking and running outdoors’; Wales has restricted outdoor exercise to only once a day; authorities in Paris have banned outdoor exercise during the day. It is even unsafe in many densely populated cities, such as NYC, to go outside at all. The coronavirus is slowly chipping away at what little avenues of freedom we have left, but to be able to leave the house and feel your heart rate rise and your feet against the earth makes you feel alive, even on unaccompanied walks around the block.
A literary idol of mine Charlotte Brontë, the author Jane Eyre (1847) who lived on the other side of the world two centuries ago, nailed the solitary wanderer role on her long walks away from her small town of Haworth. She, often with her sisters as her companions, tramped miles across the isolated Yorkshire moors for exercise, liberty, and leisure “to the great damage of [her] shoes, but… to the benefit of [her] health”: in a letter to her publisher, she wrote, “I and solitude and memory have often profited by its sunshine on the moors.” Plenty of writers and thinkers have walked and written about walking, from Rousseau to Wordsworth, from Austen to Woolf, as did their fictional characters, but Brontë walked alone so often and modelled her heroines and their walks largely off of her own experiences.
I am nearing the end of writing my undergraduate thesis on walking in Brontë’s literature and its implications for nineteenth-century women, given the time’s societal, legal, and safety restrictions on travelling for unaccompanied women. (Women to this day are still seen as either dangerous (i.e., streetwalkers, fallen women) or endangered when they walk solo in the dark. Restrictions range from societal to legal to the constraining garments of heels and corsets.) The stay-at-home orders and sudden stagnancy imposed by quarantine made it feel impossible to continue writing about the importance of the freedom of movement and public places and wide open spaces when the future we are walking toward is intangible and uncertain and largely indoors. I’ve even struggled finding the energy to get out of bed and make it outside to take a walk. But perhaps walks are all we have now — without destinations or any clear end to this pandemic, life indeed hinges on the circular journeys from our homes and back and the ways we stay sane while self-quarantined.
This piece is not really about gender, as my thesis is. While I’m weary of calling this coronavirus pandemic a “great equalizer,” I do think walks, for those who are well and able, unite us during this time as a means to seek some freedom and life in miniature and allow for both physical and mental exercise across identities. That being said, I am writing this as someone who is lucky to have a room of my own, a job that I’m able to work remotely, access to online education, freedom and ability to walk safely, and most importantly good health and a sense of security that I will likely make it out of this alive. I have also been given free time that I haven’t had since I was a kid — time to read, write, panic about the state of the world, and ruminate on dead authors and their fictional characters and how they manage to teach us about self-isolating from their words and graves.
In Jane Eyre’s childhood school years, there is an outbreak of typhus, mirroring the author’s own experience of losing her older sisters to a tuberculosis epidemic at their school: “While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors.” Jane has the time and health to walk past outside the sick-room, finding freedom in her solitude away from the company of school tyrants and elders. Time is halted, or altered at least, during quarantine, and most of us (me included) are lucky enough to have the biggest existential concern be how to fill this extensive temporal blank (and, no, I refuse to bake bread or participate in any Instagram challenge). Though Jane wishes she could wander beyond the garden walls and the school grounds, to unfamiliar and densely populated towns, she is happy enough to be able to enjoy these walks outside, just as her creator did. And gradually, we too move toward May sunshine.
Still from Jane Eyre (2011), ℅ BBC Films
So, I’ve turned to the Victorians, bar their strict morality and splash of sexism, for guidance while stuck at home. I am writing copious letters to friends and family, explaining what exactly I’ve done, which is admittedly not much. Likewise, Brontë wrote widely to acquaintances to pass the time and stay connected; after her trip to London is postponed due to the health of a friend, she once again settles “down in the quietude of Haworth Parsonage, with books for my household companions, and an occasional letter for a visitor; a mute society, but neither quarrelsome, nor vulgarising, nor unimproving.” I am too kept company by my books (and my screens), bent on “improving” myself even while stuck helpless and hopeless at home by staying active.
Outwardly, I’m doing a bad job at a new creative endeavour of needlework (how much more Victorian can you get?), crafting alongside the few people I am quarantined with; inwardly, I’m thinking almost constantly about sex (so much for isolation not being “vulgarising”). And while I’m not quite as paranoid as people had to be in the nineteenth century, I wash my hands raw and have convinced myself that I’m ill each time I cough or feel a chill. Moreover, I’m wearing pajamas during my quarantine, but the Victorians developed a fashionable way to social distance. Whereas in my thesis I argue that women’s dresses and heels restricted their physical mobility — I instead take my daily walks in sweats and sneakers — the caged hoop skirts were used to maintain distance between a woman and her suitor and inadvertently helped to mitigate the spread of diseases. Ultimately, I fill my time by walking (or at the very least, thinking about walking). And in a way these marks I make, whether with thread or pen, are like steps, repetitive gestures that engage the body and mind, a line in movement pointing forward.
I’ve since moved home to rural North Georgia, and while they’re not quite through the open space of the moors that Brontë and her heroines traversed, my walks down windy, mountain roads and unmarked woods trails are met with complete Thoreau-like solipsism. Henry David Thoreau himself wrote in his journal, “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow,” asserting an innate connection between thinking and walking. Since walking is as instinctual to us as breathing, our mind is free to wander mentally as our bodies do physically. While we still walk for exercise, to get our blood flowing, our walks look different now: we can no longer walk to a coffee shop or hike on crowded trails or wander a city with a group of friends. Instead, we walk for something to do, to nourish the mind and body in a time of fear and anxiety. Walking is the way we experience the world, even if it has become to look different than it did at the start of 2020 and in the nineteenth-century. Brontë wrote about the discomfort of carriage travel and the constriction of interior spaces, and today our modern technology and productivity-oriented society has further eroded the practice of taking a walk for the sake of it. Now, we have the free time to do so — by speeding up, and walking out of the house, we are able to slow down and appreciate that we’re still moving toward something of a future.
In a letter to his sister-in-law, the nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard offers us perfect advice for our time in quarantine: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.” We, like the commonly isolated Charlotte Brontë and her heroines, are separated from loved ones and confined to the household. She was surrounded by death and disease, her quaint parsonage bordered by a graveyard, and walking toward the moors and away from the disease-ridden town provided solace, solitude, and time to think. In fact, Brontë was quarantined with her father in 1846 during his cataracts operation in a Manchester inn — it was here that she began writing Jane Eyre. We can look back to Brontë and the nineteenth-century consciousness of walking for the nourishment of our bodies and minds yet look forward to the future of a vaccine in a world where we understand how germs spread. Taking a page from her book, we are forced to fill our time, whether it be by staying in touch with loved ones over snail mail (or FaceTime), writing letters and novels, or, of course, walking. We don’t have to write the next Jane Eyre (perhaps we just finally get around to reading it); we need only to embrace the metaphor that walking lends us: we all must keep moving forward on the path ahead of us.
About the Author
Kendall Geisel (she/her) is a 4th year from Milton, GA studying English Literature at the George Washington University. As being a woman is an important part of her identity, she is interested in female novelists of the Victorian to contemporary periods, particularly Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf. She’s at her best when she’s reading in the sun or at a concert.
