Paper short abstract:

Exploring walking as performance in Romantic and suburban spaces, this paper considers how a 21st century mother might respond to constructions of the maternal role inherited from earlier artists' descriptions of these geographies.

Paper long abstract:

The travelling poets of the Romantic movement imagined the English landscape as a silent benevolent maternal background for the vulnerable yet heroic male wanderer or artist; "Dear Nature is the kindest mother still", exclaims Byron. The landscape as a mother to this childlike subject remains a powerful cultural reference; she is nation, home, the domestic. In the 20th century, rock and punk musicians maternalised spaces again; this time identifying themselves against the monotony and smothering convention of suburban geographies, from which they desired to escape. This paper takes these pathetic fallacies as a starting point to consider how geographical notions have shaped middle class English motherhood, and to reflect on ways in which a human mother might travel in maternalised landscapes in order to perform her own responses to these conceptions.