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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.
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.