Abstract
Reading early Wordsworth through Adorno, this article suggests that Romantic walking entails the subjugation of external objects through the exercise of an imperial and elevated perception. It then considers Dorothy Wordsworth’s influence over her brother and the possibility that a Romantic ‘eco-poetic’ emerges from the ‘feminine’ perspective below the mountain, and within the domestic landscape. I argue that this gesture away from walking and mountaineering as the demonstration of physical prowess, or as the pursuit of a real or ideal goal, is taken up by three contemporary women poets of landscape. Harriet Tarlo, Frances Presley and Helen Macdonald offer different ways of walking, which dispense with goal-orientation, explore the ethical choices available to perceptual beings, and attempt a more immersive, embodied engagement with the land. Their contribution to contemporary ‘radical landscape poetry’ combines the feminist discourse of ‘situated knowledge’ with an implicitly enactivist approach to human encounters with the environment.
Highlights
University of DundeeArticle How to Cite: Widger, E 2017 Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry
On a practical level this relates to the spaces in which we walk – how do we protect or conserve areas such as National Parks without implicitly treating them as a ‘screen’, ‘ground’ or ‘resource’ for our inward seeking?140 In philosophical terms, it relates to current discussions about objects themselves – perhaps phenomenology and enactivism allow us too complete access to their being, guaranteeing what Adorno called their ‘unfreedom’; on the other hand, perhaps the emphasis on mystery and withdrawnness in OOO reinforces the idea of externality in ways that move us scarcely beyond the masculine sublime
Macdonald and Presley’s important caveat on the potential hostility of ‘external reality’ raises questions such as: how can a landscape with which we are structurally coupled pose such significant dangers? How might it be possible to square the notion that human perceivers enact their environment with the particular ways in which walking has been, and c ontinues to be hazardous for women? How might women embrace the ‘marked’ position required by feminist objectivity and enact their environment with the same autonomy as ‘unmarked’ male bodies?
Summary
Article How to Cite: Widger, E 2017 Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry. 1–31, DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ biip.[12] Published: 16 January 2017. Peer Review: This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Walking Women: Embodied Perception in Romantic and Contemporary Radical Landscape Poetry
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