Blood and Footprints: Traces of Embodiment in Jude the Obscure and The Woman in White

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both blood on snow and footprints in sand illustrate the ways that bodies impress their physical presence upon their surroundings and leave behind traces of their labouring, suffering, and travelling. In examining the multiplicity of remnants in nineteenth-century fiction, my analysis draws upon the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s model of triple mimesis and his definition of the trace uniting material marks with memory in order to investigate how characters’ bodily agency is intertwined with residue, ruins, and reminiscence. With a comparative approach, I evaluate how two Victorian novels employ imprints, inscriptions, and stains to highlight characters’ mobile bodies and thus stimulate readers’ involvement in protagonists’ anguish, explorations, and romantic entanglements. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure exemplify how a wide variety of memorable vestiges assert the past infringing upon the present, thereby implicating emotional devastation, physical destruction, and crucial discoveries of hidden secrets.